Well, they're going to build a huge database crosslinking DNA samples and names and one day, you'll get a visit from a guy in a dump truck full of hair, dead skin and lots of bodily secretions returning all of your lost property onto your lawn. Heh. That'll teach those pesky kids to get off of it. Yeah.
Linked stuff has an annoying tendency to not be available when you most need it, be it expired domain names, dying servers or even reading the comment in a WiFi-less coffe shop. Cited books tend to only be available in a different edition than referenced. But the solution's quite simple: GP, keep on commenting as long as necessary. IDEs and even rather simple editors have allowed coders to collapse comment blocks for several generations now. Long comments are no problem.
How are they supposed to find out if I'm using some tethered device or the phone itself? FWIW, I've been using my (SE X1, WinMo 6.5) phone's data connection through my notebook for several months, and to me this only seems to establish a PPP connection (over Bluetooth, USB or an Ad-Hoc WiFi net) between notebook and phone, using the existing data connection.
Oh yeah, tethering doesn't cost extra here, but the bandwidth is metered ($50 equiv for 5 GB/mo).
I'm not sure if it does the Apple ones natively, but if it doesn't, some hackery might help. There's a pretty active community over at my.opera.com, try them.
What works are Opera's own gestures, see Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Shortcuts or just hold your right mouse button (uh, yeah...) and do try any gesture. Not sure how they're done on Apple hardware, though.
As long as it's not an Apple one, it'll still work just fine, though I must admit to prefer the forward/back keys (completing the holes in the cursor key block) on ThinkPads to the rocker gesture.
Anyhow, if it is Apple, it ought to have MultiTouch, right? Opera natively supports mouse gestures, so full MT gesture controll shouldn't be more than a bit of hackery away.
Why the 'F does the page have to reload when I hit the back button, or two pages reload if I did so accidentally and hit the forward button immediately thereafter.
You're looking for Opera. Be advised, you won't need the forward/back buttons anymore, though, as holding the right button and left-clicking works for "Back" and switching buttons will get you "Forward".
IBM/Lenovo makes an USB ThinkPad branded keyboard with TrackPoint, a touch pad and a number pad. Great if you don't need too much mouse dexterity; runs about $90-$100 though.
I'm not intimately familiar with the whole "Kill infidels to achieve eternal fun with dozens of virgins in paradise" argument, but lack of knowledge hasn't stopped a true slashdotter from commenting, right? So here we go:
As far as I can gather, the whole spoils of martyrdom deal is bought by spilling the blood of The Infidel, i.e. killing a (seemingly undefined) number of people of whom a significant part shouldn't belong to the same belief system as the actual martyr. Now as an aspiring martyr, stepping up to the check point, you should already have the bombs strapped on, right? I'm guessing, you might also have some kind of trigger device, concealed in one of your various hands and/or a buddy o' yours who's a couple of meters away from you and could remotely take care of the fireworks if, through some coincidence you get shot in the neck and can't push that button. Now as soon as you've entered the line to the checkpoint, you're home safe. If there are any irregularities (sirens and blinking lights, a rent-a-cop stopping you in a non-standard fashion, the "getting caught" you're speaking of), flick the switch and be blown to smithereens^Wparadise. If there aren't any, stroll to your final destination and do it there -- as long as infidels walk amongst the civilians you surround yourself with, nothing can stop you anymore.
On another note: 71 virgins per eternity is less than the general population's average (around 1 per 90-100 years).
Huh? If you're cruising at some useful speed (possibly on the leftmost lane), hit the clutch and you'll still have a few hundred yards to get over onto the emergency lane. Add hazard lights and most other drivers will even free the room you require.
Going at 70 (the speed limit over here) in the right lane (the left lane over here;-) and taking my foot off the throttle would result in my slowing down pretty quickly... I know if someone did that in front of me at that speed I don't think I'd crash into them, but would be rather taken aback and have to have quick reflexes to slow down, assuming they couldn't pull out of that land because of heavy traffic. I can imagine a worse driver hitting the back of them.
Also, in both cases: Turning your motor off and on again should not take more than a few seconds.
That's one of the things I've always been taught explicitly NOT to do whilst driving.:-) You lose power steering, the brakes will quickly become less effective, and expecting people to turn their car off and on again with very little notice in the middle of driving (a sudden loss of throttle because of this problem they've probably never even heard of) seems like a bizarre suggestion to me.
