This makes me sick to my stomach. How can so much of the world still be back in the stone age? The part about the school fire made me so angry.

Physicists LOVE Queens of the Stone Age

>> ^Drachen_Jager:

>> The scale is relative to the economy, not the population. Considering I have seen estimates that there are 96 million of those 'investment' condos sitting empty in China right now I'd say the fallout will put them back to the stone age. That guy living with one faucet among ten households will consider himself lucky compared to his neighbours.

I'd really like to see how the analysts are getting their numbers. The analyst in the video going "It is said that there are 64 million empty apartments" doesn't sound very convincing. Also, I wonder just who is investing in these properties, and who's going to be hurt the worst when the bubble pops. In any case, that guy with one faucet is living in Beijing, and he's not going to be able to afford housing on his salary even if there were no bubble. That's like trying to buy a place in Manhattan on your minimum wage from McD's.

>> ^mentality:

I wonder what the forces are behind such a housing bubble, and the scale of it compared to China's population of 1.3 billion. Also, it seems crazy that local governments are supporting such projects, while the central government is consistently trying to slow its economy and prevent such bubbles from forming : http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/business/global/06yuan.html


The scale is relative to the economy, not the population. Considering I have seen estimates that there are 96 million of those 'investment' condos sitting empty in China right now I'd say the fallout will put them back to the stone age. That guy living with one faucet among ten households will consider himself lucky compared to his neighbours.

Lol this could have been done by some stone age kid

" jonny feed the bones to the dogs stop drawing pictures on them"

Yes its remarkable to find something with marks on it thats that old and yes its a drawing of a horse thats not to shabby on the grand scheme of things , but what the guy says is such an overindulgence and pure speculation.



thats the thing with art it pretty much speaks for itself the comontator should simply provide the context in which it was created in , not some bullshit subjective statments.

Well my question to this is, is the bandwidth actually as advertised at all hours of the day and do they guarantee it will be available at that rate at all times in the future under the terms of the agreement?

For instance, Time Warner in my area was consistently fast at all hours of the day when I first got it....much better than the DSL I had prior. And it slowly got a little slower...a few more outages a year...more "massive outages"... plus other problems unrelated to speed like them cutting off my net connection because they can't read a street address properly so they killed my net access when they installed my neighbors "business class"...that took me 2 days of calling to straighten out and total of 5 days to fix.

So the conclusion I can draw there is, his business class plus the other subscribers signing up in my loop drastically affected my bandwidth. Yet they claim higher bandwidth offerings with "Roadrunner Boost"...and I've got that...it's almost as fast as my connection was back when I first got it maybe a little better late at night.

So their claim of higher speeds is technically true, only because they've gotten slower. And the minimum speed they offer is pretty appalling although I don't remember it off the top of my head...I think it was like 125 or 250 kbps down.

Killing off non-digital television was supposed to give more bandwidth on the line for better internet speeds and better digital programming, except you have to pay for both...and the internet speeds aren't guaranteed until you step into business class. And for them to guarantee those speeds on a loop they would have to throttle residential users on the same loop.


I am not aware of DSL being improved upon. I know they offer the Fios and what not offerings through some of the phone companies, but they are not offering in this area. And you have to research them to see if they have hidden download caps or other nasty little things in the works to stick on their network to create artificial speed bumps to their own offerings.

Beyond that you'll have to direct to me to the information you speak of.

As for cell phones, I don't use data plans on them, but my parents have a property that has cell towers located on them...and I've been able to catch a couple of the guys and ask them some questions. Even without asking them...there's a screwed up little story related to these towers.

About 10 years back they got hot and heavy about putting in towers, for 3-5 years they were renting lots of land off people and installing these towers. My dad did some work for them paving the roadways, got to know one of the head guys in charge of the project. And while my information is not going to be perfect I know a few things affected their installation and their coverage.

Many of the cities and burbs wouldn't allow them to install towers that would be consider eyesores, in some cases they decorated the towers or put something on them to mask them being a tower...maybe the city name or some kind of design. Many of the "perfect" spots for towers people would not rent the land, so they had to pick imperfect places as close as they could get. So this led to problems with the coverage areas and causes some towers to bear more burden than they should, which Im taking a stab here and saying this really affects big cities network speeds. Within the last 3 years they upgraded the tower on my parents property by installing fiber landlines to the towers, presumably to speed up their network and alleviate some of the congestion.....however....the tower on the property has 2 "boxes" (equipment rooms with racks of network gear and the like) it feeds signals into...and I believe each ring or triangle of receivers transmitters is another cell phone companies signal range...so it services at least 3 networks. Meaning all 3 of those networks shares that one fiber line they installed to the tower unless they have multiple lines in the cable to be split, not very familiar with fiber cable.

Now the weird thing here is...Verizon did the majority of the tower installs I'm familiar with..as soon as they finished all of the towers were taken over by a company called "American Tower". They service the towers, you call them when you see a problem... I called them once about their air conditioner unit running all the time (it has 2 and one was running morning noon and night every time I got close enough to hear it). Two or three months later I thought I'd check to see if they fixed it, I could hear it running as I approached it...and when I got to where I could see it..it was frozen solid. This was in the Fall a year or two back, like 50 degrees or so outside with Winter coming. So they obviously don't pay very close attention to their equipment. AC failing in the summer means their shit cooks, and engineer said stuff in there is easily 100 grand worth of equipment.

