brainless

kawasu: yes, those are also somewhat near mass production ... and yes, they are amazing but diversity should do the trick (what about combining the air-powered engine with a water-powered engine instead of a regular gasoline-powered one? that might be a good idea for the next step once people have switched away from gasoline...)15 years might be a doable time to replace a large part of the cars used nowadays with non-/way less polluting cars but that's not fast enough, if you ask me. I'm not worrying about gas prices (the higher the better, that's what I think), I'm seriously worried about this planet's state. So many people produce so much waste in such a short time...

tetraca: oh, ok...dreus: too true, I would have written something alike if I had taken the time for it :)you're right with that quote of Marx, though I'd add Lenin's version of it to the thought: "Religion is the opiate for the masses"...--if there is someone among us who does not get the difference between what Marx said and what Lenin said later, I'll be happy to explain it. The difference in the words is small but the difference in the meaning is huge...--

If there is air in this room, the light would eventually be absorbed (i.e. the light's energy would be passed to the atoms/molecules which make up the air, thereby the temperature in this room would increase).Using a perfect vacuum and perfect mirrors, the light would be trapped between the mirrors. There would, however, be now way to measure exactly how much light there is in this room since this would require a certain amount of light to leave this room.This thinking reminds me of Schroedinger's cat: During the initial phase of research on radioactivity, a guy named Schroder put a cat and some radioactive material (enough to kill a living being) into a box and closed it.How do we know whether the cat is still alive after a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month? ok, the latter ones maybe guessed by the amount of food the cat had...

The reason for the Soviet Union's collapse was to a very high level of certainty _not_ atheism as the state's religion.I consider atheism itself to be yet another kind of religion - "classical" religions are based on one or more gods; prophets or similar entities. Atheism is the exact opposite: Atheists belive that there is/are no god(s). A world without "religion" would be rather agnostic ("we can't prove that there is a god, we can't prove that there is no god")...

I uppose it's not necessary to worry too much about the looks of the car during the development phase - once the core system works, it shouldn't be too hard to design another shell around it (look at conventional cars - they all work on very much the same kind of engine and there have been loads and loads of different shapes...)new world order: I give a huge bonus for the idea of using a jet engine to power a kart but the problems of conventional cars remain: 1) Where to get oil? 2) Pollution...

half of this doesn't apply to me (ok, make it a quarter...) but then ... some friends of mine and me did some Gender Test on the internet-thingy and I scored like 80% female whereas a female friend of mine scored 72% male

actually I've refused to join the armed forces, that's why I'm writing about my experiences with community service, one of the things why Germany has a rather good social system (well ... in the Human(e?) Development Index we're ranked 19th whereas we're the third-richest country in the world, right after the USofA and Japan -- correct me if I'm wrong).but ... even though we had a little misunderstanding, your opinion applies to people doing community service as well (a selection of common jobs for people who refuse to join the army: assistance on ambulances; nursing in hopsitals, retirement stuff; educating in "kindergarten"s; maintenance staff in social institutions; general jobs in social institutions etc etc...) - at any given day, there are about 200.000 young men working at a wage of 7 to 8 Euros per day, about 8 hours on 5 days a week. This should be worth more than what happened to me...anyways, submitting my story to a local newspaper near my service place or back home wouldn't be too good an idea, they run headlines like "Emancipation was a big mistake" on the first page :/-----[update]and another piece of Rage against the Machine...:Last friday, the person "supervising" me (basically this woman's main job is staring at the city's working time surveillance system all day long to find anyone working less than he's supposed to) called in to tell my boss that, according to her files, I've been illegaly absent from work for about 30 hours while I was actually somewhere around 10 hours more than I am supposed to work.The consequence: Due to the city fair, we were going to close the youth centre for the weekend. While everyone was enjoying themselves, I had to stay back in the centre to get parts of these 30 hours back. This made the difference between driving back home on Friday evening or Saturday night (after all, I could have saved me the trouble of going back. There were just about only people I didn't like in "my" disco ... why didn't anyone tell me they were not going to be there? I don't care going there on my own but even those people I don't know seemed somewhat unfriendly :/)On monday morning, I decided to increase the pressure on the chain of command to provide me "service glasses" (according to the Guideline on Community Service, I am appointed to receive free -cheap- glasses if I need them because if my private glasses get lost, damaged or destroyed during service, the replacement costs will only be covered up to the cost my "service glasses" would have been) and reported in that my glasses somehow got lost somewhen in the night from saturday to sunday --"I put them in a friend's bag on saturday night and on sunday morning, the food and drinks in this bag where gone, together with the bag and my glasses"--. Most of my job is driving around and since I am legally required to wear glasses when driving, there was just about no work for me to do and my boss went nuts and it took me a couple of hours throwing his own papers back at him until I convinced him that he had to give me a little piece of paper which I can trade in for glasses. well, at least I got it after about 4 hours ... I've been waiting two weeks for my request to be approved the usual way...

