Then, again, it stops being a Massively Multiplayer Online game. One rich with many quests, group dynamics, PvP, raids, and an economy. Those are all things that pretty much define a good MMO.
MMO = Massively Multiplayer
on
Open Sourcing MMOs
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· Score: 5, Interesting
MMO means it is a Massively Multiplayer Online game. Open sourcing would be decentralizing the servers. But that also means that each time you run a new instance, you split the player base. World of Warcraft already does this with Realms, but this is a hardware limitation issue. You can't squeeze 10 million players on one box, the CPU would simply die. But if 100 people want to "keep a game alive" by running their own servers, you now effictively split the populace 100 ways. Stops being Massively Multiplayer really quickly.
Games such as Quake, Counter-Strike, etc, work just fine because they are meant to be split into 8 or 16 or 32 player chunks. MMO's are meant to be played by literally thousands of players. How do you group for an instance if only 100 people even have accounts? You certainly can't raid. How do you do large scale PvP battles? You can't. How do you have an economy when only 1 person is selling something and the other 5 people don't want it?
My second point is this..
BANDWIDTH!
WoW takes about 2-4KBps per person of bandwidth. Multiply that by lets say a minimum of 100 people we're talking 200-400KBps dedicated and this doesn't allow for growth. Pretty sure my upstream on my home connection is capped at 64KBps. I don't want to think about paying for a business class line to let people play a dying game for free.
There is a reason MMO's will stay corporate, it takes a lot of money to keep them running. Yes, you can have offshoots, just like people run private WoW servers, but those aren't MMO, they are toys, novelties, something the masses will never join.
For most "grandmothers" and other non-technically inclined users, why upgrade? Heck, I'd wager most don't even know there is an update, or that you should be updating. Only those that know the technology and the potential risks will care to keep things up to date. And even then, I rarely update, but then again, I routinely format my windows boxes due to all the other issues that come up.
This will get abused/misused just like the "Vista Capable" mark. Find a way to technically be compliant but in reality be quite sub-par to what the consumer expectations are.
This is exactly the type of service I'd pay for. Tiered on kbps. I'd happily pay for a 400kbps (unlimited) service.
Example:
100kbps/12kbps for $10/mo
200kbps/24kbps for $20/mo
400kbps/48kbps for $30/mo
800kbps/96kbps for $40/mo
1000kbps/128kbps for $50/mo
These would be totally reasonable to me. This would limit you on speed not total bandwidth usage (although they go hand in hand). This would compute to the granny user a lot easier too. Slow -vs- medium -vs- fast speeds.
And just to keep up the revenue, make the $40/mo plan the default. If you don't ask for cheaper, you get that standard.
Not to sound rude, but it's a movie, not a class that is being taught in public schools. Michael Moore also has "hate-filled rhetoric" and "blatant misinformation". The saving grace for the world is that most people know that these movies are for entertainment. Maybe they have a small demographic, but they aren't being touted as documentaries on Discovery channel, etc.
Furthermore, I doubt that Ben Stein is trying to convince us of anything. I'm sure he's just trying to make money, partially because he knows that the movie will generate negative press and possibly get him more "fame" and potentially more movie sales.
Although, I understand this need to lump anyone with a strange and/or wrong opinion into this group of outcasts and/or misfits of whom only want to subvert our beliefs or views. But really, I think he's a has-been who is putting out a movie that will generate press (negative or positive) to get his name out there again.
I don't doubt that he believes this stuff, but he's not hurting anyone. This is going to be one of those things where, if you don't want your kids to watch this crap, then don't let them see it. If you don't want to watch this crap, then don't. But I don't see a conspiracy nor do I see anything remotely malicious.
Sometimes a movie, is just a movie.. even if it is terrible.
Seriously, I don't get what the fuss is about. First off, I'm agnostic bordering on atheist (confused but don't particularly believe, but still confused). That said, I would never buy this ID/Creationist bull that is being portrayed as some sort of pseudo-science.
But seriously, it's Ben Stein making a movie!?!? Why is this going to be "promoting poor science education that can and will severely handicap American students"?
Listen, there are VERY FEW MOVIES of which I would ever suggest to a kid to _learn_ from. As a boilerplate, if you see it on TV, it is probably fiction (except for most of what discovery et al have in their programming, you can generally learn from those).
