Wii Fit made this point clear to me a while back. I'm under 6ft and according to Wii Fits BMI rating I'm just on the edge of overweight. I don't have a much of a gut and nothing jiggles when I run (which I do frequently). Once I'd discovered that I'm practically obsese my friend jumped on and discovered he was dead center of normal. The problem is he's so skinny and slight the size 10 girls in my social circle actually look fat next to the guy and can and do push him around in football (soccer not the other kind).
I don't think BMI is a very good measure of anything. I'm fine with being overweight, being told I'm obsese freaked me out for a while.
At the end of the day who cares about what political party caused the problem. The real issue is if the current government is capable of solving the problem. Maye the Democrats did de-regulate the industry and cause the current issue. But do the Democrats aknowledge and have a plan on how the fix the mess?
Take the current credit crunch; a lot of the problems were caused by a short term bonus environment which encouraged excessive risk taking. I'm a lot more interested in hearing a UK party actually come up with a workable regulation system to discourage that, than hearing the Tories take cheap shots at Labour about Brown and Darling's inability to do anything to fix the issue.
Then again I'm so tired of insulated Westminster politicians out of touch with anything not to do with the City (term describes London's Financial Sector) I'm looking in to see if I can afford to join the Pirate party and stand in my local area. I won't win but maybe the local MP will pay more attention to certain issues.
I've been doing a similar sort thing with the PS3, when inFamous came out it was £49.99 in the shops. Its only been a few months but the games £26.99 now and if you get it second hand I paid £17. The price difference is extreme enough that a 3/4 month delay on games is really worth it. Plus you get a much more realistic opinion of the game (don't trust critics myself).
During university I used a variety of Windows Mobile 2003 and Windows Mobile 5 phones with a bluetooth keyboard to take notes during class. Sure those notes were not perfectly formatted, but they were very usefull.
Doing things this way had two major advantages: Cheap laptops tended to be stupidly heavy then and a 140gram phone with 20 gram keyboard is small enough to fit in a coat pocket.
The second and by far the most important advantage was the poor typsetting capability of pocket word forced me to spend an hour each evening transferring my notes into a decent word document. My notes tended to be the most comprehensive in the class because I took that extra time in the evenings (helped me learn the material as well).
There are other reasons as well, but are difficult to describe. An example of what I mean from my current nokia is GPS. I've never used GPS and I have a good sense of direction, but because its there on the phone I've used it hundreds of times and got real value from it.
For most situations Pocket word is beyond useless, but document writing on a cell phone has uses.
Your point was there aren't any charge points nor are their places where you can simply plug in and pay for the electricty you've used. My point is the UK government has set aside £15 million to build 300 charge points as part of their initiative to get more people using electric cars. The point being most people talking about the limited range of such cars and then dismiss them, just as you did.
Your entire post simply discusses the lack of points and can be summed up with:
Where have you ever seen an outlet that was metered in such a way as to allow the person who pays the electric bill to charge people who plug into it for how much electricity they use?
At no point did you talk about strategy or how Tesla's approach is going to get us Electric cars. My point (admittedly poorly made) was to point out such charge points have been expearimented with in London and will become reality by next year with 300 being built.
As for governments building a large number of basic charge points I believe it will be a necessary step. LPG became popular in the UK because it was a 1/3 of the price of Unleaded and if you run out of gas you can still run on petrol. Most of the Hybrid electric cars in the UK haven't done well (alot of European cars get Prius mileage for example). Since a purely electric car doesn't have the fall back of petrol then your going to need alot of charge points, before alot of people consider buying them. Normal petrol stations and other companies aren't going to pay for it until electric cars become common. Its a chicken and egg kind of problem and one governments are perfectly situated to resolve.
Lastly Tesla aren't the only electric car manufacturer out there,alot of car manufacturers are creating electric versions of their big brand cars or creating new lines. Personnally I prefer the look of Smarts electric car over Telsa's.
The UK government is currently planning on building 300 charge points for electric cars, If the US Government starts taking that view your arguement will become mute.
