catzaa

17 ms·

91.
by catzaa 17y ago
You can get a next day VISA for China (it costs extra though). It is actually a suprisingly fast system (all the admin when entering or getting a VISA is very efficient).
92.
by catzaa 17y ago
Off topic: What are the final costs of a book and what is the share? (i.e. printing, authors cut, publisher’s cut)? Buying books really hurts my back-pocket (the last book cost me $140+ dollars – and it is a lot more expensive if you do the
93.
by catzaa 17y ago
> will make AI winter a continuing reality. This will be a good thing. Theoretical development thrived under the AI “winter”. I am going to throw the rooster in the hen house and say it: It seems that a large part of AI is thinking up n
94.
by catzaa 17y ago
> White bread is cheaper than Whole Wheat. But brown bread is cheaper (and healthier) than white bread.
95.
by catzaa 17y ago
How can you improve something if you cannot measure it? How do you know that you actually improved something? Maybe tests can be improved - but it is currently the only reliable way in which the performance of students can be measured.
96.
by catzaa 17y ago
The article is interesting about mobile phones. For interest sake, MTN is a South African company. Mobile phones make things such as informal jobs a lot easier (e.g. if someone wants to organise labour for a project). The problem still howe
97.
by catzaa 17y ago
That is exactly one of my main problems. The biggest disadvantage in Africa is that rich countries subsidise their agriculture production. Agriculture is one of the few areas where Africa can be competitive. But what happens now is that Afr
98.
by catzaa 17y ago
That is a bit of an overreaction to an innocent comment. He made a valid point (better non-lethal crowd control could have stopped the civil rights movement) and you chose to take it a wrong way. What is worse is that the Civil Rights movem
99.
by catzaa 17y ago
> To answer the first question, the existance of non-patent-emcumbered codecs, such as Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, demonstrates that software patents don't need to exist for these things to exist. This is an extremely bad example. Ogg Vo
100.
by catzaa 17y ago
That is unfortunately true. There is this old joke: Q: How do you know someone is from MIT {Stanford, Havard, ...}? A: He tells you.
101.
by catzaa 17y ago
Money spend on Aid in Africa probably dwarfs money spend on space research. Sub-Sahara Africa has swallowed more than 15 Marshall Plans with no signs of development. Africa will never develop with external aid (it will only become more welf
102.
by catzaa 17y ago
> School education is not a good predictor of future performance. I would venture to say that above some (fairly modest) threshold of quality, the difference in schooling is irrelevant. I beg to differ. School performance in mathematics
103.
by catzaa 17y ago
> There's a nice documentary "My Brilliant Brain" that shows how people can get extraordinarily skilled by (surprise surprise) making an extraordinary effort). There is also something called the g-factor that is a measure of intelligenc
104.
by catzaa 17y ago
> If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers. This is not a bad thing. It is completely the opposite to some Western ideals to ensure that
105.
by catzaa 17y ago
Many articles are peer reviewed without actually looking at the data or recreating all the results. The whole idea is that a paper should be reproducible so that people can come along later and reproduce it. If they fail to do that then tha
106.
by catzaa 17y ago
> The business cycle has since the 1970's has been a bit worse than the cycle from '45 to 75. Nothing like the current financial crisis happened during that time. Nothing like the current financial crises happened since the 1930ies. The
107.
by catzaa 17y ago
> If you travel to socialist countries, you will observe this in effect. That is so true. There are countries in which government jobs are the most prized jobs (high salary, flexible working hours and extremely high job security). This
108.
by catzaa 17y ago
Well, the simple fact is that the above quote from the article is completely wrong. The 80ies was one of the longest periods of sustained US GDP growth (and the 40ies&70ies weren’t that magical). During the 80ies the USA tacked on the e
109.
by catzaa 17y ago
Hmmm... The ISS seems a waste. How can the ISS cost 37 times more than the MIR space station? Also, why isn't the birds nest staduim in Beijing on the list? Was it cheaper? What about the different canals that was built in the USSR? It is i
110.
by catzaa 17y ago
Maybe. I have used latex extensively (and is now currently busy typing my dissertation in Latex). I personally think that Latex is a bit overrated. There can be much better programs and Latex's applicability is fairly limited. It takes hour
111.
by catzaa 17y ago
South Africa built at least 6 deliverable nuclear weapons (bombing airplanes). If it was tested, no one knows. There were suggestions that SA tested in 1979 (Vela incident). For what it is worth, South Africa had a fairly good rocket develo
112.
by catzaa 17y ago
You can download it (but it is fairly difficult). I downloaded a lot of videos which I successfully played with MPlayer. If you want to I can look at how exactly I downloaded it (it was a long time ago though).
113.
by catzaa 17y ago
Nice. Would be nice if it use MathML (or something like that) instead of images.
114.
by catzaa 17y ago
There is a flipside to this. In my country murders are the highest in the world even though we have extremely strict gun controls. The problem is that criminals often do not follow the (gun control) laws. And it therefore gives them an adva
115.
by catzaa 17y ago
That is not so bad. My country had an unemployment rate of 40%+ before the recession (when it includes people not employed but not looking for a job). If unemployed illegal aliens from other countries in my country are included it will be s
116.
by catzaa 17y ago
> Go visit a counter clinic and get exactly what you need ---though I'm sure you know that you have acute viral bronchitis and you only needs some over-the-counter drugs to treat symptoms. Then, you can go reinvest your "shitload" in so
117.
by catzaa 17y ago
The problem is that doctors charge ridiculous amounts even for simple treatments. If I have Bronchitis I know exactly what I need and the doctor knows it too. Yet he will charge a shitload for a 10 minute appointment. The same with medical
118.
by catzaa 17y ago
> "About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents." Maybe. My question is that how many of those children that are in auto-accidents are pedestrians? The p
119.
by catzaa 17y ago
> Train 2173, Acela Express, 4'36", $213 Dude, it is still crap expensive. In my country you pay $210 for a 2000km plane ticket return (4000km total). That is just crazy. In China trains are dirt cheap, on-time, clean and fast (at lea
120.
by catzaa 17y ago
That is my point exactly. Did Gordon Brown kill him or condoned his killing? Furthermore, if he apologised on behalf of the government, is it the same government that killed him (seeing as how the parties/people in power changed). If the la

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