But come on! It's a religiously themed movie that seems to take after those awful Moore movies. Buy a ticket or don't, but why blow this up (in typical American fashion) and out of proportion?
Get over it, it's a movie, move on, ride a bike or something and forget about it.
The other side to this is, out of these 12% of consumers who are "stealing" it, what portion KNOW they aren't connected to their own network?
The ironic part is, I bet a good deal of them DO pay for it but don't use it because their laptop/etc either automagically connected to their neighbors, or they didn't realize that they chose the wrong network when they set their computer up on the network.
I would love a metered service. However, I don't think that the cable companies would survive on that model.
Lets assume for a minute that you don't have a per month fee, but a "usage" fee. Use x meg, pay y dollars. The cable companies would lose out on a ton of money.
Example:
Say for now, everyone pays a flat $40 a month for "unlimited" service and you have 10 people that buy it.
8 "grandma users" which take 500 meg a month
1 "Web saavy user" which takes 10 gig a month
1 "Pirate" which takes 1 tb a month
That is 1,014,000 meg a month
That is $400 a month (10 people x $40)
Now if you go to metered and charge even $1 per Gig (which I would assume is high).
The cable company, with the same hypothetical users, would get:
8 "grandma users" which take 500 meg a month = $0.50 each ($3.00 total)
1 "Web saavy user" which takes 10 gig a month = $10.00
1 "Pirate" which takes 1 terabyte a month = $100
Total: $113
To get even near the amount they do now, they would have to charge nearly $4 per gig in my hypothetical. Hope you don't download Linux iso's or game online. The gigs and the dollars will pile up fast.
Maybe if they charged, say, $10/mo flat, which came with 10 gig each way then charged a nominal amount over that, it would be acceptable.
I don't know, but what I do know is, charging $30+/mo per person regardless of what they download probably nets them around $10/gig a month profit. I know my parents barely use their connection, as well as my grandparents. I probably use 5x what my whole extended family does put together, every month. They are just pure profit and I barely use my connection besides ssh tunneling back home to surf while I'm at work =) (100 meg each tx and rx a day)
Metered just wouldn't touch that profit margin....
And just like animals, this museum joins the ranks of other extinct beings. Sometimes a runt like this is born but without the proper tools, Natural selection eventually catches up with it!
While I think NO penalties for ignoring copyright infringement is a bad idea, I also think that suing 12yr olds is even more retarded. The benefits of this idea are that time/money/lives aren't lost and/or ruined by overly greedy corporations. However, I don't think the artists/creators will enjoy this much. But I think we can all agree, those that want to infringe will, regardless of the laws.
"But seriously, why would anyone want to live in Ohio anyway?"
You're right, everyone should move to either California, Massachusetts or Florida. I mean, population density doesn't mean squat right? Sure, I do believe that infrastructure capacity scales infinitely right? Water, sewer, power, etc? I'm pretty sure we would all be fine with land too. I highly doubt San Francisco is overly populated. Boston either for that matter. That's what you're saying right, might as well pack everyone into the big cities on the coasts? Freaking SUPER idea!
What's your beef with Ohio?
Maybe I went off the deep end here, but I can't stand people who push others aside for asinine reasons. Because that's exactly what was done with that last sentence. I was with you until then, but I got stuck in the ignorance.
I'm confused as to how the smaller states would get screwed over. Isn't the purpose of an election and a country's citizens voting simply "every person votes for the President and every vote has the same amount of weight?".
Now, I see the other side of the coin.
If we didn't have an electoral college, small states such as Deleware, Rhode Island etc, would have a tiny say overall. With this in mind, it would make the Politicians think twice about even visiting a state where "there aren't many people to convince". Honestly, I don't go to the rallys, I don't give a crap that Politician X is going to give some big speech to a bunch of people who are probably die hard (insert the Politicians party here) and would vote for them anyways. Besides, how much weight do we give what a Presidential hopeful says anyways?
So, really, what we've done is not try to give voters an equal weighted vote, we've tried to give STATES an equal weighted vote. So my question is, which is more important? States of varying populations getting the same amount of rallies, or giving the citizens the same say as the next guy?