Hm, just got the notification email that there were replies half an hour ago or so, bad slashcode and/or gmail! Anyhow, you picked the wrong guy to bullshit. I needed to pick up my jacket from the drycleaner's anyways, so I hopped on my bike and tested it. The bike used was a Suzuki, weighting in at about 250 kg (that's including me), with rather fresh tires, without ABS; the road is standard asphalt, slightly damp. Fair weather, temperature around 3 deg C. I did four runs, each one consisting of accelerating to 60 km/h (+/- 5%), then performing one of the following four actions at the same point:
1 - disengaging the clutch, letting the bike run to a slow halt; the action I proposed to be taken in the event of an engine failure. 2 - turning the engine off with the clutch still engaged. 3 - standard degressive braking (i.e. not as soft as your average bus driver, but still not as hard as to spill coffee anybody might be holding a cup of.) 4 - hard braking (i.e. slamming the brakes as hard as possible without the front wheel blocking, me falling off the bike and trashing the poor asphalt on impact.)
Run #1 had me slowing down very calmly, coming to a halt after some 500 metres.
In run #2 I was slowed down noticeably faster, stopping after some 200 - 250 metres. Runs #3 and #4 were a lot shorter, clocking in at some 60-70 and some 30-40 metres, respectively.
Values for cars ought to be somewhat more extreme as they are more aerodynamic (extends #1) but have better road contact (brakes more in #2,3,4 than #1).
Where am I going with this, you may ask. It's pretty simple: At any point in time you absolutely need to be prepared to deal with the guy in the car in front of you to do a #3 as described. They happen, and they aren't rarities. A full-on emergency stop is more rare, but you should be able to react to it nonetheless, you probably are required by law to.
An engine failure, though, cannot ever be a problem. An unprepared, newbie driver will give you about four times the amount of road you should require to calmly stop, and a somewhat skilled driver can prolong that to a factor of nine or ten, enough for either him to get to the emergency lane or you (and the cars behind you) to merge into a neighboring lane, avoiding jams.
All things considered: Don't fear the engine failure, it's an inconvenience but, handled correctly, as far from dangerous as a Big Mac is from fine food.:]
Even without anti-anxiety drugs, can anybody confirm that the kind of terrorist who actually pulls off attacks will be fearful? I could very well imagine them being as calm as can be, completely convinced what they're doing is the right thing. After all, standing there with a bomb strapped to your chest pretty much implies you believe in that "heaven with 71 virgins" delusion, no matter if you take out a couple hundred civilians or just two guards, it's martyrdom and it's spoils (mostly spoiled intestines hanging everywhere) for you.
Where'd you get that? Most setups I've encountered were pretty damn accurate since MSIE pulls it's Accept-Lang from Windows' locale which is the same thing that'll tell Excel how to format your numbers and the calendar how to display dates (and recommend a time zone at the install). Even in the few places where an english (instead of local language) version of Windows is used, they tend to get the locale setting right. In alternative browsers, Opera pulls it's setting from the system at it's installation, then allowing change as desired; Chrome has a great config menu (populated from the system settings at installation, I'm guessing) and Firefox probably does something similar.
Even in cases where english is requested from a non-english user, it's pretty likely at least part of his setup is actually set to english, so he's quite likely to understand it.
Curiously few people seem to have gotten that. I've got an account named "John Doe" to try 'em out and another one which I add people I know to. Funnily, John Doe has several hundred friends already, despite not actually existing.
+1; tried to install it yesterday, not a snow ball's chance in hell to get the fucker booting without configuring grub myself. This could possibly be related to installing it on an mdraid root in a box with some 22 SATA devices spread over five controllers, making the root (hdN,M) quite difficult to predict with varying drivers between pre-boot grub and post-boot config environment. Fortunately one can fiddle with anything and everything; works like a charm until the next update breaks everything:]
Ubuntu does XFS, (as well as ext*, JFS, MurderFS and so on) through the standard installer. mdraid, lvm and truecrypt only work through the alternate installer disc (but the curses interface ain't that much more difficult than the GUI, so it oughtn't be an issue.
