catz

It may be true that it is different - but it can be as profitable as other (search companies).

Remember that Facebook basically have all your personal data with which it can select products for you to buy.

> Because the data plan isn't metered.

Fair enough. In my country it is (I did not think that there was a country that did not charge for its data).I use a SIM with pre-paid on it which is nice (no contracts, nothing).

> Sort of how like you can get in trouble for using a residential cable modem in a business--consumers get a price break and power users pay more.

This is actually just a devious scheme to rip companies off.

> Not totally true, the iPhone is just now getting this in the upcoming 3.0 release for example.

Maybe. I only personally know of one person with an iPhone (again, it is more popular in the states). Most newish (e.g. last 4 years) phones (from Nokia or Samsung) have 3G built-in (when compared to iPhone's EDGE).

Also, connecting to the Internet using these phones' modems is straight forward and the majority of them accept micro-USB (through which it also charges).

> GM paid dividends up until last year, decades after it was known that they had large health care obligations.

If you look at the post I said that GM did not take into account their future obligations. Their profits was nothing more than fancy bookkeeping.

> GM management made a deal they were unwilling to keep.

I agree with you on the point that GM should never have made those lavish packages and kept their salaries in line with the market (or relocated their factories).

> These companies are not easily replaceable. If they were, another company would have replaced them by now.

There are numerous companies that can replace the big auto companies. Toyota and Honda has been slowly replacing GM is most of the world markets (including the US). If either GM goes into bankruptcy and gets split up/sold off (e.g. Opel gets sold etc...). It would not be a bad thing.

> Setting up an operation of that magnitude requires decades of experience and huge capital expenditures.

Setting up a car manufacturer is not that impossible in the market. Over the past years there were 10s of new car manufacturers that started (and some failed). A good example is some Chinese companies such as GWM, Cherry. There is also no reason why existing car manufacturers can not grow to fill the gaps that GM leaves (as they have done for a long time – e.g. Hyundai, Honda, Toyota, etc...).

> AMD employs 15,000. GM directly empl

Starting a new x86 processor manufacturer would probably be impossible. The x86 is a patent minefield (to which only AMD and Intel have cross licenses to use each other's patents). Setting up a new generation fab can cost more than $5 billion.

And if AMD goes Intel will have a monopoly. Both Chrysler, GM and Ford can disappear and there still will not be a monopoly.

> The application lets users connect their G1 Android phones via Wi-Fi to their laptops and then access the Internet from the laptop using the phone's cellular connection.

This is stupid. So T-Mobile has a problem with using their paid-for service more?

I access my internet from a phone - this is just stupid. Why would they have a problem with something that gives them extra revenue?

Connecting your phone to your computer as a modem is a standard feature for all other phones.

> I agree that the company should not be expected to pay for work not done, but these payments are essentially part of the benefits package agreed upon when the employee started working.

Those benefits packages were done under extreme coercion from the unions. The management of GM basically just deferred these costs.

Things such as pension funds should not be handled by the employee (IMHO). You should get your full salary (with benefits included) and make your own choice what funds you will use for medical aid/retirement.

Also - on a side note (of topic), these companies should be allowed to fail. They are easily replaceable and most motor manufacturing already happens in lower cost countries in any way.

Aren't there companies that are much more important pillars of the world economy that deserve a bailout more (e.g. AMD).

Hmmm... maybe - but I don't think so.

Firstly, the cost to each player is extremely small - so their incentive to "do something about it" is small. If a person receives only one email a year nothing will be done.

But if he receives his life's spam in a year he will do something about it.

Also note that most countries will not change their laws for a "small" problem. But if a problem is perceived to be large enough the law will be changed.

No. He implied that if the boy broke enough windows the town will put up CCTV cameras and no windows will be broken further.

That is true. At least drum music was developed before colonisation took place. The style of music is probably influenced a lot by the instruments.

There is some evidence that these drums were used for communication.

Maybe. One reason I listen to classical music is that it is nice if you study with it and it drains out the background music. (e.g. I find it less distracting to work with classical music on than with Korn or Papa Roach).

A few people I know is like that - but they would for sure not have a classical music CD in their car.

in is a fairly global word. If you play around in Google translate you will see that in is in in German and Dutch.

Yup, I'm also lucky that poiuyt is not on that list.

What would be cool is if they stick a little camera into the back of the car. This will help a lot for reversing, etc...

What exactly is the problem? The original stack overflow is CC-SA. This website: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ says what it is meant by that:

You are free:

- to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work

- to Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

- Attribution ...

- Share Alike ...

The Chinese cite shows that it is CC-SA (right bottom corner). Furthermore it freely acknowledges that it is based on stackoverflow. You can look at the blog [here](http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=_t&hl=en&...)

Here is an [answer](http://209.85.229.132/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=...) to what the relationship is between cnprog.com and stackoverflow:

The creation of CNProg are stackoverflow inspiration comes from (see "Why CNProg.COM create?")

SO once made to us, but because of Jeff and his team are currently no plans for localization, so we have created to serve the Chinese programmers CNProg. And our platform is already open source code, welcome like-minded friends to join us, millions of programmers to provide a domestic major technical Q & A community.

