As it happens, I have spent much of the time since iPhone acquisition in a town with a population of less than 5,000 people. The strength of cell based wireless networks, as laughable as it might seem to people outside of the major cities, lies in its geographic coverage, which is very wide, if spotty. However, WiFi compensates for this to a larger degree than I would have previously guessed, by being pretty closely aligned with where you spend your time, or more precisely, where you spend the portion of your time when you could be using a device like this to access the network. People seem to spend most of this portion of their time in places where they are likely to have access to a hotspot: at home, at work, at the homes of friends, at coffee shops, at airports if you travel a lot.
Those places and many others are WiFi enabled these days, as are many others which might surprise. Hospitals have open WiFi for guests and patients now. The places that are not WiFi enabled become interesting boundary conditions as people acquire these small mobile devices, because some of them are places where laptop users might not want network access, but mobile users might. Those places will drive people to 3G, parks, grocery stores and other retail shopping areas, restaurants, and random public or quai-public spaces in between hot spots like office building lobbies and whatnot.
WiFi covers people in the places where they spend most of their time, and in particular, most of that portion of their time when they want to use a network. The space between those spots is not covered, of course, but it's also space where people need to pay attention to where they are walking, driving, or biking, so they don't cause an accident. Yeah, I know the concept isn't perfect, but all this incessant whining about how the lack of 3G is a folly that will kill the iPhone is just FUD. It isn't true. There are a few things that might kill the iPhone, but lack of 3G in the first version of the device is not one of them. The AT&T partnership, as this fine article points out, is a much more likely candidate.
Yes, 3G is pretty neat. If I lived in Europe, where 3G coverage was reasonable (unlike the U.S. where, except for Verizon's EVDO, it is spotty) I would want 3G, too, but honestly, now that I've had a chance to use iPhone a while, I really think I could live without 3G for a long time and be just fine. WiFi Hot Spots are doing the trick a lot better than I thought they would, and they are faster than 3G. Future versions of iPhone will undoubtedly offer 3G, and I'll be happy when they do, but if I had to pick between them, right now, I'd pick WiFi over 3G in a heartbeat.
There are other ways to judge the magnitude of the business success which iPhone achieved. AT&T said that they've never had a device launch sell so many units, ever. That's pretty amazing when you think about it. The Motorola RAZR, which is now one of the most popular phones (if not the most popular phone) on the market, had a massive PR campaign which preceded its launch, just like iPhone. The devices which have been launched prior to iPhone were launched by established players using established distribution channels.
Here's another interesting bit... Google the two phones, iPhone, and RAZR.
Results 1 - 10 of about 174,000,000 for iphone. (0.06 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 17,700,000 for RAZR. (0.12 seconds)
Clearly there must be some amount of grass roots level interest in iPhone, which doesn't exist for the Motorola RAZR phone which was probably the hottest selling single model of phone for most of 2005 and 2006. (Nokia's response to the RAZR hegemony was to proliferate models and offer a wider array of "choice", basically external styling with features randomly mixed and matched in ways that made little sense. The strategy, combined with software that, in general, sucked less than the RAZR software, worked.)
The established players compete in a very dynamic market, with relatively large shifts in market position every year or so. Apple might well capture an interesting portion of that market. Sure, a few geeks like us are pretty annoyed by the twisted nature of the cell phone market, with private networks and exclusive vendor lock-in contracts. The bulk of the market doesn't yet have the sophistication to be aware of the possibilities. Or maybe they do. Maybe they see the worthless pile of poo which is the virus laden botnet zombie PC in their den, and they realize that the trade offs might be worth it. If cell phone networks remain free of this plague, maybe just maybe it's worth it for my phone to remain useful without the consumer spending untold zillions of hours "keeping it secure". Maybe they give up their freedoms willingly, in exchange for a device that "just works" quite a bit better than their home PC. OK, I doubt that there is this level of conscious analysis going on. OK, there clearly isn't. But it was a fun little thought experiment, before I woke up just now. Anyway, the market doesn't care about the things that tick you, and a handful of other gadget geeks, off. iPhone will continue to be an amazing market success, if Apple continues to build successive generations of the device which continue to improve in capability and performance, as they have done with the Macintosh and the iPod. You really don't need to wait for a few years of market data to see where this is going.