... You do understand the difference between an e-book reader and a regular laptop/notebook/netbook, though, don't you? The former is almost completely off, wakes up for a keypress, refreshes it's e-ink display and goes to a very deep sleep ("almost off") again, resulting in battery life measured in page turns. For models featuring 3G and so on, add a circuit that's periodically turned on, checks for new content and goes to sleep asap.
The latter is either off and will have battery life for weeks or turned on and keep refreshing it's display, power it's memory (RAM eats energy to keep data), keep processor and so on running. Having a system clock will cause a wakeup per second. Moving the pointer, another wakeup.
What you are looking for is definitely not a computer. You might get lucky with an old-style Casio organizer or a Psion, they tend to have nice battery lives, but the display size will disappoint you. e-Ink is also not for you, because every change on the display requires the whole thing to be refreshed. All things considered, get yourself some nice paper, a pen (fountain pens make writing by hand more fun than writing on a computer!) and write as much as you'd like.
Driving a a stick you won't be able to get the vehicle rolling if you can't use both feet (left goes onto clutch, right onto break, turn engine on, left slowly releases while right moves to accelerator). After that, your setup is guaranteed to be functional as you won't have to move your left foot from the clutch ever again (i.e. right foot is for gas and brakes, left only for the clutch). An exception exists for race drivers who need to downshift, brake and rev up into turns, but they'll just turn the right foot by some 90 degrees, so even then they won't have to move it. In an automatic transmission, it's even simpler: your left foot does nothing, ever. The right foot takes care of both pedals -- you'll never need to use both at the same time, so don't.
That sounds pretty dangerous if you're on a motorway
Huh? If you're cruising at some useful speed (possibly on the leftmost lane), hit the clutch and you'll still have a few hundred yards to get over onto the emergency lane. Add hazard lights and most other drivers will even free the room you require. Driving a girl car^w^w automatic? Go to "N" and move to the emergency lane.
If you're not doing the 50 mph or so required to pull this off, it's even easier: Turn on your hazard lights, press down your clutch and roll to a gentle stop. Since you're not even using your brakes, anybody behind you can slow down more by braking lightly. It'll cause some congestion but accidents aren't likely.
Also, in both cases: Turning your motor off and on again should not take more than a few seconds. If it's just a temporary sensor fail, it ought to get the engine going again before even coming to a halt (hazard lights first, though!).
Having recently bought a neat $3000 Wintendo box (must've been drunk or something, but I can't say I wouldn't like it), one of the very first things I did was get Win-X-Move and enable focus follows mouse ("X mouse") by fiddling around in HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop UserPreferencesMask.
I prefer the former to your AutoHotkey solution because it also enables Alt-RightClick to resize windows (the corner nearest to the cursor will be moved), but the script ought to work just as well. About the latter: It's such a lovely feature that MSFT actually put a switch for it in the Control Panel, so no need to fiddle around, just do like here.
Windows 7 is, if you aren't too dependent on your console fix (sorry, but cmd is just nasty), a great, snappy, stable and very usable OS that can very well compete with current Ubuntu. Both have their advantages and drawbacks, but after several months of growing dislike for Windows, I must admit to not favouring Linux over Win or vice-versa anymore.
[No mention of OS X because I'm heterosexual, z/OS because I don't quite have that kind of processing power around here or Gentoo because... I already said I didn't have that kind of machine -- how would I ever finish compiling?;)]
Know that joke where two guys encounter a bear while camping? A puts on his running shoes, B goes "Why are you putting on your shoes, there's no way for you to outrun a grizzly", A replies "I don't need to. Only need to outrun you."
It's the same thing with jamming a tower, really. You don't need to transmit stronger than the tower, you couldn't do it, anyways. But that's not a problem -- you only need to transmit enough to distort any other phones enough so the tower can't understand them anymore. A directional antenna with some gain or being closer to the tower ought to be enough to distort a large part of, if not the whole cell.
SE Xperia X1, HTC Touch HD, Touch Pro 2 and (iirc) the Touch Diamond 2 have WVGA (480x800 px) displays and are out since quite some time; they were preceded by several VGA (480x640) smartphones. All Windows Mobile, though.
Motorola's releasing the Droid/Sholes/Tao soon - 480x852 px with Android 1.6 (or 2.0, not sure). Also planned for soonish release are several devices with 360x640 px displays (SE X3, Samsung Moment et al.).
