Just make sure the vertical viewing angle is good on the display, as TN panels are designed to be looked at in a certain orientation. Putting an IPS display upright would certainly be no problem, though.

I was thinking the same thing, but considering NK's lengthy border with China and shorter one with Russia, the odds of cutting all the cables (let alone getting permission from China and Russia!) are slim.

Although if you look at the recent stock price of GS, you'll see that there hasn't been a big drop recently. This means that the shareholders don't think this leakage is a big deal.

You should consider getting a used CF-T5. It's a fanless Core Solo model that gets a realistic 12-13 hours of battery life with the regular battery. I used it once on the whole trip from Hong Kong to Berlin and still had battery life to spare! It's not as rugged as the CF-72, though.

From what I understand from the article, China only holds 95% of the supply because they are able to provide the metals for cheaper. If these Chinese companies took advantage of their "monopoly position" by raising prices significantly, then other countries/companies would simply mine their own rare earth metals. Right now, there's simply no economic incentive to increase the mining capacity.

Straight from Cisco:

"Digital subscriber line (DSL) is a modem technology that uses existing twisted-pair telephone lines to transfer high-speed data. Many types of DSL are used today; the most common are asymmetric DSL (ADSL) and symmetric DSL (SDSL). ADSL provides a higher downstream speed than upstream. SDSL provides the same speed for both upstream and downstream traffic."

You know, that link was woefully uninformative. I guess that's why you've been modded "Funny".

Right. It would sure be nice if the amd64 releases of FreeNAS 0.7 are continued (apparently, there's a kernel panic upon bootup preventing them from releasing the amd64 alpha versions). The current i386 version is limited to 512MB of kmem (unless the kernel is recompiled), which is DEFINITELY not enough for ZFS (even a 1GB allocation is insufficient). With my max allocation at 512MB, I've had the kernel panic about 5 times in one day while transferring large amounts of data.

My advice to those of you who are using ZFS in FreeBSD: set the vm.kmem_size and vm.kmem_size_max in /boot/loader.conf to at least 1.5GB (assuming a 2GB system, 512MB remains reserved for the OS).

I remember ripping DVDs about 4 years ago in Linux, and it was a painless GUI affair (can't remember the exact software I used then, sorry). I'm using OS X now, and I usually use Handbrake, which is also available for linux. It, however, doesn't offer anything but hard-encoded subtitles, which is a big pain in a multilingual environment.

In your case, however, I'd probably recommend just going ahead and learning Japanese. That way, you'd never have to worry about which audio/subtitle track you rip; both would do just fine.

Actually, I'm using a 100Mb line right now in Tokyo (roughly $50/mo. with a static IP address and all fees), and I do get the full 100 megabits, full duplex. Of course, I'm usually limited by the other party's connection, but when downloading things within Japan, the computer immediately slows down due to the hard disk sustaining writes at 8-9MB/sec.

I wonder if the 160Mb connection mentioned in the summary includes a gigabit router...

Ah, so you've upgraded to Windows Server 2008?

Ferrari and Bentley have ruled diesels out, but you could consider preordering a Lamborghini diesel, assuming they go through with it.

Considering that Adobe still hasn't fixed the broken thumbnails in 64-bit environments (as of Acrobat 9 with current updates), this exploit seems to affect 32-bit systems. I haven't yet seen working .pdf thumbnails in 64-bit Vista (or Windows 7 Beta, for that matter).

As for the syncing on DoCoMo, try "datalink", available here: http://datalink.nttdocomo.co.jp/

...and I'm too lazy to write a reply to your post.