iPhone success is nearly as much a story about the *failure* of these previous phones to satisfy the cell phone using public as it is about the iPhone itself. Sure, iPhone isn't perfect, but it's already solved a number of problems that plagued previous phones, and you are already seeing the other cell phone vendors trying to catch up. iPhone software has been updated 3 times already. How many times has the crap software on the RAZR been updated? Exactly zero. To get newer firmware on a RAZR you have to flash it yourself with underground grey market flash images and risk bricking the phone, mind you, or *buy a new phone*. The first many millions of consumers who bought the RAZR had to contend with serious software defects over the life of the device that could not be fixed. Well, which the vendor(s) refused to fix, really. Consumers have been burned by previous love affairs with phones made by companies that thought their customer was the cell phone company, not the cell phone user.
Finally, there is the price of AAPL, compared to vendors of other cell phone platf
I'm not really sure why this myth continues to propagate. iPhone has a SIM slot. iPhone has a SIM slot. It's visible on the top of the phone, with a tiny pin hole. Inserting a pin or paper clip ejects the SIM card from the slot. You can use this SIM in any other GSM phone.
Before I started using iPhone, I thought that the lack of 3G was a minor disappointment in the design. After using it a few months, I realized that I'm in a WiFi hotspot so often that I really don't miss 3G. The applications perform well enough over EDGE to use them when I need to do that, which isn't very often. Sure, 3G would be great, and I'll be excited when the iPhone 3G happens, but the lack of this feature really is a simple design trade-off right now, and I get a better battery life in the current device in the trade. I get a great deal more use out of iPhone on a single charge than I ever did any previous cell phone, even the Motorola RAZR, and that phone was useful only for talking due to the poor quality or poor performance of the other features of the phone. iPhone WiFi is faster now than the fastest mapped out 3G protocols, and far faster than most current 3G implementations. WiFi was the right design choice for this device at this time. Apple figured that out by doing what they generally do with these choices. They stepped back from their gut level geek cool factor emotional response to the newest hottest technology, 3G, which you know they all wanted in this phone, and they said, OK, what do ordinary people really want? Fast, plus battery life. How do we give them both, in a world where 3G chipsets slurp too much juice? Wifi + EDGE.
Although you're right that the "tech-ignorant media" and the blogosphere are spreading their conspiracy theory about the iPhone update, there is a reasonable amount of information about what the update did. You just have to spend about 3 seconds googling for it:
Well, it seems to me that Apple could offer a service. If your iPhone is now a brick, maybe they'll engrave your name on it and epoxy it into a sculpture in a park in Silicon Valley somewhere, for a small fee. For a slightly larger fee they'll re-flash the firmware, assuming it's even possible to fix what's broke without opening the case of the phone. If you must open the case and replace a part to fix a bricked iPhone, then it's likely that the cost of repair would exceed the cost of a new device. It also seems that there is some potential liability to be borne by the supplier of the software and instructions for modifying the iPhone. If those fine people were not appropriately careful about warning their victims, uh, customers, the might see some hostility directed their way at some point by people who figure they were misled. They probably won't be sued, though, since they can't fix the underlying issue (locked phones and the broken cell phone industry) nor do they have a mountain of cash to covet.
By the way, when did they stop allowing idiots to post here? I hadn't noticed.
The day isn't even over and the Slashdot Comment of the Day Award has been granted, to you. Congratulations! Comments like yours, rational, informative, interesting, well written and maybe even checked for spelling and grammar, are a reason to keep reading Slashdot. Thank you for contributing to Signal amidst the growing crap flood of Noise. I will make you a Friend, regardless of how many times your insightful comments have been flagged as Troll or Flamebait.
"mob of angry News of the World readers brandishing pitchforks and flaming torches."
