I just did a quick search on google on sapphire, and saw a couple sites that mentioned that sapphire is actually more brittle than glass (but also more scratch resistant). So while sapphire might avoid the scratching that can sometimes result in cracking, it'd be more like to suffer damage from drops or other impacts that sometimes result in cracking.
I actually like the way my 3GS feels in my hand with the added thickness of the case. I don't think I have abnormally large hands, but without the case the phone feels just a little too small for me to hold it comfortably with one hand. Also the case that I chose provides better grip than the default plastic, so that's nice too.
That being said, sand has gotten between the back of my phone and the case, and there are some very significant scratches on the phone. The 3GS back is plastic, so it's just a cosmetic issue for me, and not something that I'm concerned about.
Right on. Especially with a decent facebook client on my phone, it functions almost like a convergence of various online services that I've been using for years. Email, instant messaging, event planning, photo sharing, etc.
While it's certainly got its own annoying quirks, there are relatively simple (if not always straightforward) ways of dealing with most of them, and if you aren't afraid of potentially offending a few people, then you can keep your friend list limited to what you find useful.
Much of what my facebook friends post is irrelevant to me and gets skimmed right over, and I hardly ever post content myself. But with a little bit of care to how I've set it up, I don't find the signal-to-noise ration on facebook any worse than the most of the rest of the internet. And the fact that such a high percentage of people that I might want to get in touch with have an account, it can be incredibly useful at times.
Listen, if he didn't build this by placing one block at a time, over and over again for 42 weeks straight, eschewing any actual human contact the whole time, all the while subsisting on nothing but doritos and mt. dew, stopping only to urinate and post screeds against the RIAA; well then he is not a true geek and I reserve the right to not only be unimpressed, but also to be judgmental and/or dismissive of him.
That's a really good point. In minecraft you're never stuck spending time fiddling with offsets or whatever to get textures to line up just right, or really worrying which wood texture you want for this door. You've just got a few basic options, so you pick one and it looks as good as everything else and you just keep moving with your construction project.
Also while having such a basic toolkit can lead to the problem of everything looking sort of the same, it also forces more creativity in the spatial design of whatever you're building, You have to think a little harder to make your castle look different from that guy's castle, it's not as simple as just changing the stone color.
It's like having a giant box of plain legos, with just the basic rectangular blocks. Limited palette but the pieces are so abstract that you can make anything out of them and it'll work.
There's a tool that you can produce in the game called redstone dust that you can use to make what's basically wires, and it's the way it works makes it possible to create logic gates and such, which are the building blocks of computing. It's not a particularly efficient way of computing, but it can certainly be functional.
It wouldn't be an extinction level event or anything like that, but it would almost certainly ruin the day of anyone nearby where it did hit. And even if we could get advanced warning of where it would hit and evacuate all the people, if it heads towards a city, that's a lot of property/infrastructure/housing that will be obliterated. So not necessarily catastrophic, but probably not particularly great either.
Although if we figured out that it was going to hit somewhere basically unpopulated and un-utilized (middle of a desert or something), it could actually be kind of cool. We could probably get some excellent satellite video footage of it.
I dunno, the iPod came out in 2001, although windows support didn't really come about until 2003-2004. So if we go with 2004 for when the "Apple fad" started, that's already 6 years, which seems like an awfully long time in today's culture, especially when you consider that we're also talking about technology, which evolves at least as quickly as fashion.
Because Apple makes stuff that people have chose to buy and use, while the reality of the PC market meant that Windows was constantly crammed down everyone's throat whether they wanted it or not.
The bigger screen size makes a bigger difference than just having the text be larger. And don't be fooled by the fact that the main screen of both the iPhone and iPad function with the same interface, many apps that are available on both the iphone and ipad present the user with different interfaces depending on which device you use. It's not just a matter of scaling everything up to fit the bigger screen, that extra real estate allows for significant reworking of interfaces.
If you replaced my desktop computer's 23" monitor with a 12" screen from 20 years ago, I guess I could still do the drafting in AutoCAD that I'm hoping to get done today, but it would be much less efficient, and would require some serious rethinking of my workflow in order to actually get anything done with so much less space.
That's a question that has come up before in religious discussions about the origin of the universe, and it generally falls under the idea of the "uncaused cause". Ok, so our universe has been created in a lab somewhere. Then what created the universe that that lab exists in? Oh, that lab only exists as part of an elaborate computer simulation. Ok, well then what created the universe that that computer exists in?
The argument would be that no matter how many steps back you want to take it, there has to be that first universe that became the canvas for all this other stuff. So whatever made that first universe is the uncaused cause.