480x320 is an iPhone phenomenon. Devices with superior displays have been out there the whole time, you just have to look for them a bit.:)
Have you already had the chance to test it out? I'm considering replacing my X1 (WinMobile) with something running Android, but couldn't find anything that's superior in all areas. (The Moment looks rather large for it's display size and doesn't have the 480x800 resolution; the X3 lacks the slide-out qwerty keyboard and is somewhat resolution-impaired, the Motorola Droid (might just get that) doesn't look as sleek as the X1 and has a grid-styled qwerty instead of the offset layout real keyboards, the X1 and the Moment have...) Any advice?
Credit cards tend to have a country and a currency associated with them. Watertight as long as we forget about gift credit cards (U.S.-centric phenomenon).
Then again, it's iPhones we're talking about here. I'd be very surprised if Apple didn't have a way to track any App Store sale to it's phone number, and even if they can't, they get the S/N of the device and know what S/N was destined for what market (and, if sold through an Apple Store, when it was purchased with what method of payment). This is easily defeated by using a proxy to connect to iTMS with an account from the proxy's country, paying with a credit card from that country as well as using an iTouch bought for cash in a non-Apple-Store in just that country.
From Apple's viewpoint, they're dealing with a customer in whatever country your proxy, CC and iTouch are in/from. No fault on their part as it's completely impossible for them to track this to you. If, by some coincidence, you should be found with all that equipment, the blame is instantly shifted over to you -- going through so much work you had to be aware you were doing something forbidden. Still, discovery is rather unlikely.
Considering the apps, though, I seriously can't understand why anybody should go through so much trouble to get his/her fix of Apple-authorized apps when there's so many superior alternatives. Just go Android, download whatever you need from wherever you like (through a proxy, if you feel like that) and party on.
I got 444 km (276 mi) out of my Suzuki. That's on a 17 l (4.5 US gal) tank, running full to bone dry -- some 3.8 l per 100 km or 60 mpg.
On a side note: running dry in the middle of a one-lane highway section ain't that funny, so bikers everywhere: don't forget to switch the reserve off after refueling;)
Almost every phone out there is using an LED-backlit TFT LCD screen.
Most of the new and great laptops with LED screens are exactly the same -- a regular LCD with LED-based backlight instead of one or two CCFLs. Technically inferior to OLED but possible and affordable right now. I wouldn't know of any OLED screens in production laptops, as far as I know it's just prototypes and concepts right now, but I wouldn't mind being corrected on that:)
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Well, they're going to build a huge database crosslinking DNA samples and names and one day, you'll get a visit from a guy in a dump truck full of hair, dead skin and lots of bodily secretions returning all of your lost property onto your lawn. Heh. That'll teach those pesky kids to get off of it. Yeah.
Linked stuff has an annoying tendency to not be available when you most need it, be it expired domain names, dying servers or even reading the comment in a WiFi-less coffe shop. Cited books tend to only be available in a different edition than referenced.
But the solution's quite simple: GP, keep on commenting as long as necessary. IDEs and even rather simple editors have allowed coders to collapse comment blocks for several generations now. Long comments are no problem.
How are they supposed to find out if I'm using some tethered device or the phone itself? FWIW, I've been using my (SE X1, WinMo 6.5) phone's data connection through my notebook for several months, and to me this only seems to establish a PPP connection (over Bluetooth, USB or an Ad-Hoc WiFi net) between notebook and phone, using the existing data connection.
Oh yeah, tethering doesn't cost extra here, but the bandwidth is metered ($50 equiv for 5 GB/mo).
I'm not sure if it does the Apple ones natively, but if it doesn't, some hackery might help. There's a pretty active community over at my.opera.com, try them.
What works are Opera's own gestures, see Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Shortcuts or just hold your right mouse button (uh, yeah...) and do try any gesture. Not sure how they're done on Apple hardware, though.
As long as it's not an Apple one, it'll still work just fine, though I must admit to prefer the forward/back keys (completing the holes in the cursor key block) on ThinkPads to the rocker gesture.
Anyhow, if it is Apple, it ought to have MultiTouch, right? Opera natively supports mouse gestures, so full MT gesture controll shouldn't be more than a bit of hackery away.
You're looking for Opera. Be advised, you won't need the forward/back buttons anymore, though, as holding the right button and left-clicking works for "Back" and switching buttons will get you "Forward".