Why do Fords US cars suck so much? A friend of mine owns the new Ford Fiesta which I think looks stunning and she tells me shes getting 50 MPG in a car thats quite happy to get to 70+ MPH. The Ford Mondeo is a very nice car which gets good mileage and the Ford Focus usually manages anything between 30-60 MPG depending on the engine. I'll admit I can't stand the look of the new Ka but again its a car design to commute inside towns. The 2 Litre Focus TDI (with all the mod cons) is probably the most fun car I've every driven, not as capable as a Audi A4/A3 or a Mercedes C class but alot of fun. While I chucked that car around corners and gunned it off traffic lights I still got 55MPG. It should be noted any Focus below 1.8 litre can't pull the skin off of a rice pudding.
Its the same with GM, Vauxhall/Opel have some very well engineered and fuel efficent cars sure the Corsa/Brianna are probably to small for America. But the Astra and Vectra are both cars big enough to fit 5 grown men, have high safety ratings and get good mileage.
I understand American cars all have to be 20ft long for some reason but why don't Ford/GM sell their european cars in the US. They get great mileage pretty much all have 5 star NCap ratings (very safe), you can usually get all the Mod cons from GPS to Air Con. There wasn't any need for GM to sell itself to Fiat for engine technology when Vauxhall/Opel already had good engine technology.
Yes my Debit card worked in the ATM machines, but in the six weeks I spent in Australia not a single place I went into used chip 'n pin. From the Lygon Street Melbourne resturants, the *McDonalds, *Red Roosters, *KFC's, Gloria Jeans, Australian Tea houses, any of the towns along the Great Ocean Road until you reach Port Cambell (which is as far as I went), Eureka Skydeck, Melbourne trams (love those btw), any shop in West Sale, the carraige place in the Blue Mountains, The resturant inside the parliment building, Canberra's Novatel, Hertz, That telcom tower in Canberra, Sydney ferries, The Syndey bridge tower, M1 toll road, the toll road inside of Sydney, Syndey Opera house, the 4 or 5 different high rise pub/clubs in Melbourne city centre, I could go on but hopefully I've made my point.
I don't carry cash as a rule and was carrying a work American Express credit card, a Mastercard and my Maestro. The only time I saw a chip n pin machine was when I drove from Melbourne to Cann river and then upto Canberra (petrol station around Orbost) and even then the machine rejected all of my cards and I ended up using cash.
*I'd like to point out that after 3-4 weeks of expensive meals and good Yarra valley wine (honestly the best wine I've ever had) a person can really start to crave cheap food and simple things like beans on toast.
In the UK we tend to use Debit cards for everything. A debit card is tied to a current account (which can or can't have overdrafts). Credit cards are a seperate thing and work like they do in Australia. Savings accounts tend to be something completly seperate and you don't usually get a bank card for them, they never have overdrafts.
Debit cards are big in europe for a couple of reasons, firstly they don't let you spend money you don't have, secondly they work effectivily like credit cards and lastly they allow this thing called Direct Debits which make paying monthly bills insanely easy (you set up amounts and payment dates and then don't have to do anything). Debit and Credit cards aren't the same thing over here (with respect to rights and protections). But otherwise function the same.
Just a small comment Visa debit isn't Visa Electron. I have a Visa Debit card in the UK (thanks HSBC for that annoying change). Visa Electron is also going the way of the dinosaur mostly because the banks that used it made cards which look fake (LLoyds TSB I'm looking at you).
Lastly to any European going to Australia, the idea of a debit card is new to them. When I went over there 6 months ago almost no where supported Debit cards, the few places that "did" didn't support my Maestro or Solo cards (even when they had the logo's).
I only bother mentioning this because HSBC felt the need to send me a brouchure about how they were scrapping Maestro and giving me Visa Debit and how that wasn't Visa Electron or a Visa credit card. Secondly because going to Australia and finding out they don't do Debit cards (nor chip n pin) was a big shock to me.