So what I gather is, Verizon sold the towers, and rents from them....and now the other carriers rent from them. American Tower is in charge of maintaining the property and the building, but probably not the equipment since I see the various company engineers show up from time to time. They also provide power generators, there's a diesel powered unit that sits near these buildings and turns on from time to time.

I was also told the height of a tower limits it's usefulness. The tall towers can host more companies various signals versus the short towers. So For some reason they put in a bunch of short towers but they have limited utility and are just as ugly as the tall ones...so I dunno why in the hell they did that.


But for them to offer less congestion and higher speeds in high population areas they need more towers so they can break the area up in smaller coverage areas to limit the number of devices hitting any one tower. I have not see them put in a new tower since American Tower took over. I have seen them remove tower locations, probably due to cost of operation/replacement being high due to people hitting them with vehicles or breaking in.

In my opinion, cell phone pricing is a little better than it was but I am not happy with how Verizon handles their plans. For instance, if you want just a voice plan..no data no text. Your phone selection is terrible, I mean basic basic phones...most generally being flip phones with poor external screens and OK internal screens. If you want a better phone, you have to buy a text or data plan. Because if you buy specific types of phones, Verizon assumes you will be using that phone for what they specify that phone is. Take the EnV line of phones, I hate texting, but I like having the keyboard for typing in contacts and just general moderate to heavy usage it's easier to use than a flip phone keying in alternative. If I wanted that phone, I need a texting plan. If you get into smart phones you need a data plan...you can't activate one on your account without the plan. I don't know if the phones need the data plan to even function or not, but texting phones don't need texting plans to function...that's Verizon's plan offerings to maximize their earnings.

And texting in general is cheaper to the phone company than any voice call will ever be. Except texting is almost universally in ADDITION to voice packages....yet texting costs them very little in transfer costs compared to transmitting voice.

I hope some company out there is actually trying to implement new technologies and improve transfer speeds and push down prices. But if they are, they are taking their sweet time doing so...because if it was a big push...the other companies would have to react to that. Right now the only thing I see them all doing is trying to push through contract changes, shutting down government implement ISPs, and influencing laws that help keep us in the stone age.


>> ^deathcow:

> Everything except their networks seems to increase in size and capability, which is an odd thing.
All the ISP's I'm aware of have RADICALLY increased bandwidth and package offerings. It's called survival.

>> ^RedSky:

Brilliant. If science took your attitude of being unwilling (or as I suspect, incapable) of even making a hypothesis we would have never made it past the stone age.
Just admit the fact that there is simply nothing idiosynchratic enough about the US besides its gun ownership rate compared to other developed countries, will ya?
Everyone outside of the US gun industry and NRA distortion field, outside the self-destructive American gun-obsessed culture has known this for decades.


Ad hominem attacks against my capacity for intelligence. Check.

And apparently I live in a country of gun-toting dullards and every other country in the world is brilliant beyond comparison.

Anything else you'd like to add before I end this tired banter? I don't want you to leave feeling like you had more to say, because it would be a tragedy if you were robbed of that sense of indignant supremacy you'll undoubtedly have as you go back to your remarkable life as a 22 year old, navel-gazing intellectual telling "Americans" on the internet how they're doing it wrong and secretly wishing those around you interpret your arrogance and elitism as intelligence.

Brilliant. If science took your attitude of being unwilling (or as I suspect, incapable) of even making a hypothesis we would have never made it past the stone age.

Just admit the fact that there is simply nothing idiosynchratic enough about the US besides its gun ownership rate compared to other developed countries, will ya?

Everyone outside of the US gun industry and NRA distortion field, outside the self-destructive American gun-obsessed culture has known this for decades.>> ^blankfist:

>> ^RedSky:
That's because it is dodging.
And you have speculated already.
When I called you out for your claimed reasons obviously nowhere near explaining the disparity in numbers, you claimed that they weren't 'exclusively' to blame.
Now that I've asked you 'what else', and you've run out arguments and have decided instead that you don't want to speculate.
>> ^blankfist:
^I guess in your world it's dodging if I refuse to speculate. Touché.


You're trying to prove causation by correlation.
That's a logical fallacy.
If there's a "correlation" between number of deaths and number of guns, that doesn't demonstrate "causation". Answering "I don't know" does not mean I'm dodging. It means I don't know and refuse to speculate.
Sorry that doesn't satisfy you.

This has some good points but it's really really naive and has a very distorted view of reality. Without government run police and courts, you just have private revenge and private paramilitary forces, like kindling for the cycle of violence to escalate. Plus corporations would flee the country unanimously and we'd be back in the stone age.

>> ^xxovercastxx:

>> ^jwray:
Q3 has no strangelove mod nor "giant maps", and I'm not sure if it's even possible to make either of them in Q3. Back when I played Q3 there weren't a lot of mod servers and they didn't have very creative mods. Although quake 3 had resource downloading, the interface for it sucked and was slower. UT had better music and way more user-created maps.