uargh, I just got home from another week of service the bad news: there are 7 1/2 months left.I've received a permanent flat on Wednesday and it's just what you expect when your boss tells you "it's the only one we could get": dirty beyond any reasonable effort of cleaning something; inside the train station (yep, I don't need to take off my headphones to know a train is passing by ... it can easily be felt 'cause the whole building is shaking); the bed is ... well, I'm glad I brought a sleeping bag along; the shower doesn't give warm water for more than half a minute at one time; the door looks like I shouldn't leave anything expensive in there......but there's also some positive things about this flat: I don't have to park my bike together with those many other bikes in front of the station since I can leave it in my room; when I get back to Melle late in the night I don't have to carry my stuff more than about 50 meters; it's only a two minutes-walk to work and three minutes on the bike to the next supermarket - and, after all, it's my first own flat :lol:anyways, my boss thinks I should learn to be a good worker (that's his form of saying "do what you're told and don't ask questions") before I demand that I get my rights like food or money to buy my own food; a clean bed; five days of paid vacation for educational purposes (yep, the law says I am entitled to this ... alright alright, I could live without this for another couple of weeks if only the rest gets fixed) or even try to gain freedom of speech - how the heck is this supposed to work out? I am supposed to do what the law requires me to (I'm already doing that and I feel like sh*t because of it) and they may put me into a heap of dirt and tell me I'm supposed to live in that?the working hours became worse last week ... I still have loads of time to spare but never long enough to start something useful because I have to get up again to fix something every other minute (and when I decide that it's not worth to start doing something I'll have to start over in a few minutes, I'm idle for half an hour or something...).I really hope to get out of that place somewhen soon though I have to watch out that I don't burn all my vacation on getting away within the first two months 'cause it'll have to last through all the rest of the year

this reminds me of a nice thought on people like you've described a friend of mine had ... "Why do the thinking for them? Let's just remove the safety notes from everything and let the problem take care of itself..."

serverph: something like this happens every other month, check out http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ ("RIAA vs The People") and https://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/MPAA_v_ThePeople/ ("MPAA vs The People") ... and unfortunately, many people couldn't care less

I'll just give a short summary on the origin of the reference "third world" as this name is often mistaken: Back in the Cold War, the world centered on two poles: US and Allies on the one side, the Soviet Union and Allies on the other. Some nations, however, decided they did not want to belong to one of these extremes - they went a third way and were called the "third world". Basically, "third world" referred to any country which did not ally with one of the two parties during Cold War, not necessarily to poor countries. Due to the circumstances, the "third world"-countries did not receive too much of (financial) aid by the two super powers and were not as much traded with as countries who allied with one of the super powers - and as time went by, these countries stuck out as quite poor, compared to the rest of the world... The current "ranking" describing how far a country's technology/economy has developed is Developed/Industrial Country (DC); Less Developed Country (LDC) and Least Developed Country (LLDC). Note: This "ranking" does not say anything about a country's culture which is hard to rank anyway. When it comes to quality of life, the Humane Development Index (HDI) is somewhat reliable as it measures, among several other factors, a country's standard level of education, women's rights, average life expectance of its people, average income etc etc. Some numbers to show how the index you look at incluences the result: Germany is the third-richest nation in the world (that's f*ckin' rich for you). If you do not belong to the rich among the German, you'd probably rather look at the HDI, where Germany is only ranked 19th. We learn: Living in a rich country does not equal a good life. I'll try to find some time to look up how the USofA, the world's richest country, rank in the HDI. It's definitely not ranked best since number one when it comes to average quality of life is Norway...