Also I think it's important that to many people, believing what scientists say is reality would be just as much a leap of faith as believing that the what their religion tells them is true. You can tell me that science has definitively proven that the universe is at least 13 billion years old because astronomers can see light from stars that are that far away, but all the talk of red shifting and gravitational lensing might not mean much of anything to me. Maybe I've got two kids and a job that I'm worried I might lose, I don't have time to learn the math and check your work, so you might as well be telling me that space is full of black jello. It's so far out of my frame of reference that your "proof" has no meaning to me. You say that hundreds of other scientists have confirmed your observations, but so what, there are thousands of people out there who say that God has spoken to them.
I very seldom feel the need to play 10 year old games, but whenever I have, finding cracked versions online is not difficult. I see no reason why this would change 10 years into the future.
While I think that it's unlikely that the US military would fight the populace if a large scale revolt were to occur, even if they did, I'm not sure how successful they'd be. Iraq and Afghanistan are excellent examples of the inability of bigger guns to control an unruly population. You just plain need a lot of soldiers in order to control territory, the USA is geographically and demographically much larger than Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military just doesn't have enough soldiers to effectively control the population. They could barricade DC, protect the politicians, and probably even control most of the big cities, but it's just way too big of a country to suppress a large scale uprising.
True enough, although there's something just kind of crappy about a big company with deep pockets basically stomping out a new guy, especially if they do it by using their big bank account to compete via marketing and/or pricing, instead of competing by making a better product.
It's not illegal, and nobody ever said the world was fair, but still, it's just kind of a shame sometimes.
The solution to this is to design the game so that it's possible for other players to cause mr. moneybags over there to lose his investment. EvE Online is a great example of this, because while there are sanctioned ways for you to turn real money into in-game money and then use that to buy a superpowerful ship, it is entirely possible for other players to go and blow up your fancy ship. Advantage over, all you're left with is an embarrassing killmail.
Not only does the game company get to make some extra money, but there is a huge potential for laughs when some kid borrows his parents' credit card, spends a hundred bucks on a big ship, and loses it twenty minutes later.
I would expect that scanning a ticket to check if it won would involve a check back to the lottery people's network/mainframe/whatever. I would think that if that's the case, any scanned ticket is marked purchased and used, and that being the case, the store is responsible for paying the lottery for it. And since the store's odds aren't any better than anybody else's odds, they should end up losing money.
You can't patent/copyright/etc gameplay mechanics. There were news stories a year or so back about legal action against a popular scrabble rip-off that was popular on facebook. The issue was basically resolved by the devs changing the visuals to not exactly match scrabble, and change their game's name to something that didn't resemble scrabble.
Basically, you can't steal their art or their name, but your game can play exactly the same way.
Yeah, unfortunately for Microsoft, they don't really have a choice. WinMobile is really looking like a dead end, so while they could just try and cling onto that market share it would likely end up continuing to fade away. Windows 7 has a tough road ahead for sure, and might even crash and burn, but if everything goes right it could keep them in the game long term. Kind of amazing to see Microsoft having to take such a big risk just to stay relevant.
Fair enough, but revolution does not automatically mean that all of our problems will magically be solved when it's all said and done.
Also, there's a pretty significant election season every two years in the USA. If the people really got fed up with the current politicians, we have plenty of opportunities to fire enough of them through the normal electoral process to bring the rest right into line.
Why don't some commercial software companies seize this opportunity and use this issue to differentiate their products from their competitors. It doesn't increase your development costs, and if you make a big deal of it and are smart about it, you'll get a bunch of good will and free advertising in the tech media. And at the end of the day, if you can convince consumers to care, then your software will have added value in its resale potential compared to the competition that doesn't allow resale.
Right, so because the fashion industry makes a bunch of money, then whatever they do must be the right thing to do for the software industry. Is that your point?
I certainly agree that there are some serious problems with the current state of IP law, but the fact that something works over here doesn't mean that it'll automatically work over there. Copyright and patent issues are not the only things that are different between the fashion world and the software world.
I dunno, isn't there sort of a bright side to this? If people really care about this issue, then here's a great opportunity for a developer/publisher to differentiate their product in a very substantial way.
Just like Google promotes their Android software by touting its lack of restrictions compared to the iPhone, why can't a software company advertise their product by emphasizing the fact that their software doesn't require a license that nullifies the first sale doctrine?
If people really care about this issue, then maybe this is a good opportunity to establish a new business model and for some new people to become successful.
Be careful not to use the developing world's "culture" as an excuse for them to seriously exploit their workers.
Anyways, it's much harder to innovate new products and business methods than it is to copy them and ship that work off to somewhere with a fraction of the wage rates and much less stringent rules about worker safety, pollution controls, etc.
And it's even worse when you look at it at the level of your average middle class adult. A person can only learn new skills so fast, and that's if you can find someone willing to help you learn.