Thats hardly insightfull. When I was 14 I was able to back up a pc with minimal loss of data. I used to clone the contents of the hard drive onto anouther machine, re-install windows configure everything and then copy the obvious folders (my doc, my pictures basically anything in the user folder) accross from one to the other. When the customer came to pick up I showed them the machine with the clone info and spent twenty minutes talking to them about common non standard things (game saves, specific apps they use etc...).
Even following my poorly thought out solution usefull data loss was minimal they only real cost was in configuration. People who think a complete install is losing everything need to remember how easy it is to back up data onto USB/DVD/Blu-Ray/Hard Drive/Network storage.
Nah Myst/Monkey Island/Auroura/Starship Titanic/etc.. would all make great films if done right. Puzzle games and some FPS's are where the good game conversions can come from. HL would work, so would Bioshock, Deus Ex and you wouldn't really have an excuse to deviate from the plot to much. Just like I thing a 2.5 hour film condensing Myst, Riven, and some parts of Myst IV could be brilliant.
I'd have suggested Minesweeper but theres a pretty good mock trailer on YouTube. Although the microsoft arcade games pack from many a year ago might be able to make a more idiotic movie.. Coming Soon.. Jezzball watch as our hero has to contian an ever increasing number of red balls into smaller and smaller areas!
Because bluetooth file transfer has been around for years, I remember sending files via bluetooth on my Nokia 7650 (cira 2002). Most basic low end phones provide the ability to transfer files via bluetooth.
My Phone right now has connected to my PC via bluetooth and is updating the track list over bluetooth. Hence the posters position, its like the iPhone not having MMS capability (I know its getting it), its such a basic feature most people assume it will be built into the phone.
Never mind having to travel at lower speeds their biker unfriendly. If you put even mild acceleration through them your back end goes all over the place and take you out if your not carefull. This happened alot on a 200cc trails bike with off road tyres, I won't go near gravel on my 600cc superbike.
The real issue here is grip, gravel provides very little grip while tarmac/cement provides a reasonable amount. While gravel might be cheaper I bet the social cost from the increase in accidents makes it more expensive over the life of the road.
I say this as a person from Somerset in the UK, Somerset a county where they seem to think running some a variety of silly social schemes which benifit dozens of people are more important than resurfacing major roads through towns (benifiting thousands). Yeovils main roads have been dug up and poorly filled in so many times they are nothing but potholes. Given the choice between that mess and gravel I'd still prefer the potholed, bumpy tarmac.
Where I work we do code reviews and they are definitly worth the time. 60% of the time the review doesn't flag anything. But by having anouther coder look at the code you can find those points when a comment would be very usefull, where an algorythm might break down to simple typo's , complexity issues and general readability
Code reviews are as much about code maintainability and ensuring the code follows standards then finding bugs.
Your right obiviously no one has put a video camera in the front of a phone along with one in the back so users can take decent phones with one and make video calls with the other. Thats crazyness! My nokia 5800 will let me choose which camera (back or front) to use to take video/photos and which camera to use for calling, its certainly a new innovative feature.
I think you minunderstand what "revolutionary" means. A 64bit kernel isn't revolutionary, nor is adding exchange support. These are evolutionary changes. Your buying into Apple hype.
AMD's hypertransport was revolutionary, microwave ovens were revolutionary and not all revolutionary ideas have to be popular (see Office 2007's menu system). Taking a 32bit/64bit hybrid OS and making it purely 64bit is evolutionary.
The £25 7210 I bought of O2 more than three years ago had MMS, that phone was bought because I'd continually dropped my O2 XDA Mini S onto concrete and it was being repaired, the Nokia 7650 (era 2002) had MMS messaging, low end phones have had MMS messaging from around 2002 onwards*.
It's not a case of something being "up and coming" its existed on low end GSM phones as standard for more than half a decade. The fact the iPhone didn't support was unusual and amusing.
It's like selling "cut,copy and paste" as revolutionary, the Orange m500 I purchased in 2004 (running windows Mobile 2003) had cut, copy and paste. My Nokia 7610 (not sure about my old Nokia 7650) supported cut,copy and paste.