IBM/Lenovo makes an USB ThinkPad branded keyboard with TrackPoint, a touch pad and a number pad. Great if you don't need too much mouse dexterity; runs about
$90-$100 though.
I'm not intimately familiar with the whole "Kill infidels to achieve eternal fun with dozens of virgins in paradise" argument, but lack of knowledge hasn't stopped a true slashdotter from commenting, right? So here we go:
As far as I can gather, the whole spoils of martyrdom deal is bought by spilling the blood of The Infidel, i.e. killing a (seemingly undefined) number of people of whom a significant part shouldn't belong to the same belief system as the actual martyr.
Now as an aspiring martyr, stepping up to the check point, you should already have the bombs strapped on, right? I'm guessing, you might also have some kind of trigger device, concealed in one of your various hands and/or a buddy o' yours who's a couple of meters away from you and could remotely take care of the fireworks if, through some coincidence you get shot in the neck and can't push that button.
Now as soon as you've entered the line to the checkpoint, you're home safe. If there are any irregularities (sirens and blinking lights, a rent-a-cop stopping you in a non-standard fashion, the "getting caught" you're speaking of), flick the switch and be blown to smithereens^Wparadise. If there aren't any, stroll to your final destination and do it there -- as long as infidels walk amongst the civilians you surround yourself with, nothing can stop you anymore.
On another note: 71 virgins per eternity is less than the general population's average (around 1 per 90-100 years).
Huh? If you're cruising at some useful speed (possibly on the leftmost lane), hit the clutch and you'll still have a few hundred yards to get over onto the emergency lane. Add hazard lights and most other drivers will even free the room you require.
Going at 70 (the speed limit over here) in the right lane (the left lane over here ;-) and taking my foot off the throttle would result in my slowing down pretty quickly... I know if someone did that in front of me at that speed I don't think I'd crash into them, but would be rather taken aback and have to have quick reflexes to slow down, assuming they couldn't pull out of that land because of heavy traffic. I can imagine a worse driver hitting the back of them.
Also, in both cases: Turning your motor off and on again should not take more than a few seconds.
That's one of the things I've always been taught explicitly NOT to do whilst driving. :-) You lose power steering, the brakes will quickly become less effective, and expecting people to turn their car off and on again with very little notice in the middle of driving (a sudden loss of throttle because of this problem they've probably never even heard of) seems like a bizarre suggestion to me.
Hm, just got the notification email that there were replies half an hour ago or so, bad slashcode and/or gmail!
Anyhow, you picked the wrong guy to bullshit. I needed to pick up my jacket from the drycleaner's anyways, so I hopped on my bike and tested it.
The bike used was a Suzuki, weighting in at about 250 kg (that's including me), with rather fresh tires, without ABS; the road is standard asphalt, slightly damp. Fair weather, temperature around 3 deg C.
I did four runs, each one consisting of accelerating to 60 km/h (+/- 5%), then performing one of the following four actions at the same point:
1 - disengaging the clutch, letting the bike run to a slow halt; the action I proposed to be taken in the event of an engine failure.
2 - turning the engine off with the clutch still engaged.
3 - standard degressive braking (i.e. not as soft as your average bus driver, but still not as hard as to spill coffee anybody might be holding a cup of.)
4 - hard braking (i.e. slamming the brakes as hard as possible without the front wheel blocking, me falling off the bike and trashing the poor asphalt on impact.)
Run #1 had me slowing down very calmly, coming to a halt after some 500 metres.
In run #2 I was slowed down noticeably faster, stopping after some 200 - 250 metres.
Runs #3 and #4 were a lot shorter, clocking in at some 60-70 and some 30-40 metres, respectively.
Values for cars ought to be somewhat more extreme as they are more aerodynamic (extends #1) but have better road contact (brakes more in #2,3,4 than #1).
Where am I going with this, you may ask. It's pretty simple: At any point in time you absolutely need to be prepared to deal with the guy in the car in front of you to do a #3 as described. They happen, and they aren't rarities. A full-on emergency stop is more rare, but you should be able to react to it nonetheless, you probably are required by law to.
An engine failure, though, cannot ever be a problem. An unprepared, newbie driver will give you about four times the amount of road you should require to calmly stop, and a somewhat skilled driver can prolong that to a factor of nine or ten, enough for either him to get to the emergency lane or you (and the cars behind you) to merge into a neighboring lane, avoiding jams.