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I just did a quick search on google on sapphire, and saw a couple sites that mentioned that sapphire is actually more brittle than glass (but also more scratch resistant). So while sapphire might avoid the scratching that can sometimes result in cracking, it'd be more like to suffer damage from drops or other impacts that sometimes result in cracking.
I actually like the way my 3GS feels in my hand with the added thickness of the case. I don't think I have abnormally large hands, but without the case the phone feels just a little too small for me to hold it comfortably with one hand. Also the case that I chose provides better grip than the default plastic, so that's nice too.
That being said, sand has gotten between the back of my phone and the case, and there are some very significant scratches on the phone. The 3GS back is plastic, so it's just a cosmetic issue for me, and not something that I'm concerned about.
Right on. Especially with a decent facebook client on my phone, it functions almost like a convergence of various online services that I've been using for years. Email, instant messaging, event planning, photo sharing, etc.
While it's certainly got its own annoying quirks, there are relatively simple (if not always straightforward) ways of dealing with most of them, and if you aren't afraid of potentially offending a few people, then you can keep your friend list limited to what you find useful.
Much of what my facebook friends post is irrelevant to me and gets skimmed right over, and I hardly ever post content myself. But with a little bit of care to how I've set it up, I don't find the signal-to-noise ration on facebook any worse than the most of the rest of the internet. And the fact that such a high percentage of people that I might want to get in touch with have an account, it can be incredibly useful at times.
Listen, if he didn't build this by placing one block at a time, over and over again for 42 weeks straight, eschewing any actual human contact the whole time, all the while subsisting on nothing but doritos and mt. dew, stopping only to urinate and post screeds against the RIAA; well then he is not a true geek and I reserve the right to not only be unimpressed, but also to be judgmental and/or dismissive of him.
That's a really good point. In minecraft you're never stuck spending time fiddling with offsets or whatever to get textures to line up just right, or really worrying which wood texture you want for this door. You've just got a few basic options, so you pick one and it looks as good as everything else and you just keep moving with your construction project.
Also while having such a basic toolkit can lead to the problem of everything looking sort of the same, it also forces more creativity in the spatial design of whatever you're building, You have to think a little harder to make your castle look different from that guy's castle, it's not as simple as just changing the stone color.
It's like having a giant box of plain legos, with just the basic rectangular blocks. Limited palette but the pieces are so abstract that you can make anything out of them and it'll work.
There's a tool that you can produce in the game called redstone dust that you can use to make what's basically wires, and it's the way it works makes it possible to create logic gates and such, which are the building blocks of computing. It's not a particularly efficient way of computing, but it can certainly be functional.
It wouldn't be an extinction level event or anything like that, but it would almost certainly ruin the day of anyone nearby where it did hit. And even if we could get advanced warning of where it would hit and evacuate all the people, if it heads towards a city, that's a lot of property/infrastructure/housing that will be obliterated. So not necessarily catastrophic, but probably not particularly great either.
Although if we figured out that it was going to hit somewhere basically unpopulated and un-utilized (middle of a desert or something), it could actually be kind of cool. We could probably get some excellent satellite video footage of it.
I dunno, the iPod came out in 2001, although windows support didn't really come about until 2003-2004. So if we go with 2004 for when the "Apple fad" started, that's already 6 years, which seems like an awfully long time in today's culture, especially when you consider that we're also talking about technology, which evolves at least as quickly as fashion.
Because Apple makes stuff that people have chose to buy and use, while the reality of the PC market meant that Windows was constantly crammed down everyone's throat whether they wanted it or not.
That is a good car analogy. Well done.
The bigger screen size makes a bigger difference than just having the text be larger. And don't be fooled by the fact that the main screen of both the iPhone and iPad function with the same interface, many apps that are available on both the iphone and ipad present the user with different interfaces depending on which device you use. It's not just a matter of scaling everything up to fit the bigger screen, that extra real estate allows for significant reworking of interfaces.
If you replaced my desktop computer's 23" monitor with a 12" screen from 20 years ago, I guess I could still do the drafting in AutoCAD that I'm hoping to get done today, but it would be much less efficient, and would require some serious rethinking of my workflow in order to actually get anything done with so much less space.
That's a question that has come up before in religious discussions about the origin of the universe, and it generally falls under the idea of the "uncaused cause". Ok, so our universe has been created in a lab somewhere. Then what created the universe that that lab exists in? Oh, that lab only exists as part of an elaborate computer simulation. Ok, well then what created the universe that that computer exists in?
The argument would be that no matter how many steps back you want to take it, there has to be that first universe that became the canvas for all this other stuff. So whatever made that first universe is the uncaused cause.