jmb2006: it should run fine if you lower the graphical details; if you mean that the game's a bit laggy: everyone has this problem, it's not too hard to get used to it

I suppose it's nothing too new google's checking out there, it kind of reminds me of the FCKeditor (which probably does not look into the stuff you write)...trace-uk: This problem can be solved using a JavaScript as one of my freemail providers does - set a cookie with the text you've typed every once in a while; delete it on hitting the save-button; check for it when the editing page is loaded; if it exists, ask whether the previous text shall be restored...

actually, some guy from around Spain had this idea 15 years before you and has his car almost ready for the market http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

If I hadn't worked towards being recognized as conscious objector, I'd be in the [german] army now. In the USofA, you've got at least the choice of joining the army or not, here in Germany you need somewhat good writing skills in order to explain a Federal Agency why you don't want to join the army... ...though people who do military service are on the somewhat safe side as the army is not allowed to use them outside german territory (except the Navy guys) - but nonetheless a couple of people forced to join the army die on the training grounds every year and even more get severly injured...

Providing you have enough money (Google has), space and bandwidth shouldn't be a problem. That space and bandwidth will be (as the user experiences it) unlimited is mere speculation which I can't base on any statements.The global space usage can be lowered by a) compressing files [especially text files/source code can be compressed by a huge percentage] and getting the file's MD5 sum or another kind of signature and check it against a list of already existing files, this would be especially useful with music and/or movie files since those tend to be plain copies of few files which have been posted to sites some among us know or don't know. Several thousand people downloading one set of files is not too rare a thing, now do the maths: What is smaller, 15,000 copies of a 700MB-file or a compressed 700MB-file and a list containing 15,000 user IDs which are allowed to access this file?Remember: The RIAA's/MPAA's interest (hunting down file sharers to increase profit) is not necessarily Google's interest (providing online storage to increase profit). I do not trust the slogan "Google won't be evil", all it would take is a new CEO.As Opaque and Saint Michael pointed out, this service won't be free. It might be free as in "no money charged" but as you can see with GMail, you pay in terms of privacy. Google processes your eMails in order to show you ads which might be especially interesting for you as the content of your eMails suggests. It shouldn't be too hard to guess what kind of information you're mailing around if you're that kind of person who clicks banners (that does not mean you're safe if you don't click them since anyone providing you a mail server can easily read your mail, anyone with a server placed at a good point in the internet can pick up any mail passing through it). It would probably be easy to guess even more details about you if parts of your personal files or even all of them are stored on Google's servers.A note which might not fit into this topic: One way to minimize the damage done to your privacy by using Google's services might be encrypting your eMails/files before you upload it. It might be easy to pass a file through some files as long as it can be easily read but could you gain anything if you had to spend years of CPU time to crack the file's encryption? I'm working on a tutorial on how to encrypt your eMails/Files/IM-Communication and found that strong crypto software is outlawed in quite a lot of countries...