I don't feel like my vote is worth all that much, especially in the Presidential Elections. The Electoral College appears to pretty much trump it. What does it matter if my vote makes it Candidate x @ 1,000,000 to Candidate y @ 1,000,001 (yay for me!). If the Electoral College swings towards Candidate x, it made pretty much no difference. I just don't see the point in asking for my vote in that case.
So, what about the times that it would matter. Well, again, with the very real possibility that we'll get another "popular vote loss/College vote win" situation, I just don't feel the urge to care enough. Thanks for your vote! It just doesn't matter!
First, I was under the impression that Google would make a physical iPhone competitor as well as its own OS/Software. This OS/Software would also be open to 3rd Parties to create apps/additional tools for it.
Second, I was hoping it would be open to any carrier. Obviously, some tools might only be usable on some networks as maybe not all carriers support a particular technology. Perhaps you would have to search for the carrier that best suited your wishes for your phone functionality.
Verizon... Unfortunately, I had the displeasure of working for a particular customer that had a lot of Fractional T1's that were supported by Verizon, at least at the LEC level. Now, I don't know what the rest of you know, but working with them on a Business to Business level was absolutely HORRIBLE.
Here is a particular scenario that would play out ALL the time (This is a little Off Topic, but I just want to color the picture as to why I hate Verizon).
One of my Frac T1's would go down. ATT would determine that there was a problem in the LEC network, maybe a bad Demarc, something in their C.O., etc. AT&T would load a ticket to them for Dispatch to troubleshoot. Verizon would reply with "Pending Tech Pickup" (basically meaning they were waiting for a tech to answer the page to accept the job). The ticket would get stuck in this state all day until end of business. At this point, Verizon would push the ticket back to AT&T as "This will have to go out 1st AM as it is now End-of-Business". The next day the process would repeat. Sometimes for 2 to 3 days in a row.
Now I remind you this was how they treated BUSINESS service.
I've also heard that customer service, end users, non-business users, actually LIKE them and find them friendly and helpful. But I don't know why this is? Seperate business units with seperate management? They just hate other businesses? I'm not sure. But I simply can't STAND Verizon after banging my head against the wall trying to get them to fix a damn fractional T1 for a business.
Halo kicks ass, don't get me wrong. I just absolutely HATE seeing a movie of something great, absolutely tank. It's almost embarrasing.
Mario Brothers Movie
Resident Evil (ok, some people actually like it)
etc.
etc.
As good as Halo is, I think it would be a terrible movie. It would be some odd rehashed Predator type movie, in my imagination at least. Some things just aren't meant for the big screen. Create another sequal and you'll make a ton more money than a movie would!
For those of you saying that a Tier based service system is "bad" because it will raise rates, look at it this way. Currently, you are NOT getting unlimited service, you are getting a soft capped service that is labeled as unlimited. The big issue is that you probably don't even know what that cap even is.
Now a Tier based service may "cost more for unlimited" but it might actually BE unlimited.
Simple Question: Would you pay $20 more a month for truely unlimited service of which you could even run servers off of, if you so choose?
I can totally agree with you. Mini Heli's could be reasonably stable if they were controlled via "AI" instead of a person. I only see this as a benefit if you wanted to move one from one point to another, however. As a "spy" device, you would have to put transmitting and/or recording equipment onboard and keep it stable enough to get pictures/audio worth recording. I submit that video from one of these tiny things (outside) would be nearly worthless. The way these things get thrown around by even mild breezes/gusts would simply make getting video a crapshoot at best. Audio recording? Don't we already have ground based systems for that of which would work a lot better (flying devices would pick up a lot of noise from the mechanics) that don't emit sounds themselves?
The only real use I can see for these would be to "sniff" an area. Maybe to release a "cloud" of little dragonfly like devices to simply go out and sample a large, moving, convecting, volume of air. Personally, that's the only real use I can see for the little guys. A stable a/v platform they are NOT.
Tens of thousands of years of evolution have created the dragonfly. Have you ever actually watched them fly around? Especially in any wind? They get pushed all over the place and at high speed.
Attach a tiny video camera onto one and you'll get one nice blurr effect. I would imagine anyways.
I don't doubt you could design a tiny dragonfly drone that could fly from point A to point B successfully to, say, deliver a message or something similar, assuming minimal air movement as well. But to be able to "spy" with it with any kind of succes?