Don't get me wrong I like the iPhone, because of the iPhone my Nokia 5800 was designed and sold. But can we please stop using it as a reference for phone features since it has been behind (feature wise) since release.
*I understand US phone carriers might have been disabling the features but it certainly isn't new.
How is texting a new fad? I remember owning a Nokia 5510i (think 402) in 1998 which could text upto 160 characters. I beleive my Nan had a BT Cellnet Analogue phone (this was before the days of a standard GSM sim card) in 95/96 which was capable of sending 60 character text messages (worked until 2004 when BT forced her to upgrade to a digital phone).
Back then a Nokia 5110i on Orange Pay As You GO went for £100, and were hardly rare. Nokia 402
It uses the webkit engine to load pages, I have no idea about the Pre but the Nokia 5800 which also uses webkit loads the iPhone facebook page marginally better than the iPhone does.
From what I personnally can tell the only real difference between the Nokia 5800 browser and the iPhone Safari one is the cool zooming thing you can do with your fingers on the iPhone (its a menu option for the 5800). When you consider the Pre is supposed to be heavily web app based I wouldn't be surprised if the expearence was the same.
If you want to be a member you can't have laws which go against EU Directives. Its kinda the point of being part of the EU (many trade agreements aren't contigent on membership).
An example a few years back with the UK was safety standards. For example there used to be three standards of motorcycle helmet you could buy. British (BSA), EU and American. If you could afford it you bought a BSA helmet since they were the best. Unfortunatly an EU directive stated that standards had to match accross the EU. While this was a very good thing for many countries it meant the British standards had to be reduced to match the EU standards. As a result it became much harder to find the best lids.
On a side note and I'm not sure if it is still true but American lid standards were considerably lower than EU ones. It is something you might want to pester your government about.
A house built to with heat conservation in mind should almost heat itself. I've moved into a new flat building in the UK, between all the insulation and double glazing its actually hard for me to get the flat cooler than 21 degrees.
During the winter when it reached -8 degrees outside, my flat without any heating was at 16 degrees. My neighbours have the same issue, we only have the one small flat below us so the heat isn't coming from downstairs.
I can think of several other new buildings which suffer from this problem. If your going to argue about the color of a building mandating improved heat conservation should remove most of the heating costs.
You realise going from copper to gold connectors causes problems right? I You have differing input impedances for the gold connectors and the copper/silicon. While I agree with your point about the wire. Unless you want to go all gold/copper/silicon using gold connectors offers no real improvement, its the audiophile eqviulent of Apple's "Mac's can't get virus's" in the computer world.
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone, a Symbian touch screen phone available across the world including America
It's a touch screen phone with a webkit based browser than seems equal in ability to the iPhone.
Nokia Music is a surprisingly good copy of iTunes (although the DRM on the songs sucks). I think the Music player is simple and intuitive to use although I'll admit the iPhone is easier to use.
The phone supports push/pull email and can be setup to grab your hotmail as well. The phone also supports copy/paste for messages and MMS messaging which is integrated nicely.
The GPS capabilities are better than I iPhone's. I have a friend who own one and my Nokia can get a more accurate position than his iPhone. You also have better maps since the Nokia works with Nokia Maps 2.0, Garmin software and Google Maps. Lastly the phone supports satellite navigation, a feature which I thought I would never use but have used a lot.
The Nokia phone is marginally thicker (by 2/3mm) and it seems worse because the Nokia phone is rectangular. It also lacks multi touch but then the phone vibrates when you touch the screen letting you know you've activated it (very handy). The phone doesn't require a highly expensive contract (I'm on a £20pm tarif and paying an additional £7pm for an unlimited download bolt on). Its also cheaper than the iPhone, it's ok to admit you only own one because its "cool".
Slashdot Mirror
Wii Fit made this point clear to me a while back. I'm under 6ft and according to Wii Fits BMI rating I'm just on the edge of overweight. I don't have a much of a gut and nothing jiggles when I run (which I do frequently). Once I'd discovered that I'm practically obsese my friend jumped on and discovered he was dead center of normal. The problem is he's so skinny and slight the size 10 girls in my social circle actually look fat next to the guy and can and do push him around in football (soccer not the other kind).