All things considered: Don't fear the engine failure, it's an inconvenience but, handled correctly, as far from dangerous as a Big Mac is from fine food. :]
Even without anti-anxiety drugs, can anybody confirm that the kind of terrorist who actually pulls off attacks will be fearful? I could very well imagine them being as calm as can be, completely convinced what they're doing is the right thing. After all, standing there with a bomb strapped to your chest pretty much implies you believe in that "heaven with 71 virgins" delusion, no matter if you take out a couple hundred civilians or just two guards, it's martyrdom and it's spoils (mostly spoiled intestines hanging everywhere) for you.
Where'd you get that? Most setups I've encountered were pretty damn accurate since MSIE pulls it's Accept-Lang from Windows' locale which is the same thing that'll tell Excel how to format your numbers and the calendar how to display dates (and recommend a time zone at the install). Even in the few places where an english (instead of local language) version of Windows is used, they tend to get the locale setting right. In alternative browsers, Opera pulls it's setting from the system at it's installation, then allowing change as desired; Chrome has a great config menu (populated from the system settings at installation, I'm guessing) and Firefox probably does something similar.
Even in cases where english is requested from a non-english user, it's pretty likely at least part of his setup is actually set to english, so he's quite likely to understand it.
Curiously few people seem to have gotten that. I've got an account named "John Doe" to try 'em out and another one which I add people I know to. Funnily, John Doe has several hundred friends already, despite not actually existing.
Now in 2004 and 2008, on which day did you turn it off? 29 Feb or 31 Dec?
+1; tried to install it yesterday, not a snow ball's chance in hell to get the fucker booting without configuring grub myself. This could possibly be related to installing it on an mdraid root in a box with some 22 SATA devices spread over five controllers, making the root (hdN,M) quite difficult to predict with varying drivers between pre-boot grub and post-boot config environment. :]
Fortunately one can fiddle with anything and everything; works like a charm until the next update breaks everything
Ubuntu does XFS, (as well as ext*, JFS, MurderFS and so on) through the standard installer. mdraid, lvm and truecrypt only work through the alternate installer disc (but the curses interface ain't that much more difficult than the GUI, so it oughtn't be an issue.
The latter is either off and will have battery life for weeks or turned on and keep refreshing it's display, power it's memory (RAM eats energy to keep data), keep processor and so on running. Having a system clock will cause a wakeup per second. Moving the pointer, another wakeup.
What you are looking for is definitely not a computer. You might get lucky with an old-style Casio organizer or a Psion, they tend to have nice battery lives, but the display size will disappoint you. e-Ink is also not for you, because every change on the display requires the whole thing to be refreshed. All things considered, get yourself some nice paper, a pen (fountain pens make writing by hand more fun than writing on a computer!) and write as much as you'd like.
Wtf?
Driving a a stick you won't be able to get the vehicle rolling if you can't use both feet (left goes onto clutch, right onto break, turn engine on, left slowly releases while right moves to accelerator). After that, your setup is guaranteed to be functional as you won't have to move your left foot from the clutch ever again (i.e. right foot is for gas and brakes, left only for the clutch). An exception exists for race drivers who need to downshift, brake and rev up into turns, but they'll just turn the right foot by some 90 degrees, so even then they won't have to move it.
In an automatic transmission, it's even simpler: your left foot does nothing, ever. The right foot takes care of both pedals -- you'll never need to use both at the same time, so don't.
Huh? If you're cruising at some useful speed (possibly on the leftmost lane), hit the clutch and you'll still have a few hundred yards to get over onto the emergency lane. Add hazard lights and most other drivers will even free the room you require. Driving a girl car^w^w automatic? Go to "N" and move to the emergency lane.
If you're not doing the 50 mph or so required to pull this off, it's even easier: Turn on your hazard lights, press down your clutch and roll to a gentle stop. Since you're not even using your brakes, anybody behind you can slow down more by braking lightly. It'll cause some congestion but accidents aren't likely.
Also, in both cases: Turning your motor off and on again should not take more than a few seconds. If it's just a temporary sensor fail, it ought to get the engine going again before even coming to a halt (hazard lights first, though!).
Having recently bought a neat $3000 Wintendo box (must've been drunk or something, but I can't say I wouldn't like it), one of the very first things I did was get Win-X-Move and enable focus follows mouse ("X mouse") by fiddling around in HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop UserPreferencesMask.