Easy to say "YA! mini bugs as spy robots!", then you actually try and fly a mini RC device and realize how stupidly difficult it is..
Please, anyone who thinks this is a reality, go to Walmart and pick one of those up (Target carries them too, as well as Toys'R'Us, etc)
Once you get this badboy home, power her up and fly her around! Make sure you do it inside. Oh ya, make sure the AC/Heat is off as well. Also make sure no fans are on. Please also ask everyone around to not walk near it. If any of these happen, it'll make it nearly impossible to fly.
Why am I bringing this up? Well simple. People want to believe in these dragonfly, big brother is watching, micro tech, James Bond style toys. However, they have no idea how difficult it is to actually FLY them.
Indoors, I can fly my (see link) around for quite a while and have a good time at it. It's especially fun to turn on a fan to start a slight breeze just to try and navigate the air currents. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible, but it is a challenge and I like challenges.
Now, if a slight breeze, from a steady fan makes it impossible to fly, what will it do outside in a 2 mph wind with GUSTS to 4mph? The thing, at 6", is stupid hard to control in a house, with a fan on. Now you want me to believe the govt has dragonfly sized "spy" bots flying around OUTSIDE? And that they have any reliability at all?
I'm serious when I say this.. No.. It's just not going to happen. UNLESS you can GUARANTEE zero wind. Nadda, zilch.. Then, ya, might happen. But unfortunately, outside weather is rarely perfectly still and again, the slightest breeze at all, will totally throw it around to the point it is impossible to fly.
I'm a model hobbiest. I happen to fly RC helicopters in the "small" size range. For those that want to believe these are real, more power to you, honestly. It would be really fun to buy consumer level versions of something similar to the purported goverment versions as I'm sure they would be fun as hell to fly.
But frankly.....
Helicopters, which are tried and tested technology, at the minature level (I fly one with an 18" rotor diamater) it becomes EXTREMELY unstable in any wind. Shrink that down to a 6" diamater and to be honest, you wouldn't be able to control it in anything but a room with no fans, etc, causing air currents.
Now we're talking about dragonfly size? AND outdoors?
It's, unfortunately, not a reality. At least in my opinion.
Honestly, what it is really going to come down to is trust. She can't police her kids internet usage 100% of the time. And the only way to lock down a computer to keep her kids "safe" 100% of the time is to simply disconnect it from the internet.
But, as others have already said, they can just go over to a friends house and gain access that way.
Lets face it, we are ALL curious at a young age. Obviously you don't want a 9 yr old viewing explicit material, but around puberty, kids are curious about themselves and others. I wouldn't advocate making material readily available, but a certain amount of "peeking" is healthy.
When I was a kid, it was my friend and I finding some of his older brothers "hidden stash" of magazines. Am I worse off for finding it? I highly doubt it. In fact, I dare say I had less questions after being exposed to it than before finding it.
In my opinion, she's going to have to just accept the fact that her kids are going to be exposed to naughty words, pictures, stories, jokes, etc. It is part of growing up. She should probably just talk to, and teach her kids a little bit first and then trust that they can satisfy their curiosities without it ever becoming a "problem".
Are you serious?
Are you talking about bullies, or someone not following the rules of tag/touch football and basically being a bully? So, you apparently ARE talking about bullies.
What, and please explain this, does tag/touch football have to do with bullies? I had issues with bullies like most other children and it had zero to do with playground games. If a bully wants to be a bully, they bully you.
Banning childrens games does nothing to curb your fears. Wake up.
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Then, again, it stops being a Massively Multiplayer Online game. One rich with many quests, group dynamics, PvP, raids, and an economy. Those are all things that pretty much define a good MMO.
Games such as Quake, Counter-Strike, etc, work just fine because they are meant to be split into 8 or 16 or 32 player chunks. MMO's are meant to be played by literally thousands of players. How do you group for an instance if only 100 people even have accounts? You certainly can't raid. How do you do large scale PvP battles? You can't. How do you have an economy when only 1 person is selling something and the other 5 people don't want it?
My second point is this..
BANDWIDTH!
WoW takes about 2-4KBps per person of bandwidth. Multiply that by lets say a minimum of 100 people we're talking 200-400KBps dedicated and this doesn't allow for growth. Pretty sure my upstream on my home connection is capped at 64KBps. I don't want to think about paying for a business class line to let people play a dying game for free.