Artem ZHI: This is very, very dangerous thinking. Both the USA and Russia sponsor "terrorists" by their actions but if you look at their point of view, they call themselves "freedom fighters", some overdo it but many are absolutely right to call themselves like that. USA: Afghanistan and Iraq are only late examples of how US/western policy creates resistance against itself. At least in Iraq, US and UK troops severely violate the Geneva Convenion by either sending troops in plain clothes instead of uniforms (was it in Basra where two british soldiers in plain clothes killed an iraqi cop and injured another before they were arrested, had some more guns and explosives with remote triggers in their car - and where freed by the UK army which destroyed some prison walls, thereby freeing not only these two soldiers but also several hundred other prisoners) or severely violating the Geneva Convention, which makes the occupying forces responsible for safety of the people, responsible for health care, responsible for food and water supplies etc etc (they produce an illusion of safety by opening fire at everything that might or might not move when a roadside bomb blows up, children mortality rate has gone up by 30% in Basra [1] since President Hussein has been overthrown --remember: medical supplies were already rare under President Hussein due to the sanctions against Iraq which made it hard to get medical supplies; the situation is now worse than it was with a "brutal dictatorship" in charge; Red Cross, Red Halfmoon and several other organisations complain about their medical/food/water supply convois being forbidden to enter large areas of Iraq; . . . -- The situation in Iraq is even worse than the situation in Cuba, where Castro managed to keep the country running somewhat smoothly through 40 years of US sanctions against Cuba and anyone trading with them. Russia: Just look at Chechnya [spelling?]. Russian forces are severely violating human rights there and the rest of the world closes its eyes. Sure, the Chechenians are terrorists, each and every one of them... *sick* [1] http://www.irinnews.org/ morosophos: Due to things like the Patriot Act in the USofA, I'm beginning to work against similar developments in Germany. This begins with simple things like encrypting eMails and ICQ and with rather drastic actions like disabling surveillance cameras when possible. I'm working on a tutorial for the encryption-thingy and one hint for the latter one: Some spray paint on a lens does wonders