I don't think BMI is a very good measure of anything. I'm fine with being overweight, being told I'm obsese freaked me out for a while.
At the end of the day who cares about what political party caused the problem. The real issue is if the current government is capable of solving the problem. Maye the Democrats did de-regulate the industry and cause the current issue. But do the Democrats aknowledge and have a plan on how the fix the mess?
Take the current credit crunch; a lot of the problems were caused by a short term bonus environment which encouraged excessive risk taking. I'm a lot more interested in hearing a UK party actually come up with a workable regulation system to discourage that, than hearing the Tories take cheap shots at Labour about Brown and Darling's inability to do anything to fix the issue.
Then again I'm so tired of insulated Westminster politicians out of touch with anything not to do with the City (term describes London's Financial Sector) I'm looking in to see if I can afford to join the Pirate party and stand in my local area. I won't win but maybe the local MP will pay more attention to certain issues.
I've been doing a similar sort thing with the PS3, when inFamous came out it was £49.99 in the shops. Its only been a few months but the games £26.99 now and if you get it second hand I paid £17. The price difference is extreme enough that a 3/4 month delay on games is really worth it. Plus you get a much more realistic opinion of the game (don't trust critics myself).
During university I used a variety of Windows Mobile 2003 and Windows Mobile 5 phones with a bluetooth keyboard to take notes during class. Sure those notes were not perfectly formatted, but they were very usefull.
Doing things this way had two major advantages:
Cheap laptops tended to be stupidly heavy then and a 140gram phone with 20 gram keyboard is small enough to fit in a coat pocket.
The second and by far the most important advantage was the poor typsetting capability of pocket word forced me to spend an hour each evening transferring my notes into a decent word document. My notes tended to be the most comprehensive in the class because I took that extra time in the evenings (helped me learn the material as well).
There are other reasons as well, but are difficult to describe. An example of what I mean from my current nokia is GPS. I've never used GPS and I have a good sense of direction, but because its there on the phone I've used it hundreds of times and got real value from it.
For most situations Pocket word is beyond useless, but document writing on a cell phone has uses.
Your point was there aren't any charge points nor are their places where you can simply plug in and pay for the electricty you've used. My point is the UK government has set aside £15 million to build 300 charge points as part of their initiative to get more people using electric cars. The point being most people talking about the limited range of such cars and then dismiss them, just as you did.
Your entire post simply discusses the lack of points and can be summed up with:
Where have you ever seen an outlet that was metered in such a way as to allow the person who pays the electric bill to charge people who plug into it for how much electricity they use?
At no point did you talk about strategy or how Tesla's approach is going to get us Electric cars. My point (admittedly poorly made) was to point out such charge points have been expearimented with in London and will become reality by next year with 300 being built.
As for governments building a large number of basic charge points I believe it will be a necessary step. LPG became popular in the UK because it was a 1/3 of the price of Unleaded and if you run out of gas you can still run on petrol. Most of the Hybrid electric cars in the UK haven't done well (alot of European cars get Prius mileage for example). Since a purely electric car doesn't have the fall back of petrol then your going to need alot of charge points, before alot of people consider buying them. Normal petrol stations and other companies aren't going to pay for it until electric cars become common. Its a chicken and egg kind of problem and one governments are perfectly situated to resolve.
Lastly Tesla aren't the only electric car manufacturer out there,alot of car manufacturers are creating electric versions of their big brand cars or creating new lines. Personnally I prefer the look of Smarts electric car over Telsa's.
The UK government is currently planning on building 300 charge points for electric cars, If the US Government starts taking that view your arguement will become mute.
