jpatokal

65 ms·

601.
How SMS set back the mobile internet by ten years(gyrovague.com)
2 points by jpatokal 9y ago|0 comments
602.
by jpatokal 9y ago
The main cause of the cancellation was political: there were difficulties with the supplier (Siemens) and the price spiralled up to the point where it would never have paid off. http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/single
603.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Drilling tunnels into the Kiwi equivalent of the Alps to service communities that are mostly in the range of hundreds to thousands of people is neither simple nor financially feasible.
604.
by jpatokal 9y ago
It's complicated and I'm not an expert, but I understand the main risk with TBMs is running into a type of rock it can't handle and suddenly having a multi-million dollar paperweight wedged in a very awkward location. They&#
605.
by jpatokal 9y ago
RTS and flight sim games were the domain people who could afford PCs. The average American kid only had a game console.
606.
by jpatokal 9y ago
FWIW, the Cantonese themselves say they eat anything with four legs except tables, anything that flies except planes, and anything that swims except submarines.
607.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Got source? The vast majority of countries either a) insist you renounce all other citizenships on naturalization, whether it's one or three, or b) don't care how many you have.
608.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Citizenship doesn't go away just because you don't renew your passport.
609.
State Bank of India: Do not use hacking characters in your password(twitter.com)
22 points by jpatokal 9y ago|0 comments
610.
Ce*sored: China bans letter N (briefly) as Xi Jinping extends grip on power(theguardian.com)
3 points by jpatokal 9y ago|0 comments
611.
by jpatokal 9y ago
My little contribution to the genre's literature: https://gyrovague.com/2015/07/29/crashes-only-on-wednesdays/
612.
by jpatokal 9y ago
A) That's passive income, and B) I'd like to know where you're getting those steady 10% rates of return.
613.
by jpatokal 9y ago
My understanding is that most jobs involving moving around millions or billions of other people's money tend to be the opposite of low-stress.
614.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Pray tell, what kind of low stress job lets you earn $500k/year with 20 hours/week? (Actual job, please, not "4-hour workweek" style passive investment income.)
615.
Inside the Federal Bureau of Way Too Many Guns(gq.com)
4 points by jpatokal 9y ago|1 comments
616.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Not in literal terms: that job falls to nearby Guam and Okinawa, which host huge US military bases.
617.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Saipan used to be very popular with Japanese tourists, because it's only about a 4-hour flight from Tokyo. Then the Japanese economic bubble burst and that dried up. FWIW, I visited once in 1998, when Japanese tourism was trailing off
618.
Mofobike: A personal review of Sydney's bikeshare programs and why they’re doomed(gyrovague.com)
1 points by jpatokal 9y ago|0 comments
619.
by jpatokal 9y ago
The food sold in Japanese convinience stores is head and shoulders above those of most countries though: you can get bento boxes, salads, onigiri rice balls, basic sushi, etc. Not exactly gourmet fare, and there's junk if you want tha
620.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Remember, a lot of these cryptocoins started out as toys, experiments or get-rich-quick schemes that were never seriously designed to handle millions of dollars. MtGox is perhaps the classic example here: the biggest Bitcoin exchange of it
621.
by jpatokal 9y ago
> Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you. Never? And what if the other is lying, cheating and stealing? Motives, not actions. Odds are pretty high that the shared motivation for you and the l
622.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Actually, much of our medical data & tech proofing from really long term space exposure belongs to the Soviets/Russians and Mir, not the ISS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Te...
623.
Google Cloud Platform Arrives in Canada with Launch of Montréal Region(cloudplatform.googleblog.com)
43 points by jpatokal 9y ago|8 comments
624.
by jpatokal 9y ago
The animation & sources here is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate
625.
by jpatokal 9y ago
I find neo-Malthusian arguments like this need to be taken with a serious grain of salt. Much of the article would have applied word for word for China a decade or two ago, and that country continues to struggle with environmental problem
626.
by jpatokal 9y ago
The world's population growth is screeching to a halt almost universally, even without China-style coercion. This includes India, where the total fertility rate has fallen from >6 in the 1950s to around 2.4 today, and the steady de
627.
by jpatokal 9y ago
From the friendly article: Non-advertising revenue from Google combined with revenue from Verily and the other Alphabet companies was $15.5 billion in 2017, accounting for about 14 percent of total revenue, compared to $10.9 billion, or 12
628.
by jpatokal 9y ago
This argument seems like a non-sequitur. Helsinki already has a well-developed public transport system, particularly considering its size, and nobody's about to abandon it and switch to taxis, regulated or not. Jakarta and Mumbai hav
629.
by jpatokal 9y ago
C'mon. Getting a taxi permit in Finland requires taking a bunch of mandatory courses on highly Uber-relevant topics like "how to use your taxi meter" (185 EUR) and "local navigation without a GPS" (260 EUR), then p
630.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Google has had a large data centre in Taiwan for ages. I suspect it's going to be more of a case of HTC staff having culture shock when joining Google.

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