Yeah, the kind we Weekly World News readers used to read about in the checkout line. Like spontaneous human combustion, this kinda stuff just isn't widely reported.
I was merely making an observation, and yet I included four, count 'em, four references to "fucktard", which you apparently failed to notice. What more do you want? You also failed to notice that I was not the one being questioned by the Anonymous Fucktard.
The people who don't vote cannot save your democracy. Talk to some of them. They are mostly un-informed. They don't vote because they don't care enough to learn what to vote for. We need to look for another solution. Educating these people might be a start. If they knew more, they would start voting on their own, you wouldn't need to convince them.
See, it's this. Your subconscious recognizes that the joke contains inherent racism or sexism or classism... or the underling meta-discriminatory-ism. The authors of the joke know that nobody would get the joke if they used "Han Solo" or "Luke Skywalker" or "Princess Leah". Chewie is the victim of *ism. He's covered in fur. He's different. Ewoks are covered in fur. Chewie must live on Endor. Nobody *else* would ever think to live on Endor. Maybe the Princess has a secret thing for fur, eh?
New rule! Only logged in users are allowed to request a citation.
"Citation, please?" is a lazy rhetorical technique which in online discussion forums like Slashdot has come to imply much more about the person asking the question than about anything else. It roughly translates from moronese to English as:
I'm a moron,
I disagree with you, but
I'm too ill-informed to argue my side of the debate, and
I'm too lazy to look up the resources which are freely available which would help me construct an argument, so
I'm going to take the low road, and snidely suggest that you defend your argument, whereafter
I'll assume that you are wrong and I am right because you didn't respond by falling all over yourself by quoting chapter and verse to me,
but because I have this lingering sense that I might not know what the hell I'm talking about, I'll just post this retort as "Anonymous".
How about, instead of logged in Slashdot participants falling all over themselves to defend every other statement they make from Anonymous "show me a link" asshats, the asshats start reading a little more and learning about the world around them? Don't agree with what someone said? Look it up! You're using Slashdot, so you are already USING THE INTERNET. There are dictionaries and encyclopedias and actual laws, on the internet, mere seconds away from where you are now.
If you care enough to post, then please devote the five or ten minutes that it might take to research the topic and post your own link refuting the statement that you don't agree with. I'll help you get started, here: U.S. Copyright Law. You don't need a degree in law to read and understand well written laws. If you can't read and understand a law, that's a pretty big hint that it might be broken in some way. Finding relevant sections of the code can be challenging, but Google can be quite helpful with that.
I tried to use Skype in. The number they gave me wasn't in my LATA. I couldn't get anyone to respond at Skype to help resolve this issue, so I paid for a year of service that was useless to me. I use skype out on a regular basis, to talk to a friend who moved to Russia for a few years. On two occasions, my Skype Out credit, nearly $20 worth each time) vanished for no apparent reason (it doesn't seem to have been stolen, since there were no logged Skype Out calls using it up, it seems to have been a system glitch of some kind). I received responses from Skype email technical support, but they clearly didn't understand the problem and didn't care to resolve it.
At first this really annoyed me. Then I realized that if AT&T (or any regular telco) had done this to me, I could have complained to the public service commission and went several rounds with yet another front line support person who doesn't understand the problem and just replies with an email that says effectively, "AT&T says it didn't happen. Case closed." At least I would have had a reason to vote against an incumbent somewhere.
So, with Skype, the service quality is crap, the customer support is crap, there is no recourse, but it's cheaper than water. With AT&T the service quality is excellent, there appears to be functioning customer support which sometimes results in a problem resolution, there is recourse to a public oversight agency that is a useless pile of crap, but it's frightfully expensive.
Pick your poison. Six of one. *** Your favorite appropriate cliche here ***
I've noticed every once in a while that the story comment line isn't visible. Reloading the page sometimes seems to bring it back. Restarting the browser sometimes seems to bring it back. I suspect it's not a client side problem, however.