There is a reason MMO's will stay corporate, it takes a lot of money to keep them running. Yes, you can have offshoots, just like people run private WoW servers, but those aren't MMO, they are toys, novelties, something the masses will never join.
For most "grandmothers" and other non-technically inclined users, why upgrade? Heck, I'd wager most don't even know there is an update, or that you should be updating. Only those that know the technology and the potential risks will care to keep things up to date. And even then, I rarely update, but then again, I routinely format my windows boxes due to all the other issues that come up.
This will get abused/misused just like the "Vista Capable" mark. Find a way to technically be compliant but in reality be quite sub-par to what the consumer expectations are.
Example:
100kbps/12kbps for $10/mo
200kbps/24kbps for $20/mo
400kbps/48kbps for $30/mo
800kbps/96kbps for $40/mo
1000kbps/128kbps for $50/mo
These would be totally reasonable to me. This would limit you on speed not total bandwidth usage (although they go hand in hand). This would compute to the granny user a lot easier too. Slow -vs- medium -vs- fast speeds.
And just to keep up the revenue, make the $40/mo plan the default. If you don't ask for cheaper, you get that standard.
It's a good idea in my book of course =)
Furthermore, I doubt that Ben Stein is trying to convince us of anything. I'm sure he's just trying to make money, partially because he knows that the movie will generate negative press and possibly get him more "fame" and potentially more movie sales.
Although, I understand this need to lump anyone with a strange and/or wrong opinion into this group of outcasts and/or misfits of whom only want to subvert our beliefs or views. But really, I think he's a has-been who is putting out a movie that will generate press (negative or positive) to get his name out there again.
I don't doubt that he believes this stuff, but he's not hurting anyone. This is going to be one of those things where, if you don't want your kids to watch this crap, then don't let them see it. If you don't want to watch this crap, then don't. But I don't see a conspiracy nor do I see anything remotely malicious.
Sometimes a movie, is just a movie.. even if it is terrible.
But seriously, it's Ben Stein making a movie!?!? Why is this going to be "promoting poor science education that can and will severely handicap American students"?
Listen, there are VERY FEW MOVIES of which I would ever suggest to a kid to _learn_ from. As a boilerplate, if you see it on TV, it is probably fiction (except for most of what discovery et al have in their programming, you can generally learn from those).
But come on! It's a religiously themed movie that seems to take after those awful Moore movies. Buy a ticket or don't, but why blow this up (in typical American fashion) and out of proportion?
Get over it, it's a movie, move on, ride a bike or something and forget about it.
The ironic part is, I bet a good deal of them DO pay for it but don't use it because their laptop/etc either automagically connected to their neighbors, or they didn't realize that they chose the wrong network when they set their computer up on the network.
Lets assume for a minute that you don't have a per month fee, but a "usage" fee. Use x meg, pay y dollars. The cable companies would lose out on a ton of money.
Example: Say for now, everyone pays a flat $40 a month for "unlimited" service and you have 10 people that buy it.
8 "grandma users" which take 500 meg a month
1 "Web saavy user" which takes 10 gig a month
1 "Pirate" which takes 1 tb a month
That is 1,014,000 meg a month
That is $400 a month (10 people x $40)
Now if you go to metered and charge even $1 per Gig (which I would assume is high).
The cable company, with the same hypothetical users, would get:
8 "grandma users" which take 500 meg a month = $0.50 each ($3.00 total)
1 "Web saavy user" which takes 10 gig a month = $10.00
1 "Pirate" which takes 1 terabyte a month = $100
Total: $113
To get even near the amount they do now, they would have to charge nearly $4 per gig in my hypothetical. Hope you don't download Linux iso's or game online. The gigs and the dollars will pile up fast.
Maybe if they charged, say, $10/mo flat, which came with 10 gig each way then charged a nominal amount over that, it would be acceptable.
I don't know, but what I do know is, charging $30+/mo per person regardless of what they download probably nets them around $10/gig a month profit. I know my parents barely use their connection, as well as my grandparents. I probably use 5x what my whole extended family does put together, every month. They are just pure profit and I barely use my connection besides ssh tunneling back home to surf while I'm at work =) (100 meg each tx and rx a day)
Metered just wouldn't touch that profit margin....
