I'm surprised the whole Transmeta team didn't just up and move to Helsinki! Do you think there was a reason Linus didn't start his own business in Finland?
While I suspect the main reason is that Transmeta is not "his company" (Linus is just an employee), Silicon Valley definitely has the advantages of better weather and, more importantly, better wages. Yeah, I know that many startups pay starvation wages with the added lure of stock options, but at least the company doesn't have to pay $200 for each $100 received by the employee, who then has $50 more substracted as income tax. And when he goes grocery shopping with that $50, another $10 is sliced off as sales tax, closer to $40 if he buys alcohol or gasoline.
I do agree with the "third-world" jab though. The US banking system is ridiculously backward, the idea of paying for everything with hand-written checks is downright hilarious to most of the rest of the world. I pay all my bills through the Web and have done so for over 5 years, but even before that, everything was handled electronically through ATMs and automated payments. I can authorize the telco or whatever to take its money directly from my bank account; of course, I get to see the bill first so I can dispute it if there are problems. (Not that I've even run into one.)
By 2010, a third-world country will suffer a huge combination of famine and plague due to overpopulation. Another one will happen by 2015, and the UN will start doing things to reduce the population growth as we approach 8 billion, such as requiring freely availble birth control and abortion in some areas. The Vatican will very quietly object as to not want to appear in favor of famine and plague.
People have been predicting widespread famine since Malthus; it hasn't happened, and it's not going to happen. There is more than enough food in the world today, the problem is in distribution. As P.J. O'Rourke points out in All the Trouble in the World, democratic countries, no matter how poor, never have famines -- it's the countries run by dictators (eg. China during the Mao era, the USSR during Stalin's rule) or wracked by civil war (Ethiopia/Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, etc) that have famine, since food supplies are used as a political tool.
In addition, the population growth rate has been slowing down worldwide for quite some time now, with many industrialized countries now having negative population growth (excluding immigration). The world's population is unlikely to top 10 billion, and in a few decades it will actually start dropping -- even without famine, war or pestilence.
Not much. According to CNN, Sony comes from the Latin sono, which simply means "sound". Japanese marketing types seems to love to tack "-y" to the end of English words, as in Bolty (a deodorant), Drafty (a beer), Crunky (a chocolate bar), etc.
Speaking of high bases, I think the ancient Japanese numbering system originally had a different character for each number (and a different name) way into the hundreds! That's news to me. Japan imported its characters from China, which has used a base 10 system since time immemorial. Japanese does have an assortment of characters for representing numbers to 10^72, but this is no different from Latin terms like "quadrillion".
However, the Oksapmin of Papua New Guinea use a baseless numbering system, where each number is one of 27 body parts.
"I'll take left ankle apples and a pinkie of oranges, thank you..."
FYI, France's area is 545,630 sq.km, which translates roughly into a 500x500 mile-square -- your little simplification was off by a factor of 5. Europe's land area is approximately 10,525,000 sq.km, which is larger than the U.S.'s 9,158,960 sq.km... and yes, that figure includes Alaska. Scandinavia still manages to have the highest use rates in the world and excellent coverage despite very low population densities in the north.
I suspect there's a simple reason for why cellular phones were much slower to take off in the US than in Europe. In the US, at least in the bad old days, the cellular phone owner foots the bill for receiving calls, which is absolutely ludicrous. Think about it: if anybody can call you up and make you pay, it's in your own interest to give your number to as few people as possible! This is not exactly the best way to encourage cellphone use. (Incidentally, this is one reason why pagers are still popular in the US, but entirely obsolete in Europe. The other is GSM's SMS messaging.) In Europe, the receiver pays nothing, so everybody distributes their mobile phone numbers freely -- except when roaming in another country, but that's a different story...
The US's antiquated area code system also made it impossible to create new prefixes exclusively for cellphones, making it difficult if not impossible to distinguish between cellular phones and land line phones. (And, while I'm speculating here, I suspect this is also the reason the receiver pays -- you can't have the caller pay 1c/minute to 914-123-4567 but $1/minute to 914-123-4568!). Whereas here in Finland, all mobile phone numbers start with a special prefix (040, 050, 049) that indicates not only that the phone is mobile, but the network operator as well.
I don't suppose you've looked at a map of Scandinavia lately, now have you? There may not be much population here, but there sure is a lot of area to cover.
And what was that bit about the "GSM 900 fiasco"? In Europe, GSM 900 is the dominant standard and the fate of 1800 MHz "cityphones" is still unclear. The US just missed the 900 MHz wave, so now they're scrambling to catch up with 1800...
Slashdot Mirror
While I suspect the main reason is that Transmeta is not "his company" (Linus is just an employee), Silicon Valley definitely has the advantages of better weather and, more importantly, better wages. Yeah, I know that many startups pay starvation wages with the added lure of stock options, but at least the company doesn't have to pay $200 for each $100 received by the employee, who then has $50 more substracted as income tax. And when he goes grocery shopping with that $50, another $10 is sliced off as sales tax, closer to $40 if he buys alcohol or gasoline.
I do agree with the "third-world" jab though. The US banking system is ridiculously backward, the idea of paying for everything with hand-written checks is downright hilarious to most of the rest of the world. I pay all my bills through the Web and have done so for over 5 years, but even before that, everything was handled electronically through ATMs and automated payments. I can authorize the telco or whatever to take its money directly from my bank account; of course, I get to see the bill first so I can dispute it if there are problems. (Not that I've even run into one.)
Cheers,
-j.
People have been predicting widespread famine since Malthus; it hasn't happened, and it's not going to happen. There is more than enough food in the world today, the problem is in distribution. As P.J. O'Rourke points out in All the Trouble in the World, democratic countries, no matter how poor, never have famines -- it's the countries run by dictators (eg. China during the Mao era, the USSR during Stalin's rule) or wracked by civil war (Ethiopia/Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, etc) that have famine, since food supplies are used as a political tool.
In addition, the population growth rate has been slowing down worldwide for quite some time now, with many industrialized countries now having negative population growth (excluding immigration). The world's population is unlikely to top 10 billion, and in a few decades it will actually start dropping -- even without famine, war or pestilence.
Cheers,
-j.
Cheersy,
-j.
Cheers,
-j.
However, the Oksapmin of Papua New Guinea use a baseless numbering system, where each number is one of 27 body parts.
"I'll take left ankle apples and a pinkie of oranges, thank you..."
Cheers,
-j.
Cheers,
-j.
The US's antiquated area code system also made it impossible to create new prefixes exclusively for cellphones, making it difficult if not impossible to distinguish between cellular phones and land line phones. (And, while I'm speculating here, I suspect this is also the reason the receiver pays -- you can't have the caller pay 1c/minute to 914-123-4567 but $1/minute to 914-123-4568!). Whereas here in Finland, all mobile phone numbers start with a special prefix (040, 050, 049) that indicates not only that the phone is mobile, but the network operator as well.
Cheers,
-j.
And what was that bit about the "GSM 900 fiasco"? In Europe, GSM 900 is the dominant standard and the fate of 1800 MHz "cityphones" is still unclear. The US just missed the 900 MHz wave, so now they're scrambling to catch up with 1800...
Cheers,
-j.