-- information on german legal stuff for those living outside Germany --A couple of years after Germany got an army ('cause the US and UK thought Europe would be easier to defend against the bad bad Communists with Germany having own armed forces; that's somewhat ridiculous since according to most scenarios back then, Germany was more likely to become a nuclear battlefield than a conventional one; France opposed a german army - after all, France had been invaded thrice in 70 years by Germany), the Draft (every male German has to serve) was amended to the "Grundgesetz" (basically like a constitution but it's not supposed to be one).40 years ago, it was very hard to be recognized as conscious objector, the few people who tried to avoid armed service had to appear in person in front of a tribunal; nowadays the german social system is based on about 200,000 men (out of a total population of 82 million and about 800,000 people graduating from schools each year) refusing to join the army and some thousand women applying to do voluntary service.-- end of legal overview --I got recognized as conscious objector in late 2004 (reasons, among others I did not tell them because they would be kept in my file until I'm 60 and thereby considered too old to serve in case Germany is being attacked: I don't want to kill, I don't want to support people killing other people, I don't think Germany needs an army at all, if I'm not recognized as conscious objector, I will be forced to get trained in violence anyway so it's okay to destroy german military material before we join yet another illegal war --Germany has been involved in Kosovo, Afghanistan (special forces used there, the german government knows only that they're there, noone except the military knows what they do there), Iraq) and I received a letter that I'll have to begin my service on April 3rd 2006 at Christmas 2005, that really spoiled it for me since one of the things I did not tell the agency was that I oppose the Draft as a whole.My working week is somewhat bad since I've got to work on Monday and Wednesday-Saturday, therefore I don't get two days off in a row (I'd prefer the weekend ) like most people do which makes it hard for me to drive home on my free days since I'd be sitting in the train 5 hours on these days and spend another hour on the way home from the station/vice versa, that's 6 hours off I can't enjoy since the trains are usually crowded and ... well, I can imagine nicer things than sitting in a car.The first week, I got a room in a youth hostel since the place where I'm serving was not able to get me a place to stay anywhere else (don't worry, I was not the one who had to pay for that), I received keys for my room and the front door. I had to take special holidays from Thursday to Sunday that week since I've been sent to the state's Rescue Swimming Championships as kind of referee (I've only got the basic training, level Ia out of IV so I didn't get to decide anything but was doing stuff like watching the swimmers and carry water for those who did that while I was off duty);on Sunday (April 9th) I took the trains to get back to my Community Service place without stopping at home and walked about 2km from the station to the youth hostel (some guy picked me up for the third km, thanks dude ) with something like 50-60kg (about 100-120lbs) in bags on my shoulders to find my room occupied by a bunch of children.When I called him, the hostel's director told me that there was no free room anymore and that he told my service place that I could only stick around there for the first week of service. First I tried to get some sleep in the reception but the Director came over, took the keys and kicked me out, leaving me on the street in the middle of the night (I arrived at the station at about 10 pm).After that, against all my instincts and bad experiences with the police, I called the cops to pick me up since I only knew three basic places and how to get from one to the other then: the station (it's officially illegal to "sit or lay on the floor" there), the youth hostel (I got kicked out of that) and my service place (I didn't have keys for these rooms then, I received them on Monday, April 10th). They refused to do so and since I only found where they're based yesterday, I was unable to show up with my baggage there - what should they have done? put me into a cell? that would have been a heated room with a place to sleep, exactly what I was looking for......at this time, it was already 11:30 pm and the last train I could have gotten into to get home had left, so I decided it was time for drastic action, the one point where the bunch of tools you carry just about everywhere comes in handy: I went to my Service Place, got a screwdriver out of my pocket and forced a window open at something like half past midnight (funny: I learned how to do that when some cops where standing in the middle of my home city with a mobile window to show people how easy it is to open normal windows using only a screwdriver...), stupid me chose a window which led into the main hall which is not heated and definitely not warm in the middle of the night ... well, at least there's no wind in there and no people who could stumble upon you while you're asleep). After some searching, I finally found a couch beneath a pile of junk (filthy but softer than the floor...) and finally I had a place to sleep.Due to unlucky circumstances during the Rescue Swimming Championship (parts of Germany flooded, half the staff had to leave on Saturday morning to fill sandbags and do stuff like that), I've slept 3 hours in the night from Thursday to Friday (we slept with 15 people in one room ... some of those snored very, very loud...), another 3 hours from Friday to Saturday (for some reason I didn't get into my sleeping bag earlier and well, when the news arrived that half of the staff was going to leave in the morning, we felt the urge to discuss how to go on; even though there was a strict hierarchy in that place without any of the helpers having more contact to the administration more than twice in four days), no sleep from Saturday to Sunday (big party for all the 2,000 people participating in the Championship, I did not want to miss that and it would have been foolish to go for sleep at half past 4am since I would have had to get up at half past 5am anyway), one hour of sleep next to the swimming pool (when I nearly fell asleep while stopping a swimmer's time, I was entitled to an extra break that hour of sleep really helped me I did not dare to go back to taking time for another two hours but some excercising AKA carrying water an snacks woke me up and hey, I expected to be able to sleep the through the entire night from Sunday to Monday...). Sorry, I kinda lost track of my sentences in this paragraph :DEven though I had only 7 hours of sleep during the last four days, I awoke at around half past 5 on Monday, making it a total of 12 hours of sleep for five days (Thursday morning - Monday evening), I usually get that within one and a half night.At some minutes past 9am, when work begins at my Service Place, I heard my boss come in through the front door but for some reason, he decided that he had to get into his office first instead of unlocking all the inner doors like the first to come in is supposed to; I hammered my fists against the door but he didn't hear that.Within the next five minutes, the other people come in as well but they decided not to hear me as well.At half past nine, my mobile phone rang - it was my boss wondering where I am since I am supposed to appear at 9 as well. I simply told him to begin unlocking the inner doors and I would tell him where I am then, and closed the connection.A minute or something later, I heard him rant in the main hall about my behavior and using lots of bad words but after he opened the door to the hall I was in, I could tell by the look of his face that he really did not expect me to be in there. When I told him my story, he just grabbed his jacket, promised to find me a room at once and jumped into his car ... now the city's paying me a huge 2 rooms/kitchen/bath/garden-flat ranged in the 30 bucks per day-class since it's the only thing they could get their hands on within half a day but I'll have to move again once the city finds a cheaper flat for me. On Monday evening I was left with a huge flat but an empty fridge (I went out and got something from a restaurant ... that really hurt, people serving to comply with the Draft receive only 7,41 Euros per day, I left nearly a day's wage at that restaurant), on Tuesday (April 11th, the day I wrote this) I went shopping to fill the fridge and spent two day's wages on 6 eggs, some ham, some cheese, pepper (I will not go without any spices, no way) a bottle of water and 100g chocolate.I'll probably make some calls to the Federal Agency for Community Service to inquire whether I can do anything to make the City where my service place is in bleed for this action (after all, I am legally required to live in the flat provided to me by the Service Place and am supposed to have meals at my Service Place; my Service Place is run by the City so the City's responsible for getting me a place to sleep and food. From Sunday evening until Wednesday morning, I lived on my own budget which is rather short anyway) just like they're going to let me bleed if I don't meet the legal requirements. I've been at the city administration on Monday to hand in some paper stuff (like ... bank account details so I get my money; social security number etc) and that person working next door, responsible for checking whether everyone employed by the city works enough came running in a minute later to yell at me that I haven't been at work Thursday, Friday and Saturday (I had to take holiday for the Championship, remember?), aparrently the news that I've been on vacation these days took way longer than one week to get from my service place up the chain of command...anyways, I hope I get to a place with an internet connection somewhen soon so I can post this, there's a WiFi network in range when I'm in this 30 bucks-flat but it is secured and I don't know who's running that one... I'll be home for the Easter Feastso I'll be able to post this then at latest ... and I fear I'm running short on hosting credits now, I've been at something like 10 on Wednesday evening and it's Wednesday morning a week later in a couple of hours...