Lets just hope it didn't procreate first!
While I think NO penalties for ignoring copyright infringement is a bad idea, I also think that suing 12yr olds is even more retarded. The benefits of this idea are that time/money/lives aren't lost and/or ruined by overly greedy corporations. However, I don't think the artists/creators will enjoy this much. But I think we can all agree, those that want to infringe will, regardless of the laws.
"But seriously, why would anyone want to live in Ohio anyway?" You're right, everyone should move to either California, Massachusetts or Florida. I mean, population density doesn't mean squat right? Sure, I do believe that infrastructure capacity scales infinitely right? Water, sewer, power, etc? I'm pretty sure we would all be fine with land too. I highly doubt San Francisco is overly populated. Boston either for that matter. That's what you're saying right, might as well pack everyone into the big cities on the coasts? Freaking SUPER idea! What's your beef with Ohio? Maybe I went off the deep end here, but I can't stand people who push others aside for asinine reasons. Because that's exactly what was done with that last sentence. I was with you until then, but I got stuck in the ignorance.
Now, I see the other side of the coin.
If we didn't have an electoral college, small states such as Deleware, Rhode Island etc, would have a tiny say overall. With this in mind, it would make the Politicians think twice about even visiting a state where "there aren't many people to convince". Honestly, I don't go to the rallys, I don't give a crap that Politician X is going to give some big speech to a bunch of people who are probably die hard (insert the Politicians party here) and would vote for them anyways. Besides, how much weight do we give what a Presidential hopeful says anyways?
So, really, what we've done is not try to give voters an equal weighted vote, we've tried to give STATES an equal weighted vote. So my question is, which is more important? States of varying populations getting the same amount of rallies, or giving the citizens the same say as the next guy?
So, what about the times that it would matter. Well, again, with the very real possibility that we'll get another "popular vote loss/College vote win" situation, I just don't feel the urge to care enough. Thanks for your vote! It just doesn't matter!
First, I was under the impression that Google would make a physical iPhone competitor as well as its own OS/Software. This OS/Software would also be open to 3rd Parties to create apps/additional tools for it.
Second, I was hoping it would be open to any carrier. Obviously, some tools might only be usable on some networks as maybe not all carriers support a particular technology. Perhaps you would have to search for the carrier that best suited your wishes for your phone functionality.
Verizon... Unfortunately, I had the displeasure of working for a particular customer that had a lot of Fractional T1's that were supported by Verizon, at least at the LEC level. Now, I don't know what the rest of you know, but working with them on a Business to Business level was absolutely HORRIBLE.
Here is a particular scenario that would play out ALL the time (This is a little Off Topic, but I just want to color the picture as to why I hate Verizon).
One of my Frac T1's would go down. ATT would determine that there was a problem in the LEC network, maybe a bad Demarc, something in their C.O., etc. AT&T would load a ticket to them for Dispatch to troubleshoot. Verizon would reply with "Pending Tech Pickup" (basically meaning they were waiting for a tech to answer the page to accept the job). The ticket would get stuck in this state all day until end of business. At this point, Verizon would push the ticket back to AT&T as "This will have to go out 1st AM as it is now End-of-Business". The next day the process would repeat. Sometimes for 2 to 3 days in a row.
Now I remind you this was how they treated BUSINESS service.
I've also heard that customer service, end users, non-business users, actually LIKE them and find them friendly and helpful. But I don't know why this is? Seperate business units with seperate management? They just hate other businesses? I'm not sure. But I simply can't STAND Verizon after banging my head against the wall trying to get them to fix a damn fractional T1 for a business.
Halo kicks ass, don't get me wrong. I just absolutely HATE seeing a movie of something great, absolutely tank. It's almost embarrasing. Mario Brothers Movie Resident Evil (ok, some people actually like it) etc. etc. As good as Halo is, I think it would be a terrible movie. It would be some odd rehashed Predator type movie, in my imagination at least. Some things just aren't meant for the big screen. Create another sequal and you'll make a ton more money than a movie would!
For those of you saying that a Tier based service system is "bad" because it will raise rates, look at it this way. Currently, you are NOT getting unlimited service, you are getting a soft capped service that is labeled as unlimited. The big issue is that you probably don't even know what that cap even is.