I prefer the former to your AutoHotkey solution because it also enables Alt-RightClick to resize windows (the corner nearest to the cursor will be moved), but the script ought to work just as well.
About the latter: It's such a lovely feature that MSFT actually put a switch for it in the Control Panel, so no need to fiddle around, just do like here.
Windows 7 is, if you aren't too dependent on your console fix (sorry, but cmd is just nasty), a great, snappy, stable and very usable OS that can very well compete with current Ubuntu. Both have their advantages and drawbacks, but after several months of growing dislike for Windows, I must admit to not favouring Linux over Win or vice-versa anymore.
[No mention of OS X because I'm heterosexual, z/OS because I don't quite have that kind of processing power around here or Gentoo because ... I already said I didn't have that kind of machine -- how would I ever finish compiling? ;)]
Know that joke where two guys encounter a bear while camping? A puts on his running shoes, B goes "Why are you putting on your shoes, there's no way for you to outrun a grizzly", A replies "I don't need to. Only need to outrun you."
It's the same thing with jamming a tower, really. You don't need to transmit stronger than the tower, you couldn't do it, anyways. But that's not a problem -- you only need to transmit enough to distort any other phones enough so the tower can't understand them anymore. A directional antenna with some gain or being closer to the tower ought to be enough to distort a large part of, if not the whole cell.
SE Xperia X1, HTC Touch HD, Touch Pro 2 and (iirc) the Touch Diamond 2 have WVGA (480x800 px) displays and are out since quite some time; they were preceded by several VGA (480x640) smartphones. All Windows Mobile, though.
Motorola's releasing the Droid/Sholes/Tao soon - 480x852 px with Android 1.6 (or 2.0, not sure). Also planned for soonish release are several devices with 360x640 px displays (SE X3, Samsung Moment et al.).
480x320 is an iPhone phenomenon. Devices with superior displays have been out there the whole time, you just have to look for them a bit. :)
Have you already had the chance to test it out? I'm considering replacing my X1 (WinMobile) with something running Android, but couldn't find anything that's superior in all areas. (The Moment looks rather large for it's display size and doesn't have the 480x800 resolution; the X3 lacks the slide-out qwerty keyboard and is somewhat resolution-impaired, the Motorola Droid (might just get that) doesn't look as sleek as the X1 and has a grid-styled qwerty instead of the offset layout real keyboards, the X1 and the Moment have...)
Any advice?
Credit cards tend to have a country and a currency associated with them. Watertight as long as we forget about gift credit cards (U.S.-centric phenomenon).
Then again, it's iPhones we're talking about here. I'd be very surprised if Apple didn't have a way to track any App Store sale to it's phone number, and even if they can't, they get the S/N of the device and know what S/N was destined for what market (and, if sold through an Apple Store, when it was purchased with what method of payment). This is easily defeated by using a proxy to connect to iTMS with an account from the proxy's country, paying with a credit card from that country as well as using an iTouch bought for cash in a non-Apple-Store in just that country.
From Apple's viewpoint, they're dealing with a customer in whatever country your proxy, CC and iTouch are in/from. No fault on their part as it's completely impossible for them to track this to you. If, by some coincidence, you should be found with all that equipment, the blame is instantly shifted over to you -- going through so much work you had to be aware you were doing something forbidden. Still, discovery is rather unlikely.
Considering the apps, though, I seriously can't understand why anybody should go through so much trouble to get his/her fix of Apple-authorized apps when there's so many superior alternatives. Just go Android, download whatever you need from wherever you like (through a proxy, if you feel like that) and party on.
I got 444 km (276 mi) out of my Suzuki. That's on a 17 l (4.5 US gal) tank, running full to bone dry -- some 3.8 l per 100 km or 60 mpg.
On a side note: running dry in the middle of a one-lane highway section ain't that funny, so bikers everywhere: don't forget to switch the reserve off after refueling ;)
Almost every phone out there is using an LED-backlit TFT LCD screen.
Most of the new and great laptops with LED screens are exactly the same -- a regular LCD with LED-based backlight instead of one or two CCFLs. Technically inferior to OLED but possible and affordable right now. I wouldn't know of any OLED screens in production laptops, as far as I know it's just prototypes and concepts right now, but I wouldn't mind being corrected on that :)