Also I think it's important that to many people, believing what scientists say is reality would be just as much a leap of faith as believing that the what their religion tells them is true. You can tell me that science has definitively proven that the universe is at least 13 billion years old because astronomers can see light from stars that are that far away, but all the talk of red shifting and gravitational lensing might not mean much of anything to me. Maybe I've got two kids and a job that I'm worried I might lose, I don't have time to learn the math and check your work, so you might as well be telling me that space is full of black jello. It's so far out of my frame of reference that your "proof" has no meaning to me. You say that hundreds of other scientists have confirmed your observations, but so what, there are thousands of people out there who say that God has spoken to them.
I very seldom feel the need to play 10 year old games, but whenever I have, finding cracked versions online is not difficult. I see no reason why this would change 10 years into the future.
While I think that it's unlikely that the US military would fight the populace if a large scale revolt were to occur, even if they did, I'm not sure how successful they'd be. Iraq and Afghanistan are excellent examples of the inability of bigger guns to control an unruly population. You just plain need a lot of soldiers in order to control territory, the USA is geographically and demographically much larger than Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military just doesn't have enough soldiers to effectively control the population. They could barricade DC, protect the politicians, and probably even control most of the big cities, but it's just way too big of a country to suppress a large scale uprising.
True enough, although there's something just kind of crappy about a big company with deep pockets basically stomping out a new guy, especially if they do it by using their big bank account to compete via marketing and/or pricing, instead of competing by making a better product.
It's not illegal, and nobody ever said the world was fair, but still, it's just kind of a shame sometimes.
The solution to this is to design the game so that it's possible for other players to cause mr. moneybags over there to lose his investment. EvE Online is a great example of this, because while there are sanctioned ways for you to turn real money into in-game money and then use that to buy a superpowerful ship, it is entirely possible for other players to go and blow up your fancy ship. Advantage over, all you're left with is an embarrassing killmail.
Not only does the game company get to make some extra money, but there is a huge potential for laughs when some kid borrows his parents' credit card, spends a hundred bucks on a big ship, and loses it twenty minutes later.
I would expect that scanning a ticket to check if it won would involve a check back to the lottery people's network/mainframe/whatever. I would think that if that's the case, any scanned ticket is marked purchased and used, and that being the case, the store is responsible for paying the lottery for it. And since the store's odds aren't any better than anybody else's odds, they should end up losing money.
You can't patent/copyright/etc gameplay mechanics. There were news stories a year or so back about legal action against a popular scrabble rip-off that was popular on facebook. The issue was basically resolved by the devs changing the visuals to not exactly match scrabble, and change their game's name to something that didn't resemble scrabble.
Basically, you can't steal their art or their name, but your game can play exactly the same way.
Yeah, unfortunately for Microsoft, they don't really have a choice. WinMobile is really looking like a dead end, so while they could just try and cling onto that market share it would likely end up continuing to fade away. Windows 7 has a tough road ahead for sure, and might even crash and burn, but if everything goes right it could keep them in the game long term. Kind of amazing to see Microsoft having to take such a big risk just to stay relevant.
Fair enough, but revolution does not automatically mean that all of our problems will magically be solved when it's all said and done.
Also, there's a pretty significant election season every two years in the USA. If the people really got fed up with the current politicians, we have plenty of opportunities to fire enough of them through the normal electoral process to bring the rest right into line.
Why don't some commercial software companies seize this opportunity and use this issue to differentiate their products from their competitors. It doesn't increase your development costs, and if you make a big deal of it and are smart about it, you'll get a bunch of good will and free advertising in the tech media. And at the end of the day, if you can convince consumers to care, then your software will have added value in its resale potential compared to the competition that doesn't allow resale.
Right, so because the fashion industry makes a bunch of money, then whatever they do must be the right thing to do for the software industry. Is that your point?
I certainly agree that there are some serious problems with the current state of IP law, but the fact that something works over here doesn't mean that it'll automatically work over there. Copyright and patent issues are not the only things that are different between the fashion world and the software world.
I dunno, isn't there sort of a bright side to this? If people really care about this issue, then here's a great opportunity for a developer/publisher to differentiate their product in a very substantial way.
Just like Google promotes their Android software by touting its lack of restrictions compared to the iPhone, why can't a software company advertise their product by emphasizing the fact that their software doesn't require a license that nullifies the first sale doctrine?
If people really care about this issue, then maybe this is a good opportunity to establish a new business model and for some new people to become successful.
Be careful not to use the developing world's "culture" as an excuse for them to seriously exploit their workers.
Anyways, it's much harder to innovate new products and business methods than it is to copy them and ship that work off to somewhere with a fraction of the wage rates and much less stringent rules about worker safety, pollution controls, etc.
And it's even worse when you look at it at the level of your average middle class adult. A person can only learn new skills so fast, and that's if you can find someone willing to help you learn.