Now a Tier based service may "cost more for unlimited" but it might actually BE unlimited.
Simple Question: Would you pay $20 more a month for truely unlimited service of which you could even run servers off of, if you so choose?
I would.
The only real use I can see for these would be to "sniff" an area. Maybe to release a "cloud" of little dragonfly like devices to simply go out and sample a large, moving, convecting, volume of air. Personally, that's the only real use I can see for the little guys. A stable a/v platform they are NOT.
Attach a tiny video camera onto one and you'll get one nice blurr effect. I would imagine anyways.
I don't doubt you could design a tiny dragonfly drone that could fly from point A to point B successfully to, say, deliver a message or something similar, assuming minimal air movement as well. But to be able to "spy" with it with any kind of succes?
Easy to say "YA! mini bugs as spy robots!", then you actually try and fly a mini RC device and realize how stupidly difficult it is..
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=5978953
Please, anyone who thinks this is a reality, go to Walmart and pick one of those up (Target carries them too, as well as Toys'R'Us, etc)
Once you get this badboy home, power her up and fly her around! Make sure you do it inside. Oh ya, make sure the AC/Heat is off as well. Also make sure no fans are on. Please also ask everyone around to not walk near it. If any of these happen, it'll make it nearly impossible to fly.
Why am I bringing this up? Well simple. People want to believe in these dragonfly, big brother is watching, micro tech, James Bond style toys. However, they have no idea how difficult it is to actually FLY them.
Indoors, I can fly my (see link) around for quite a while and have a good time at it. It's especially fun to turn on a fan to start a slight breeze just to try and navigate the air currents. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible, but it is a challenge and I like challenges.
Now, if a slight breeze, from a steady fan makes it impossible to fly, what will it do outside in a 2 mph wind with GUSTS to 4mph? The thing, at 6", is stupid hard to control in a house, with a fan on. Now you want me to believe the govt has dragonfly sized "spy" bots flying around OUTSIDE? And that they have any reliability at all?
I'm serious when I say this.. No.. It's just not going to happen. UNLESS you can GUARANTEE zero wind. Nadda, zilch.. Then, ya, might happen. But unfortunately, outside weather is rarely perfectly still and again, the slightest breeze at all, will totally throw it around to the point it is impossible to fly.
I'm a model hobbiest. I happen to fly RC helicopters in the "small" size range. For those that want to believe these are real, more power to you, honestly. It would be really fun to buy consumer level versions of something similar to the purported goverment versions as I'm sure they would be fun as hell to fly. But frankly..... Helicopters, which are tried and tested technology, at the minature level (I fly one with an 18" rotor diamater) it becomes EXTREMELY unstable in any wind. Shrink that down to a 6" diamater and to be honest, you wouldn't be able to control it in anything but a room with no fans, etc, causing air currents. Now we're talking about dragonfly size? AND outdoors? It's, unfortunately, not a reality. At least in my opinion.
Honestly, what it is really going to come down to is trust. She can't police her kids internet usage 100% of the time. And the only way to lock down a computer to keep her kids "safe" 100% of the time is to simply disconnect it from the internet. But, as others have already said, they can just go over to a friends house and gain access that way. Lets face it, we are ALL curious at a young age. Obviously you don't want a 9 yr old viewing explicit material, but around puberty, kids are curious about themselves and others. I wouldn't advocate making material readily available, but a certain amount of "peeking" is healthy. When I was a kid, it was my friend and I finding some of his older brothers "hidden stash" of magazines. Am I worse off for finding it? I highly doubt it. In fact, I dare say I had less questions after being exposed to it than before finding it. In my opinion, she's going to have to just accept the fact that her kids are going to be exposed to naughty words, pictures, stories, jokes, etc. It is part of growing up. She should probably just talk to, and teach her kids a little bit first and then trust that they can satisfy their curiosities without it ever becoming a "problem".
Are you serious? Are you talking about bullies, or someone not following the rules of tag/touch football and basically being a bully? So, you apparently ARE talking about bullies. What, and please explain this, does tag/touch football have to do with bullies? I had issues with bullies like most other children and it had zero to do with playground games. If a bully wants to be a bully, they bully you. Banning childrens games does nothing to curb your fears. Wake up.