hehe, nice idea ... and if you don't have anything else in the room which would need the heat, this should actually be visible on the bill if you can keep this thing up an entire month in winter since I guess it's kinda warm in summer anyway...this probably wouldn't work for my place since my cat likes to occupy the central spot in my room and she likes it warm but something like that pointed at her ... I guess not jlhaslip: when those things are running anyway, it doesn't matter whether their operating costs have to be paid or not, using those things' waste heat actually lowers the operating cost (since you don't only get entertainment anymore but also don't need to heat that room ... at least as long as there's only one or two persons who use the waste heat...)anyways, these industrial-sized off-grid electricity production probably fits into wild20's "Power Off-Grid"-Thread, I'm afraid I can't provide a link right now...

I've had similar experiences in school ... back then, I've been that guy who was always there and didn't receive the good grades anyway, I think I got the hang of it now - just bend the rules so they fit your way. You've got something better to do than appear at an appointment? Just do whatever you want to, but be careful: If you're the one who wants to get something done by someone else, you should rather be friendly......anyways, I usually did not have my homework during the last three years I've been in school and graduated better than some of my friends o_O

and those people probably got into their cars right after the game and did not complain about traffic noise and smell... if banning smoking ledas to this kind of behavior, I'd probably join a campaign to legalize smoking ... hey, with a well-planned ventilation system, it might even be ok to let people smoke indoors...

Something alike has already been passed in Ireland (Republic of; not the northern part) where smoking is banned in buildings supposed to be entered by the public (city halls, museums, pubs [!]); it's allowed on the streets (and every couple of meters/next to the entrance of a building, an ash tray is mounted on a wall). This seems to work fine, I've been in an overcrowded pub (according to a sign on the door, it was licenced for up to 1,254 people --don't ask me how they get those odd numbers--) and it was pretty easy to breathe, it was even fresh air. It's hard to get 1,000 people in one house without anyone smoking in Germany...anyways, as a non-smoker I'd be fine with banning tobacco just like cannabis is banned (look up some info on the tobacco industry and you'll get an understanding why I wouldn't oppose banning tobacco, even though I share gaea's opinion on outlawing something).Here in Germany, it's only obligatory for employers to provide smoke-free rooms if the non-smokers among the workforce demand so, most restaurants are divided into smoking and non-smoking sections...