Why do Fords US cars suck so much? A friend of mine owns the new Ford Fiesta which I think looks stunning and she tells me shes getting 50 MPG in a car thats quite happy to get to 70+ MPH. The Ford Mondeo is a very nice car which gets good mileage and the Ford Focus usually manages anything between 30-60 MPG depending on the engine. I'll admit I can't stand the look of the new Ka but again its a car design to commute inside towns. The 2 Litre Focus TDI (with all the mod cons) is probably the most fun car I've every driven, not as capable as a Audi A4/A3 or a Mercedes C class but alot of fun. While I chucked that car around corners and gunned it off traffic lights I still got 55MPG. It should be noted any Focus below 1.8 litre can't pull the skin off of a rice pudding.
Its the same with GM, Vauxhall/Opel have some very well engineered and fuel efficent cars sure the Corsa/Brianna are probably to small for America. But the Astra and Vectra are both cars big enough to fit 5 grown men, have high safety ratings and get good mileage.
I understand American cars all have to be 20ft long for some reason but why don't Ford/GM sell their european cars in the US. They get great mileage pretty much all have 5 star NCap ratings (very safe), you can usually get all the Mod cons from GPS to Air Con. There wasn't any need for GM to sell itself to Fiat for engine technology when Vauxhall/Opel already had good engine technology.
Yes my Debit card worked in the ATM machines, but in the six weeks I spent in Australia not a single place I went into used chip 'n pin. From the Lygon Street Melbourne resturants, the *McDonalds, *Red Roosters, *KFC's, Gloria Jeans, Australian Tea houses, any of the towns along the Great Ocean Road until you reach Port Cambell (which is as far as I went), Eureka Skydeck, Melbourne trams (love those btw), any shop in West Sale, the carraige place in the Blue Mountains, The resturant inside the parliment building, Canberra's Novatel, Hertz, That telcom tower in Canberra, Sydney ferries, The Syndey bridge tower, M1 toll road, the toll road inside of Sydney, Syndey Opera house, the 4 or 5 different high rise pub/clubs in Melbourne city centre, I could go on but hopefully I've made my point.
I don't carry cash as a rule and was carrying a work American Express credit card, a Mastercard and my Maestro. The only time I saw a chip n pin machine was when I drove from Melbourne to Cann river and then upto Canberra (petrol station around Orbost) and even then the machine rejected all of my cards and I ended up using cash.
*I'd like to point out that after 3-4 weeks of expensive meals and good Yarra valley wine (honestly the best wine I've ever had) a person can really start to crave cheap food and simple things like beans on toast.
In the UK we tend to use Debit cards for everything. A debit card is tied to a current account (which can or can't have overdrafts). Credit cards are a seperate thing and work like they do in Australia. Savings accounts tend to be something completly seperate and you don't usually get a bank card for them, they never have overdrafts.
Debit cards are big in europe for a couple of reasons, firstly they don't let you spend money you don't have, secondly they work effectivily like credit cards and lastly they allow this thing called Direct Debits which make paying monthly bills insanely easy (you set up amounts and payment dates and then don't have to do anything). Debit and Credit cards aren't the same thing over here (with respect to rights and protections). But otherwise function the same.
Just a small comment Visa debit isn't Visa Electron. I have a Visa Debit card in the UK (thanks HSBC for that annoying change). Visa Electron is also going the way of the dinosaur mostly because the banks that used it made cards which look fake (LLoyds TSB I'm looking at you).
Lastly to any European going to Australia, the idea of a debit card is new to them. When I went over there 6 months ago almost no where supported Debit cards, the few places that "did" didn't support my Maestro or Solo cards (even when they had the logo's).
I only bother mentioning this because HSBC felt the need to send me a brouchure about how they were scrapping Maestro and giving me Visa Debit and how that wasn't Visa Electron or a Visa credit card. Secondly because going to Australia and finding out they don't do Debit cards (nor chip n pin) was a big shock to me.
Thats hardly insightfull. When I was 14 I was able to back up a pc with minimal loss of data. I used to clone the contents of the hard drive onto anouther machine, re-install windows configure everything and then copy the obvious folders (my doc, my pictures basically anything in the user folder) accross from one to the other. When the customer came to pick up I showed them the machine with the clone info and spent twenty minutes talking to them about common non standard things (game saves, specific apps they use etc...).