Let me count the ways that UT was superior to Q3:
1. The server browser was a million times better.
2. More mods
3. Better mods
4. More maps
5. Better maps
6. Better music
7. Better graphics
8. The options menus were a million times better. They had a real GUI instead of stone-age duke nukem 3D style menus.

I'd argue some of your "points" but most of them are irrelevant to the discussion of what sort of impact these two games had on the genre.
Your arguments are something of a reflection of UT gameplay itself, actually. You're just throwing all your thoughts in a giant pile without properly developing any of them.
Q3 was a more focused, more polished, more skill-based game and that's why I preferred it to UT's everything-to-everyone approach. Neither of them brought much to the table in terms of shaping the genre which is why I feel neither of them should be in this video.
Tribes is the definitive FPS of the late 90s, even if it never approached the popularity of these two. Every team multiplayer game since then has followed the formula that Tribes created when it comes to game types. Unfortunately, nobody has replicated the jetpack, high-mobility, massive maps, and the most skill-based weapon set I can think of.


There is no such thing as a "non-skill-based" weapon set. And there are a few CSS/TF2 servers running massive maps with jetpack mods.

>> ^jwray:

Q3 has no strangelove mod nor "giant maps", and I'm not sure if it's even possible to make either of them in Q3. Back when I played Q3 there weren't a lot of mod servers and they didn't have very creative mods. Although quake 3 had resource downloading, the interface for it sucked and was slower. UT had better music and way more user-created maps.


Let me count the ways that UT was superior to Q3:

1. The server browser was a million times better.
2. More mods
3. Better mods
4. More maps
5. Better maps
6. Better music
7. Better graphics
8. The options menus were a million times better. They had a real GUI instead of stone-age duke nukem 3D style menus.


I'd argue some of your "points" but most of them are irrelevant to the discussion of what sort of impact these two games had on the genre.

Your arguments are something of a reflection of UT gameplay itself, actually. You're just throwing all your thoughts in a giant pile without properly developing any of them.

Q3 was a more focused, more polished, more skill-based game and that's why I preferred it to UT's everything-to-everyone approach. Neither of them brought much to the table in terms of shaping the genre which is why I feel neither of them should be in this video.

Tribes is the definitive FPS of the late 90s, even if it never approached the popularity of these two. Every team multiplayer game since then has followed the formula that Tribes created when it comes to game types. Unfortunately, nobody has replicated the jetpack, high-mobility, massive maps, and the most skill-based weapon set I can think of.

Let me count the ways that UT was superior to Q3:

1. The server browser was a million times better.
2. More mods
3. Better mods
4. More maps
5. Better maps
6. Better music
7. Better graphics
8. The options menus were a million times better. They had a real GUI instead of stone-age duke nukem 3D style menus.

Whether thrown in an oven or massacred by bombs and artillery what is the difference ?
And yes, I do believe as many Muslims have been slaughtered over their history as the Jews (if not more).

Also, ALL orthodox religions are CRAZY ! Christian, Jew or Muslim. Please stop cherry picking extreme events to paint Muslims as crazy, all religions are guilty of it. I can't be bothered to troll the internet for tragic instances of religious freaks killing each other, but it's all there. Just look at orthodox Jews in Israel if you want to see the oppression of women. I don't see the west stepping in to 'help' them.

Also, the west is mostly to blame for the lack of progress in the middle east. Every time an organized modern government appears, we bomb it back into the stone age or setup a dictator to take them out.
The west does not want progress in the middle east. Just look at Israel / Palestine.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

>> ^billpayer:
This talk is pathetic.
The Hudson institute is a bunch or war mongering fascists set up by Herman Kahn (sociopath) and RAND corp (ie. US Military Industrial Complex).
Scum like these have been building up Islamophobia for decades.
Muslims are in-arguably the new Jews and are the subjects of persecution all over the globe.

Interesting, and where are the getting tossed into ovens by the tens of thousands? Where do women still get stoned for showing their faces? While no doubt, the subject or some western bigotry, the comparison to them to Jews is just patently absurd. Even African Americans pre-60s had it harder then Muslims today. Are there separate Muslims bathrooms, no.
This talk is not pathetic. Was it pathetic the Catholic Church was, and still is, the subject of malice over the recent fiasco, no. Western bigotry over Muslim ideals is inevitable, because as they currently are incompatible. They don't have to be, but that is the current state of them. A man can beat his wife for not putting out. A women can be stoned for adultery, and adultery can be so loosely defined as being alone with another man that is not your husband.
This does cause undue stress on Muslims that do not practice these ideals, they are the true victims. But they still don't have it as bad as AA did in America, the Jews in German, or the women in Muslim countries do today.

Yeah I have I agree on the stone age village thing... As much as we joke around, this game series has always left a bad taste in my mouth (I've played the first two installments). While they are certainly fun and technically impressive, I find the writing tried to normalize the kind of mentality our military has in a way that is really really curious.

Sad that all modern warfare games seem to be about torching stone age villages. I miss the good feeling of destroying Nazis.