That sounds like just about every other product the Chinese make these days, so yeah, most likely it is.

I'm not sure the US is in any position to criticize the rail system of any other nation. :)

Of course. Which is why this is not a good thing that Anonymous is threatening to do. The government will expand their definition of terrorism again, and do some more expanding of whatever trumped-up, PATRIOT Act style rules they want.

From the government's point of view, what LulzSec and Anonymous are doing is digital terrorism. Perhaps it doesn't take actual lives [yet], but it makes the masses fearful. So eventually our fine Congress is going to decide that something must be done. A digital war will be declared [or not, as it were], and our freedoms online will be taken from us in the name of security, just as our personal freedoms have been taken from us in pieces over the last 10 years.

Of course, a conspiracy theorist might decide that it was the government itself performing these acts of digital terrorism, as an excuse to put into place more control over the internet. I don't quite go that far, in spite of the fact that I'm pretty sure the government hates the openness of the internet.

Either way it saddens me. While I wouldn't mourn the loss of Facebook, I think Anonymous is just providing good excuses for the further loss of freedom and anonymity online.

They do try in some cases [rebar-reinforced foundations], and certainly on the more expensive homes they tend to have better, thicker foundations. Unfortunately the developers look at the cost and it just doesn't make sense for them to spend a fortune on a nice foundation for the cheap McMansions they've been building for the last decade .
But still, even 'better foundations' can be susceptible to the huge soil movements that are possible here. It's also largely the reason that *nobody* has a basement here.

I don't know about large commercial buildings. They tend to have landscaping and constant irrigation anyway, so that probably prevents a lot of issues right there.

It's not so much that we want 'standing water' at the foundation. The issue is the soil. Down here [I'm in the DFW area] the soil is mostly clay. So when it gets wet it expands, and when it dries out, it contracts considerably. As an example, within the space of about 2 months, I watched a sidewalk slab move a good 1.5" away from a driveway slab because the ground dried out.

A constant cycle of expanding and contracting is hell on a concrete foundation, which is standard in these parts. So many people set up a trickle hose around the house and attempt to keep the soil around the foundation at some constant level of wetness to prevent their foundation from cracking.

I had a 1997 Nissan 200SX [2-door version of a Nissan Sentra] that had a 2.0 liter engine and a 5-speed manual. I flogged the hell out of that little car and averaged 33mpg. On my many long road-trips [1500 miles, Silicon Valley to West Texas and back], I'd peg the cruise control at 89mph [as high as the cruise control worked], and would get 40+ mpg.

I miss that little thing, and wish dearly that I hadn't sold it. My current 2008 Jetta [also a 5-speed] is only averaging 22.5mpg :(

The double price comes from those of us who were on a lower-tier plan. I was originally on the 1 DVD for $7.99 plan. Then they added unlimited streaming and I thought it was great. Then they raised the price in November to $9.99 [25% increase]. Now they're making it $7.99 for streaming only, and an additional $7.99, for a grand total of $15.98/mo. So that's almost a 60% increase from my current rate, and a 100% increase from what my rate was this time last year.

I can understand some of their reasons for raising prices [Studios, postage], but I think they are doing it badly, and handling the PR for it rather poorly.

Of course, I'd be much more understanding of a price increase if Netflix were also announcing a significant increase in the videos available for streaming...

At the same time, drawing up the blueprint doesn't do you any good if you don't know how to nail two boards together properly...

Oh you think that's the hard way? Why, in my day, if we wanted to see a good Monty Python skit, we had to form our own dirt out of the elements found in the universe, and evolve our own life forms until they were advanced enough to do Monty Python skits! Set Construction? Pfft! A luxury!

Because we pay every year for support on that old hardware.
Because unlike disposable x86/X64 hardware, when you drop $20-50k [or more] on a good SPARC server, you expect it to be fully supported for more than 3 years.

Just 2 years ago we completed a hardware refresh, coming off of SPARC hardware which had first gone into service 8-10 years prior. We still have one server in service, though not supported, which is 11.5 years old. One of the other servers had a 6.5 year uptime when we finally powered it down [internal caching nameserver]. The last person who had logged into the box hadn't worked here in 4 years... [NOTE: These servers were all from before my time here. I don't let my servers go that long without being patched].

While I think a 10 year service cycle is a bit excessive [we aim for 5 years now], it's not that uncommon when you pay for premium hardware, and that hardware has historically been fully supported for well more than the 2-3 years common with x86 hardware.

The really strange thing is that the annual support costs on our Sun hardware are cheaper with Oracle than they were with Sun.

I consider BASIC the primary reason why I'm a sysadmin now, instead of a programmer. The problem I had with BASIC is that after years of tinkering with it as a kid [TI 99/4A, C64, GWBASIC on PC], I had a horrible time learning to get away from the 'GOTO' way of thinking.
In high school, I took the "Computer Math" class, which was basically learning how to do algebra in BASIC. I took that class because I had experience with BASIC at home, and thought it would help bring me to the next level. It was only years later that I realized that I should have taken the "Computer Science" class, which taught Pascal.

As a result of only being exposed to BASIC, when I tried to learn other languages or do anything more complicated than drawing circles randomly around the screen, I could never get the hang of functions and pointers and passing variables or whatever. So I decided I was too dumb to be a programmer, and wasted all my time playing games instead. I think if I had taken the Pascal class early on, I'd have had a much better foundation on which to build.

In the years since, I've become somewhat proficient with bash scripting (with functions and everything) as a sysadmin. I can sorta-kinda read some perl if it's not too obfuscated. I keep trying to learn Python, but I don't do it often enough for it to stick in my head.

While I have no desire to push my daughter to be a programmer [or do anything computer-centric] I do expect to ensure that she's at least exposed to some sort of programming, so that she has at least a reasonable idea of what makes all her computers and gadgets actually work. I have no desire for BASIC to be the thing that I use for showing her programming. Perhaps LOGO [how can you beat moving a turtle around for a kid?], and maybe Python.

I like the idea of python because, much like BASIC back in the day, you can very easily start a command line interface, and get action immediately.

BASIC:
10 print"Hello"
RUN

Python

>>> print "Hello"

Quick and simple, but without the danger of getting stuck in the rut of GOTOs.

No. Then some other lucky company gets the deal of the century on a lightly used, modern datacenter.

And a whole host of religious leaders will tell you that they see miracles and evidence of God's existence daily. I personally have never seen evidence of God's existence. I've also personally never seen evidence of the existence of Anti-hydrogen.

Don't get me wrong, I think that what the scientists are saying is more likely true, but that doesn't change the fact that it requires me to believe [have faith in] a bunch of people who make claims based on things I [or the general population] do not understand. I don't know those scientists personally. They could be lying, young-boy-sexual-abusing bastards, just like the religious leaders. Why do I trust the scientists more? Why do other people trust the religious leaders more. Either way, it's faith to some degree.

The actual Vericode post says it's both the iPhone and Android versions. I'm not sure why the article linked in the summary [and thus the summary] only mentions the Android version.

I wonder then, does the web browser interface do something similar, minus the GPS info of course? What about the Pandora One desktop app?