Even following my poorly thought out solution usefull data loss was minimal they only real cost was in configuration. People who think a complete install is losing everything need to remember how easy it is to back up data onto USB/DVD/Blu-Ray/Hard Drive/Network storage.
Nah Myst/Monkey Island/Auroura/Starship Titanic/etc.. would all make great films if done right. Puzzle games and some FPS's are where the good game conversions can come from. HL would work, so would Bioshock, Deus Ex and you wouldn't really have an excuse to deviate from the plot to much. Just like I thing a 2.5 hour film condensing Myst, Riven, and some parts of Myst IV could be brilliant.
I'd have suggested Minesweeper but theres a pretty good mock trailer on YouTube. Although the microsoft arcade games pack from many a year ago might be able to make a more idiotic movie.. Coming Soon.. Jezzball watch as our hero has to contian an ever increasing number of red balls into smaller and smaller areas!
Just wait until you get some Jesus inside of you, you'll never be the same.
Because bluetooth file transfer has been around for years, I remember sending files via bluetooth on my Nokia 7650 (cira 2002). Most basic low end phones provide the ability to transfer files via bluetooth.
My Phone right now has connected to my PC via bluetooth and is updating the track list over bluetooth. Hence the posters position, its like the iPhone not having MMS capability (I know its getting it), its such a basic feature most people assume it will be built into the phone.
Never mind having to travel at lower speeds their biker unfriendly. If you put even mild acceleration through them your back end goes all over the place and take you out if your not carefull. This happened alot on a 200cc trails bike with off road tyres, I won't go near gravel on my 600cc superbike.
The real issue here is grip, gravel provides very little grip while tarmac/cement provides a reasonable amount. While gravel might be cheaper I bet the social cost from the increase in accidents makes it more expensive over the life of the road.
I say this as a person from Somerset in the UK, Somerset a county where they seem to think running some a variety of silly social schemes which benifit dozens of people are more important than resurfacing major roads through towns (benifiting thousands). Yeovils main roads have been dug up and poorly filled in so many times they are nothing but potholes. Given the choice between that mess and gravel I'd still prefer the potholed, bumpy tarmac.
Where I work we do code reviews and they are definitly worth the time. 60% of the time the review doesn't flag anything. But by having anouther coder look at the code you can find those points when a comment would be very usefull, where an algorythm might break down to simple typo's , complexity issues and general readability
Code reviews are as much about code maintainability and ensuring the code follows standards then finding bugs.
Most 3G phones have front facing camera's. When 3 (a UK Mobile phone company) first started all of their LG and Motorolla phones had front facing VGA cameras so you could make video calls, interestingly the first 3G Nokia they sold didn't support video calling. Some Nokia Offeringswith a front facing camer
Nokia N Series
Nokia 5800, two cameras on this baby
The Sept 2006 released Nokia N95 which has two cameras and a tilt sensor
The 2006 E63
Sony Ericsson
The 2006 P990
2006 Sony Ericsson with a full VGA Camera on the front
CyberShot phone!
Motorola
The Razor
Your right obiviously no one has put a video camera in the front of a phone along with one in the back so users can take decent phones with one and make video calls with the other. Thats crazyness! My nokia 5800 will let me choose which camera (back or front) to use to take video/photos and which camera to use for calling, its certainly a new innovative feature.
I think you minunderstand what "revolutionary" means. A 64bit kernel isn't revolutionary, nor is adding exchange support. These are evolutionary changes. Your buying into Apple hype.
AMD's hypertransport was revolutionary, microwave ovens were revolutionary and not all revolutionary ideas have to be popular (see Office 2007's menu system). Taking a 32bit/64bit hybrid OS and making it purely 64bit is evolutionary.
"MMS is going to be on every phone"????
The £25 7210 I bought of O2 more than three years ago had MMS, that phone was bought because I'd continually dropped my O2 XDA Mini S onto concrete and it was being repaired, the Nokia 7650 (era 2002) had MMS messaging, low end phones have had MMS messaging from around 2002 onwards*.
It's not a case of something being "up and coming" its existed on low end GSM phones as standard for more than half a decade. The fact the iPhone didn't support was unusual and amusing.
