A bit sad to think that there will be places on Mars that we will have a better view of than ones on earth.

My mother-in-law's house in Japan, for example.

Maybe that's a good thing...

That's probably an ancient joke (Henny Youngman maybe?) but I still laughed.

Thanks, I needed that.

I'm not sure if that came out the way you intended...

Or maybe it did.

Look at the order time. The order number is just the date and time. They'd better not have more than one order/second.

Order No. 20100108063848
Order Date 2010-1-8 6:38:48

The site is just there to pick up personal info.

After thousands of times listening to my various modems connecting from 300bps to 56K and with the various incarnations of error correction I was eventually able to knowing how fast I was connected by sound alone. The problem was that as modems got faster and more sophisticated the connection time kept getting longer and longer. Sometimes I'd have to wait through 45 seconds or more of whistles, grinds and groans before the two modem would train. Ah, the good old days.

In the vain hope that they'll have nostalgia value someday I still have in my possession:

1) Mint condition Hayes Smartmodem 2400. The original workhorse.
2) Practical Peripherals 14.4K. long box with a one-line LCD that displays the connection speed and error correction mode
3) US Robotics 56K Courier - The last great standard.

Four months ago I started at a quasi-governmental organization that looks after the needs of the widows and orphans of my province. The current state of the system reflects the mentality of the late 80's-early 90's. Everything in a word processing document or spreadsheet. Ad-hoc, unstructured storage of said documents on mapped network drives ("It's on the G: drive? I thought it was supposed to be on the U: drive!"). Telnet-based trust accounting system. Badly-utilized email system being used for any and all communication within the organization including sending the aforementioned documents as email attachments. They've had SharePoint for 6 years but never used it for more than a standard HTML intranet.

If the lessons of the past 15 years are to be learned from, every operation within this organization can be done with centralized or distributed servers and a browser interface. With the possible exception of the relatively few documents in the legal department, the information generated, managed and communicated within our organization can be done without using heavy client-server applications.

Now, if someone was able to come up with a browser OS allowed us to roll out light, inexpensive end-user workstations that can be easily managed due to the lack of requirements for things such as Word, Excel, Outlook, anti-virus, Telnet app, Telnet 3270 app, DMS interface for Word and Outlook etc., our support and capital costs would drop immensely.

Chrome OS is probably not that solution now, but being open source and our requirements not being anywhere near unique, it shouldn't be too long before the requisite changes are made.

Some may say that what I describe are just the old mainframe dumb-terminals or X-terminals. I would reply that those were the right paradigm with the wrong technology. A browser OS provides the richer interface the dumb terminals lacked and the local processing ability the X-Terminals couldn't provide.

You're a few years too late with that idea:

The biggest:
Zipcars.com
Co-Operative Auto Network

A bunch of other car sharing links: http://www.carsharing.net/where.html

I was waiting for that. The Aussie road trains really are a sight to be seen.

On topic though, I have seen a demo of this technology at least 10 years ago so in that time they've had plenty of time to work through issues, test scenarios out the wazoo, so all this "But what if..." BS is just annoying.

You're out of date. The fingerprinting and picture taking of all non-Japanese passport holders entering the country started a couple of years ago. This includes permanent residents like myself.

They were also going to make us PRs go back in the gaijin visitor line (we could use the Japanese passport line) but relented when the obviously discriminatory nature of the fingerprinting became obvious, especially in cases of PRs married to Japanese citizens and with kids. I tend to use the special "re-entrants" line they set up, which is actually better as there is rarely anyone there. I get to bypass both the foreigner AND Japanese line-ups.

Richard Branson is a really smart guy and savvy businessman. He has the vision required to expand his companies but he also knows when to drop something before it becomes too much of a drain.

Read his autobiography "Losing my Virginity" to see what sets him apart from the typical board of directors who are just trying to hop on the latest bandwagon.

I find the exclusion of Asian buttocks interesting, but understandable given the absence of booty on the typical Asian female.

Here is a representative example.

I don't agree that we all agree that what we all should be agreeing on something that we might not all agree on.

Actually his response was more than reasonable and was in fact based on the reality of how any religion historically reacts to critical analysis of their faith. In fact, he probably understand the motivations of your faith better than you actually do. I like to refer to this as "the blindness of faith".

Your answer is actually a laughable illustration of exactly what he was talking about. He made a critical comment about your church which actually can be shown to be accurate. Your response: Throw insults at him that he "doesn't understand your faith", is "bigoted" and "biased" based on absolutely no proof whatsoever. Just about every religion says that charitable work is an essential part of their faith. He pointed out the truth: that charity comes at a cost: "We helped you, now don't you think you should help (or join) us?".

True charity comes with no strings attached. No expectation of reciprocation, no subtle pressure to join the faith of those who provided the assistance. That was his point. Nt that the charity provided by your church is invalid, but that the same charity could be provided by anyone whether they are a member of a church or not.

Tell me: What is the difference between a Scientologist on the street giving someone a free E-meter test (their charitable work) and then inviting that person to join their church so that they can free themselves from their worries and you giving some food or clothing to someone and then inviting them to join your church so that they can free themselves of their worries? In the end, there is none.

Then you weren't doing what you were supposed to do and the fault is yours. As I said, if you don't have a re-entry permit and especially if you have a one-way ticket you MUST give them the gaikukjin tourokoshu and if you don't have it they will really want to know why. Consider yourself lucky that they didn't hold you until you were able to get someone to bring it.