drinian

15 ms·

61.
by drinian 16y ago
What's interesting is that, fifty years ago, Japan started in largely the same economic place as SE Asia and China, but somehow managed to do things like enforce strict building codes before becoming the world's most developed nation. See
62.
by drinian 16y ago
It's worth noting that most of the country is wired for electric lighting; the issue since the fall of the Soviet Union has been fuel shortages. The Soviets used to sell them fuel and energy for practically nothing.
63.
by drinian 16y ago
Absolutely, the concept is nothing new. The difference would be decentralization and generalization.
64.
by drinian 16y ago
Are you familiar with Whuffie, which was a fictional reputational currency? I'm pretty sure that with the advent of decentralized currencies like BitCoin, we could probably implement Whuffie now. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w
65.
by drinian 16y ago
Again, I am mostly familiar with events through the film. My point was that a lot of people were having similar ideas around the same time. I'm sure there were dozens, if not hundreds, of other aspiring CS students around the US who spent a
66.
by drinian 16y ago
Everything below refers only to the film version of events. As nasty as Lawrence Summers comes off in the movie, he's right. The Winklevosses should've been out creating something new, rather than using their privilege to wrangle a meeting
67.
by drinian 16y ago
In addition to energy efficiency, do whatever you can with your money to make maintenance easier on yourself. For instance, bathrooms that are easily cleanable. I myself really like the way that Japanese homes generally separate the toilet,
68.
by drinian 16y ago
I live in Baltimore. If someone wants your money here, they'll hurt you to get it. For whatever reason, people seem less inclined to use violence outside the US.
69.
by drinian 16y ago
That's an excellent point. I always tell people that there's a huge difference between Beijing/Shanghai and the rest of China, for instance, in this regard. I'd like to write a blog post about all the various lines I've been fed, and I'll t
70.
by drinian 16y ago
I have heard of this specific scam happening in Buenos Aires as well. It's a particularly nasty one. It's unfortunate, but I would say that on my world trip about 50-60% of English-speaking locals in non-English-speaking countries were tryi
71.
by drinian 16y ago
Awesome, Japan overcomes NIH syndrome for once. How is EPUB for graphics-heavy content, like manga?
72.
by drinian 16y ago
Looks like he's still reading websites via an HTML-to-email gateway; good for him! Interesting that he mentions Diaspora, but not GNU Social.
73.
by drinian 16y ago
While I agree that the US has a serious imprisonment problem (jailing people for the wrong reasons), I have to believe that getting doctors to work in the prison system requires some significant financial incentives -- and most of these peo
74.
by drinian 16y ago
The justification is generally that these football programs pay for themselves with ticket sales, merchandising, and segregated fundraising. I know that at my private alma mater (Duke), Coach K makes many times the salary of President Brodh
75.
by drinian 16y ago
Quite aside from that, these people are Federal Government contractors, meaning that they're using people's tax money to do this.
76.
by drinian 16y ago
Singapore has maintained an odd tradition, inherited from the British. They keep a regiment of Gurkhas around, professional soldiers from Nepal. They form an independent group within the Singapore Police, and are not allowed to form deep so
77.
by drinian 16y ago
Whatever version of Chromium is in the Ubuntu repository. Though I use Firefox 99% of the time.
78.
by drinian 16y ago
Does it make a difference if you're 1) entering on a 30-day landing permission (for TH) or 90-day landing permission (most other places) 2) performing work for a company based in another country The tourist visas require signing a document
79.
by drinian 16y ago
Yeah, when I was in Thailand last year 3G deployment hadn't really started as the government hadn't issued licenses yet. Glad to hear that's changed. Have they instituted bandwidth caps? That was the nice thing about the 2G connections; I c
80.
by drinian 16y ago
Yes, I've done this. I would add that it's also very easy to get at least unlimited 2G Internet access in Thailand or Malaysia, especially Thailand. Bali/Indonesia seem to suck for connectivity as there's a serious bandwidth shortage out of
81.
by drinian 16y ago
Hey, I just realized that I didn't read your comment throughly, and maybe you can help me see what I'm missing. Why shouldn't people criticize ghetto kids for buying expensive shoes? After all, that's exactly the criticism that I was making
82.
by drinian 16y ago
What makes you think that the same Chinese who base their self-worth on Coach handbags don't also aspire to DeBeers diamonds? I stand by my comment, but doubly so because China is far from an industrialized nation. The people buying these t
83.
by drinian 16y ago
Spending months of your salary on a designer handbag, or whatever it is they think the culture values, is not a way to signal anything other than "I'm an idiot."
84.
by drinian 16y ago
Is this where I complain that my Strida folding bicycle costs $200 to check, but a golf bag of the same size (and twice the weight) flies free? It seems like a textbook example of executives, more inclined to travel with golf bags, exemptin
85.
by drinian 16y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkdYrAQJu6g Age 95, and still full of energy (as is his wife, in her 80s).
86.
by drinian 16y ago
My last laptop was from Sager, which is rebranded Clevo. http://system76.com also sells them with Ubuntu pre-loaded. They're absolutely fantastic machines.
87.
by drinian 16y ago
It's a tax paid to Microsoft. It's a matter of principle.
88.
by drinian 16y ago
AFAIK it's not possible to project out into open space like that with real holograms.
89.
by drinian 16y ago
My Japanese mobile phone would occasionally silently fail to display an email message (forwarded to the phone's Softbank address, naturally, since I couldn't get data access without a contract plan) because of the character encoding. And th
90.
by drinian 16y ago
While it's a good, didactic article, it is very much worth noting that she doesn't have much to say about Beijing's design processes. Presumably they are much more opaque than the UK's. How are the two terminals doing now, comparatively?

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