I can not see that anything morally wrong was done by creating this site - and it serves a useful purpose (by helping those people who speak Chinese).

> The language argument is a red herring that appeals to an outdated, pre-communications revolution worldview

This is the typical view of an English centric person. There are billions of people for who English is not a first language and whose second language English is not up to the standard that they can communicate with.

But who cares? I am sure that there are enough Chinese -speaking people to make this site a success.

In the right bottom corner there is a CC-wiki logo with link to creativecommons.org

I use LaTex a lot. That said, I have a few problems.

Nothing is as bad as someone who decides he is going to use Latex for general documents - such as composing tests or any type of document.

Why when people use LaTex their brain automatically shuts down? In college there are people who give extra marks if a report is done in LaTex. I thought that if a report looks nice (no matter if you've done it in FrameMaker or Word/OpenOffice) it is all that matters.

LaTex is nice - but it is not the holy grail that everyone pretends it to be.

> The main advantage of a prestigious school seems to be that you get to rub elbows with rich people's kids.

Another advantage is that you can casually mention it repeatedly on HN (casual university name dropping).

This is extremely wise. There are too many people bankrupting themselves by having a too large wedding. What is worse is that some people delay marriage for a few years in order to save up for the reception. Another approach for this "fancy" weddings is to keep it small or not to allow children (which is stupid).

The best marriage I attended was in a farmers tractor shed (don't know the direct translation) - everyone was welcome and it was all around fun.

> I went to Southern CT State University, which is basically a glorified community college. ("I went to college in New Haven." eyebrows "Oh, Yale, huh?" "No, the New Haven college you HAVENT heard of.")

You do not really appreciate the quality of universities in the USA. Even the university that you view as "second tier" is excellent by world standards.

Also - smaller universities that focus on undergraduate education often provide a better education than large research oriented universities.

You make some excellent points. My experience have been with Windows. The situation is this – they install shitloads of programs on these machines (most of it BS) . This all run at startup – the system tray is half the taskbar.

All this crap makes the machine maddingly slow. Then they mount network drives on the machines (20 or so). This means that if you use a flash drive you must start unmounting the network drives until your flash drive appear.

While you log-in 10 or so programs give you error messages (for which you must press the Ok button).

The quotas are still a problem – why must we have 100MB quotas? Hard-disk space is cheap – google gives me 7GB for email.

The worst is the internet costs. They give you 200MB for a year. After that you have to pay R2 (20 US cents) per M.B. That price is four times as expensive as GPRS through your cellphone.

Oh – it is crap working on CRT screens with a burned in log-in bar.

---

Ranting aside – the admin for the clusters in my dept. really knows his stuff.

> free printer access

Did you get free printer access? That is unfair - we had to pay for everything - bandwidth and printer access.

Or an alternative is too just lock a class up for 3 days in a library while they write their essays (with not internet).

Take home assignments are usually a mess - what I did was to force people to write tests. If there are 3 people in a group and only one is working - it will also come out.

> 1) Africa (don't underestimate it, it could grow much faster than any other country, iff it only could free itself from all those nasty colonialism consequences...)

Uhm... Firstly – Africa will never become a world power. Do you know how many problems Africa have? Most economies are shrinking. The countries whose economies grow are based on resources (e.g. oil) that foreign companies mine. There is not one sub-sahara African country with a good education system (the best is mediocre and rapidly declining education systems).

> y, iff it only could free itself from all those nasty colonialism consequences...)

You could blame the problems in the 70ies or 80ies on colonialism. But modern problems are created by Africans for Africans. I can cite numerous examples. Can you really blame Britain of Zimbabwe? Both Lesotho and Swaziland never had any major colonial influences – yet they are the most backward in Africa.

> But other then that you're right, and lets not forget the huge brain drain into America over the years.

This is true - and the brain drains are probably what made America great. Before and during WW2 some of smartest people in Europe (mostly Jewish) fled to America and they never went back. That is probably one of the reasons why the USA was off much better after WW2 than other countries.

This continued over the years. But it can easily reverse - if situations in the home countries become more favourable or if the USA decreases the number of Visas...

> * You can't leave your village without a pass

There are valid practical reasons for this. Infrastructure such as roads, hospitals, schools, etc... can simply not cater for a massive influx of people from rural areas.

The alternative to this is probably giant slum cities that surround every major city (as what happens in other parts of the world).

> * You can't have more than one kid

Although this is horrible - and things such as forced abortions is heretic there are good reasons for this.

There are huge overpopulation problems in China. Culturally many people are also inclined to get more children (since children traditionally cared for parents and were an old fashioned "retirement plan").

I would go further and argue that the rapid increase in population is responsible for much of Africa's non-development.

> * No freedom of expression

Between personal freedom and economic freedom I would prefer economic freedom. Of course China is not a democracy with all the nice associated things (freedom of expression, etc...).

However, if China were a democracy it would probably have succumbed to a kleptocratic leftist rule - as 95% of other 3rd world countries.

No. They do not prosecute people based on clicking the link. They merely obtain a search warrant. They will prosecute people if they found any CP based on the search warrant.