The metro area has over 4 million people, but to the OP's point, the city itself is pretty small (the CBD in particular feels tiny). Most of those people live the Aussie dream, in a mindless sprawling suburbia.

I got the impression that the rivers were a constraint on there being a loop, not a factor in haphazardness. Tokyo is spaghetti. London has its own constraints (river and difficulty tunnelling south of the river). Etc.

What makes NYC's subway network particularly haphazard?

I think you missed the point about it being subway networks. Most of the map you linked to is suburban rail. How much is actually subway?

T-Mobile and Orange stopped two of us looking up the menu at one of my favourite (and family friendly) local pubs. We couldn't get to the following site on our iPhones: http://theblacklion-hammersmith.co.uk/eating.php

For me that's way worse than any of the other sites you listed :)

Probably not, unless Brazil is as fucked up as the US with regards to taxing non-domiciled citizens. Ironic and hypocritical concerning the how the country came about.

Of course, lots of Western countries have entrepreneur or investor visas. You can buy your way back in anywhere you like. Coupled with visa-free travel and ease of mobility and communications, it's not much of a hassle for somebody as rich as this.

I worked with Chris in the late nineties. Very smart guy. Very hard working. Some pretty good stories of his escape from Romanian and finding his feet in NYC. Not only is he technical, but he knows how to sell. He built up businesses, hiring talented people, and those business were acquired (I went through two acquisitions in under three years), before he started another company and I lost contact when I moved overseas. He's pretty much lived the American dream.

Is this relevant in the light of Bollywood?

You can't call x264 a codec because it only does encoding, and does not do any decoding. Describing an H.264 encode as x264 format sounds rather uninformed, doesn't it?

DivX (and Xvid?) actually have a spec that includes more than just the requirements for the video. x264 can create DivX compliant video streams, as well as Blu-ray compliant streams, etc, so I'm still struggling to understand your comment :)

Hardware decoders were only needed for a short time in the late 90s. This wasn't an operating system requirement, it's just that computers weren't powerful enough for software decoding. I had DVD playback on NT4 BTW.

The other issue is that Windows didn't come with an MPEG-2 decoder, which was later bundled with Vista and W7 (or some SKUs of those OSes). Microsoft presumably decided that enough customers were needing the decoder that they'd swallow the licensing costs and make it easier for the users.

XP couldn't play DVDs because it didn't include an MPEG-2 decoder. Microsoft didn't want to pay the licensing fee for each XP install because at the time, the percentage of users trying to play DVDs on their computers was too low.

BD supports AVC, VC-1 and MPEG-2, although most serious people are only using AVC.

But that's all moot. With standards like UltaViolet gaining traction, and the general switch to internet-connected TVs, fewer and fewer people will be bothering in the next five years with optical disc playback on computers.

I'm trying to understand what you just said. Isn't x264 an h.264 encoder? Or is x264 some video standard I haven't heard of?

And better colour.

NTSC = Never The Same Colour, Never Twice the Same Colour, or No True Skin Colors

PAL = Pay for Additional Luxury, Peace At Last or Perfection At Last

That site shows Chrome surpassing Firefox for marketshare in late October, so even before the w3schools stats.