It's like selling "cut,copy and paste" as revolutionary, the Orange m500 I purchased in 2004 (running windows Mobile 2003) had cut, copy and paste. My Nokia 7610 (not sure about my old Nokia 7650) supported cut,copy and paste.
Don't get me wrong I like the iPhone, because of the iPhone my Nokia 5800 was designed and sold. But can we please stop using it as a reference for phone features since it has been behind (feature wise) since release.
*I understand US phone carriers might have been disabling the features but it certainly isn't new.
How is texting a new fad? I remember owning a Nokia 5510i (think 402) in 1998 which could text upto 160 characters. I beleive my Nan had a BT Cellnet Analogue phone (this was before the days of a standard GSM sim card) in 95/96 which was capable of sending 60 character text messages (worked until 2004 when BT forced her to upgrade to a digital phone).
Back then a Nokia 5110i on Orange Pay As You GO went for £100, and were hardly rare. Nokia 402
It uses the webkit engine to load pages, I have no idea about the Pre but the Nokia 5800 which also uses webkit loads the iPhone facebook page marginally better than the iPhone does.
From what I personnally can tell the only real difference between the Nokia 5800 browser and the iPhone Safari one is the cool zooming thing you can do with your fingers on the iPhone (its a menu option for the 5800). When you consider the Pre is supposed to be heavily web app based I wouldn't be surprised if the expearence was the same.
If you want to be a member you can't have laws which go against EU Directives. Its kinda the point of being part of the EU (many trade agreements aren't contigent on membership).
An example a few years back with the UK was safety standards. For example there used to be three standards of motorcycle helmet you could buy. British (BSA), EU and American. If you could afford it you bought a BSA helmet since they were the best. Unfortunatly an EU directive stated that standards had to match accross the EU. While this was a very good thing for many countries it meant the British standards had to be reduced to match the EU standards. As a result it became much harder to find the best lids.
On a side note and I'm not sure if it is still true but American lid standards were considerably lower than EU ones. It is something you might want to pester your government about.
A house built to with heat conservation in mind should almost heat itself. I've moved into a new flat building in the UK, between all the insulation and double glazing its actually hard for me to get the flat cooler than 21 degrees.
During the winter when it reached -8 degrees outside, my flat without any heating was at 16 degrees. My neighbours have the same issue, we only have the one small flat below us so the heat isn't coming from downstairs.
I can think of several other new buildings which suffer from this problem. If your going to argue about the color of a building mandating improved heat conservation should remove most of the heating costs.
You realise going from copper to gold connectors causes problems right? I You have differing input impedances for the gold connectors and the copper/silicon. While I agree with your point about the wire. Unless you want to go all gold/copper/silicon using gold connectors offers no real improvement, its the audiophile eqviulent of Apple's "Mac's can't get virus's" in the computer world.
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone, a Symbian touch screen phone available across the world including America
It's a touch screen phone with a webkit based browser than seems equal in ability to the iPhone.
Nokia Music is a surprisingly good copy of iTunes (although the DRM on the songs sucks). I think the Music player is simple and intuitive to use although I'll admit the iPhone is easier to use.
The phone supports push/pull email and can be setup to grab your hotmail as well. The phone also supports copy/paste for messages and MMS messaging which is integrated nicely.
The GPS capabilities are better than I iPhone's. I have a friend who own one and my Nokia can get a more accurate position than his iPhone. You also have better maps since the Nokia works with Nokia Maps 2.0, Garmin software and Google Maps. Lastly the phone supports satellite navigation, a feature which I thought I would never use but have used a lot.
The Nokia phone is marginally thicker (by 2/3mm) and it seems worse because the Nokia phone is rectangular. It also lacks multi touch but then the phone vibrates when you touch the screen letting you know you've activated it (very handy). The phone doesn't require a highly expensive contract (I'm on a £20pm tarif and paying an additional £7pm for an unlimited download bolt on). Its also cheaper than the iPhone, it's ok to admit you only own one because its "cool".