earths daughter: yes, those scientists who developed the nuclear bombs did not really know what they were doing. that's why sensors have been dropped together with "the Bomb" ... and they did not have the time to find out what they did because, after all I know, the A-Bomb is the weapon which took less time than any other weapon to make it from the testing range to a battlefield. First test: Middle of July - First use: early August. anyways, I read an article about why President Truman decided to drop "the Bomb" over Japan even though he and his advisors knew that Japan was de facto not a threat to the US army anymore which is actually a theory that sounds convincing ... however, I do not know about the author's sources and I'm not too sure about this news sites' credibility so I'd appreciate any comment pointing out sources which support or falsify this theory. You can find the article I base this post on here (only available in german): http://www.saar-echo.de/de/art.php?a=24729 1) During a conference in Potsdam-Babelsberg right after the bomb test runs (Truman was already in Germany when the first nuclear bomb ever was triggered around 5:30 am local time in New Mexico, at about 19:30 (that's 7:30 pm) german time, but don't ask me any questions about time shift between Germany and New Mexico), Truman tried to impress Stalin with his news about a "super bomb". Stalin was kind of bored about this since his spies in Los Alamos passed news about the development on to him (though Stalin probably did not know the actual effect(s) of "the Bomb"); Truman probably did not know that Stalin knew. 2) US "Target Intelligence COMmittees" (TICOM) searched for and captured german code breakers, beginning in late 1944 because US military officials thought the Germans might have cracked the soviet encryption. The following two points are, according to the article I mentioned above, classified as top secret even 60 years after WWII. That's also the point with which the article's credibility stands or falls (how did the author obtain this information if it's top secret? 3) Thanks to the german code breakers, President Truman learned about Soviet plans to invade Japan in August 1945, the US invasion of Japan was scheduled for November - leaving Japan occupied by the Soviet Union since neither the US nor the USSR intended to start a hot war between the two super-powers. 4) During WWII, Japan raided large parts of south/east Asia for gold worth "'several hundred billion dollars'" (at the exchange rate the dollar had 60 years ago, not the modern one) while Germany provided only about 20 billion dollars in industrial products, 10 billion of those were to go to the Soviet banks, according to a treaty negotiated by the Allies. -- this is important because, according to the treaty of Bretton-Woods, the US Federal Bank was obliged to be able to exchange dollars for gold at a rate of $35 per ounce of gold. With more gold in the US Federal Bank, the US could give out more dollars, with more dollars out in the world, the US Federal Bank... you know what I mean -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system 5) I'll quote the article here: ...and I just found a hint to a source pointing out the soviet plans to invade Japan: Boris Slavinsky - "The Soviet Occupation of the Kurile Islands and the Plans for the Capture of Northern Hokkaido" in "Japan Forum" (Vol. 5, No. 1, BAJS 1993)

that's why I'm usually riding my bike when I've got to get into the city ... well, during rush hours that's just as bad - there are two places on my way to/out of town where I'm running a high risk of getting killed. Both these places have stop signs (you know, these things were cars are supposed to slow down to a complete halt, let everyone on the other road pass by and go on after that) and at both places, people rush onto the bike way and stop there ... my bike has several dents caused by cars which suddenly appeared right in front of me, I'm lucky that I didn't get more than the pain you feel when you run into a wall yet;on the other hand, I left dents in some cars, even some expensive ones... usually I just go on 'cause I don't care about the damage the other people get by ignoring traffic signs as long as I'm fine - I know that it's illegal to remove oneself from a "crash site" without permission of the cops but after all, I'm the one who could complain ... wait, I could do that next time, drive into that car as usual but get myself knocked from the bike and try to get the other guy to pay for the parts that have been damaged due to similar accidents...anyways, I'm still kind of curious why the City Council decided to put only stop signs there when they could have done at least traffic lights, people tend to obey red lights more often than stop signs...

I'm happy with my single ISDN line at home (roughly 8kb/s up and down max, around 6 to 7 average),6MB/s DSL at my girlfriend's place,a super fast connection at university (well ... I don't know exactly what they've got but the campus-wide limit is 12TB (that is Terabyte) traffic per month and it took me half an hour to download a 4.7GB DVD Image on one of the university's computers (the VLAN is limited to 500kb/s downstream and automatic disconnection after an hour, both wired and wireless)......well, if I had a faster internet access at home I'd need new hard drives even more often than I need them now and I couldn't afford that...