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Datawind is always late to the party. They make big annoucements about incredibly inexpensive items years in the future to generate interest. Then by the time they're actually selling something, everyone else has passed them by. Even now, you can pickup a tablet with similar specs from walmart for $50. By the time we see any DW tablets on the shelves, several companies will be selling $40 tablets, or better.
And my magic 8-ball agrees whole heartedly...
None of that is the major problem... Declining channel quality is. In the past decade and a half, everyone has been following the model of making a good channel, keeping it that way until a lot of providers pick it up, then turning it into a piece of crap, and moving all the good content on it onto 3 other new cable channels your cable company has to start carrying.
Remember when the History Channel had shows about History? Remember when the Discovery Channel had shows with science and discovery? Remember when the Learning Channel taught viewers anything?
Proliferation of channels caused a steep decline in signal to noise ratio. Now, the lowest-common-denominator broadcast channels look very high quality in comparison, even as those morons keep chasing low-budget crap shows, and "reality" TV proliferates.
Take the money you spend on cable TV every month for a year, spend at most $150 of it on a top-of-the-line antenna system, and donate the rest to your local PBS station. You'll still get 100 channels, picture quality will be far better, and you'll quickly forget you've ever heard of Honey Boo Boo.
Sadly more and more people refuse to check any bags, leading to flights over boarding first, massive problems in the overhead bins, high stress, and delayed flights.
It's the airlines' fault for hidden charges for checked bags, and so it's only right that they reap the fallout.
Personally, I wish airlines would do away with their checked baggage fees. Besides the obvious, I'd also like to be able to take more than 10oz of hair gel, deodorant, toothpaste, mouthwash, etc., when I travel. Not to mention a pocket knife, nail clippers, etc, which TSA won't allow in the cabin but are fine if checked.
Southwest has gotten a lot of mileage out of their "bags fly free" advertising campaign, making fools of the other airlines. And so when I need to fly, I check their routes and rates first.
Other beliefs and opinions often have at least some rational basis and are subject to debate, religion does not.
That's utter nonsense. I'd say *most* politicians hold *numerous* beliefs that are not based on any evidence, and they are unwilling to debate or reconsider.
religion is directly responsible for much death and suffering throughout history, even into the present day. Other beliefs and opinions have nowhere near that death toll.
That's a pretty stupid thing to say. I'm pretty sure the combined death tolls of Stalin and Mao outweigh the sum total of all religious conflicts in modern history.
Regardless of whether votes ultimately fall along religious lines, we wouldn't even be wasting time on these issues if it weren't for religion.
That makes no sense at all. If religion is to blame, why can't you show a clear breakdown of votes by affiliation? How could it be otherwise?
And name ANY issue you want, that you wish to attribute to religion, and I'm sure I can point to a rather non-religious country somewhere on the planet that similarly has laws against it.
Even if you're British or Canadian where the religious right isn't nearly as rabid as they are in the U.S., they still influence legislation to the nation's detriment.
Thank you for calling the US "rabid" and "religious right". Now I will point out that homosexual marriage was legal in the US before almost any other nation on earth. Only the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada beat the US by a year or two. The undeniably secular and oh-so-enlightened England was a downright laggard on this issue. Why weren't they advancing LGBT rights a century before the knuckle-dragging US with their "rabid", "religious right" population?
consider that the religious people who represent you in government essentially believe in unicorns and faeries.
Any and every person on the planet holds one or more beliefs or opinions you will disagree with. Singling out religion as one harmful dark and sinister belief is absolutely baseless.
Would you prefer an atheist politician who has utterly opposite cultural, solical, economic, political, diplomatic and military views as you, over a Protestant who you otherwise agree with?
It's particularly hard to understand this view today, when religious views are hardly ever deciding factors in legislation. Votes on LGBT policies never fall on religious lines, nor do all Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, etc., universally vote for or against them. Ditto for abortion, civil rights, affirmative action, social programs, economic policies, etc.
Where is the great harm that all these damn religious politicians are causing?
Where are the horde of atheists that voted the separation of church and state into law? Where are the atheists that are fighting to keep the protestants from repealing it? Where are these atheists judges that continue to enforce it?
but long-lasting religions don't tend to have gods that can be easily disproven by experiment
The holy books of Judaism, Christianity, and Muslim read like exhaustive historical texts. If you can't find something significant in there that is disprovable, you're not trying.
Complaining that religion is not "easily disproven by experiment" is like complaining that the history of Russia has no experimental basis, and therefore must be false.
I guess I do "departmental" scale things, though we try and use enterprise class hardware when possible to get funding for it. We found the savings in consumer grade stuff was eaten by outages or IT staff time in keeping things running.
We buy generally discounted Infortrend or IBM hardware, and neither has an option for consumer HDDs so we don't use them. Buying an empty chassis or server and filling with consumer drives plus carriers ourselves also seems to eat any savings, plus makes support more complicated anyway.
I have to say, I have had several "trailer" propane hot water heaters, and not one has leaked over the years (14 +). There have been various electronic or igniter / burner failures, but no leaking. I can't imagine these are "cream of the crop" water heaters either... I suppose it depends on lots of factors, but we do have hard water so . . .
Recently, one of the biggest changes in mainstream music was that the big labels stopped signing bands and started building bands.
"RECENTLY"? What are you, 1,000 years old? The big studios have been doing that for DECADES AND DECADES.
Funny that you're disagreeing with the parent, touting how much faster software has gotten, and then complain that video playback doesn't work, when your problem is the steaming pile of crap that is Adobe Flash.
I guarantee that your old Dell can play back H.264 video just fine, using something like MPlayer instead of Flash for the decoding...
A typical pro-piracy comment in Slashdot is that "if I make a copy, no one loses anything"
Pro-piracy, or a response against the act of comparing it to literal theft? Those are not the same thing [being pro-piracy, using a statement to express the idea that an analogy is bad] in of itself.
Since you bothered to post, you could have the decency to post a link...
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/world/americas/mexico-radioactive-theft/
This is utter nonsense. Microwave communications are line-of-sight and only minimally regulated. And just like fiber optics, you can point as many lasers as you want, from tower to tower, for maximum throughput.
no country truly appreciates freedom until it's gone through a few decades of fascism and/or of a dictatorship of the proletariat. It seems it's time for the USA to have such an "enlightening" experience.
People that say such things are MASSIVELY ignorant about US history. We've slid far backwards lately, but there's no question the situation was, far, far worse various times in the past. Get back to me when we're interning all the Arab-Americans in camps...
"'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true." -- Poloniouius, in Willie the Shake's _Hamlet, Prince of Darkness_