This has been one of my names for over 20 years. I even receive mail under this name.

If you know where to look, there's a clear enough connection between this name and the one on my driver's license.

If anyone is looking for me, I'm not hard to find.

LK

Walled gardens like AOL and CompuServe failed because they had to compete with everyone else. In the early '90s, there was a lot of content that was exclusive to AOL or CompuServe. There were a load of small BBS that had their own unique content. And then there was the Internet. Anyone could put something on the Internet and when web browsers started to be easy to install anyone could put up a web page. Individuals would put things up on their ISPs' web space or somewhere like Geocities, big companies would buy their own servers. Small individual ISPs started to spring up, because the cost of entry was low: a rack of modems, a leased line, and a load of phone lines and you could be an ISP. Local ISPs competed by differentiating themselves in various ways (free email, free web space, static IPs, whatever).

Meanwhile, AOL and CompuServe (OSPs - Online Service Providers) were trying to sell access but also be responsible for all of the content. The parallel with Facebook isn't quite there, because they're only selling the content. The problem is that, while there is some content on Facebook, anyone who can access Facebook can also access the whole of the web. They need to somehow justify putting content on Facebook (where only Facebook users can see it) rather than just putting it on a web site. Their argument for this is that they can collect lots of data about potential customers if you do, but it's not clear that this is a good long-term alternative.

That was more true a year ago than it is now. Modern smartphones and data plans mean that email is becoming as easy as SMS for a lot of people who would previously only check it when they actively went to their computer. This is also true of the older generation, who previously might have turned on the computer once every day or two for email, but now increasingly have tablets that can do email, thanks to companies like Amazon selling appliances that are mainly there for videos and ebooks..

The useful gadget to sell would be something cheap (under $50) that has a small array of microphones and listens to a predefined set of tones, then produces calibration data telling your audio source what it needs to do to compensate for the poor acoustics and speaker placement in the owner's living room.

It's easy to not care what people think of you when you're anonymous.

Pussy.

LK

Remind me, what's the current exchange rate on Palestinian children to Israelis?

I can make that concession only because even war follows some rules, and Aussie football clearly does not.

As compared to:

As many as 600,000 Canadians (1 - 2% of the overall population) are thought to be at risk of anaphylaxis stemming from food and insect allergy.
-- http://www.aaia.ca/en/anaphyla...

So what's you point exactly? That marijuana is approximately 10,000 times safer than food?

If you think Morse sent over a Ham radio connection is equivalent to a telegram, then you're missing the point. It's only equivalent if someone prints it off at the far end and couriers it to the recipient.

You'd probably use a short sequence for each of the brushstrokes and compose Kanji like from them. There's an input method (Cangee? Something like that) that works like this with a QWERTY keyboard. From 26 brush strokes, it can compose any Kanji and is apparently the fastest way of entering Kanji on a computer, although it takes a while to learn.

As if selective prosecution is not prevalent in the US...

Mod parent up please, this opinion deserves higher visibility.

Your government doesn't need to brutalize its general population in order to control it.
And, as you have noted yourself, it does resort to brutalizing when dealing with less compliant groups.

As to faxes, handwritten business communications are not at all unusual among older companies, due to the fact that typing kanji was not as straightforward process 20 years ago as it is today.

I've sent telegrams in Japan, but only to couples who were getting married and whose wedding I couldn't attend. I've never seen them used for other things, but a wedding is likely to have a few telegrams read at the reception.

A little over a decade ago was when Apple announced that laptop sales had passed desktop sales for them. This wasn't surprising, because their desktops were far less competitive than their laptops (and no one bought an Apple desktop to save money). The rest of the industry followed about two years later. We've been in a world where more laptops are sold than desktops for almost a decade. Even accounting for the fact that laptops are replaced rather than upgraded, there are now more people who use laptops as their only computer than there are desktop users.