Creating algae that crack water at a high rate seems like a bad idea. When they inevitably escape the "perfectly safe" industrial algae farm facility and become established in the general environment, the hydrogen and oxygen will be released into the atmosphere. Hydrogen tends to escape planetary bodies over time. Not exactly ice-nine but if you think human caused global warming is an issue, human caused global drying would be pretty annoying, too. On the bright side, it would probably take longer.
Maybe it would be better to come up with a solar system that could be deployed in parking lots. I've thought about the Walmart roof scenario, too, but it seems like roofs are a problematic place for solar installations. Most roofs are somewhat fragile, and are not really designed to sustain much human activity, aside from repairing the roof. Flat roofs are particularly problematic in this sense. Furthermore, most roofs are not really designed to support much more weight than they already do (limited air conditioning equipment and expected maximum snow load). Roofs are also different in important structural ways, so even if these problems could be overcome for one building design, it wouldn't be reusable to other types of building roofs. So if you started with Walmart, you might not be able to easily equip all the Best Buy stores without a redesign.
Parking lots, on the other hand, are almost ideal places to install solar systems. You can bury stuff, suspend stuff in the air, re-arrange stuff. Even if it was a Walmart-only project, the parking lots are also larger than the roof.
In the It would be interesting to see an engineering class study this idea of rooftop or parking lot solar installations, in a coordinated approach like that used by Gerard O'Neill when his physics classes pondered space habitats and solar power satellites. There would be all manner of interesting possible side effects to study in such a project.
For example, there might be benefits unrelated to the power production. Suburban office buildings (which are generally surrounded by enormous parking lots) might generate enough power to meet their needs, which is an unlikely outcome for solar power rooftop installations. The installations would shade the cars, too, during the day when they tend to be in parking lots rather than in garages. This would extend the life of fragile car interior parts which degrade with UV exposure, possibly extending the life of the car. Proper design of these installations and large scale deployment might help reduce the heat island effect, although there are other ways to do this, such as pervious concrete and allocating more space for trees and shade in city designs, solar installations in parking lots could be easily retrofitted without restructuring the already-deployed land use allocation.
Slashdot Mirror
As it happens, I have spent much of the time since iPhone acquisition in a town with a population of less than 5,000 people. The strength of cell based wireless networks, as laughable as it might seem to people outside of the major cities, lies in its geographic coverage, which is very wide, if spotty. However, WiFi compensates for this to a larger degree than I would have previously guessed, by being pretty closely aligned with where you spend your time, or more precisely, where you spend the portion of your time when you could be using a device like this to access the network. People seem to spend most of this portion of their time in places where they are likely to have access to a hotspot: at home, at work, at the homes of friends, at coffee shops, at airports if you travel a lot.
Those places and many others are WiFi enabled these days, as are many others which might surprise. Hospitals have open WiFi for guests and patients now. The places that are not WiFi enabled become interesting boundary conditions as people acquire these small mobile devices, because some of them are places where laptop users might not want network access, but mobile users might. Those places will drive people to 3G, parks, grocery stores and other retail shopping areas, restaurants, and random public or quai-public spaces in between hot spots like office building lobbies and whatnot.
WiFi covers people in the places where they spend most of their time, and in particular, most of that portion of their time when they want to use a network. The space between those spots is not covered, of course, but it's also space where people need to pay attention to where they are walking, driving, or biking, so they don't cause an accident. Yeah, I know the concept isn't perfect, but all this incessant whining about how the lack of 3G is a folly that will kill the iPhone is just FUD. It isn't true. There are a few things that might kill the iPhone, but lack of 3G in the first version of the device is not one of them. The AT&T partnership, as this fine article points out, is a much more likely candidate.
Yes, 3G is pretty neat. If I lived in Europe, where 3G coverage was reasonable (unlike the U.S. where, except for Verizon's EVDO, it is spotty) I would want 3G, too, but honestly, now that I've had a chance to use iPhone a while, I really think I could live without 3G for a long time and be just fine. WiFi Hot Spots are doing the trick a lot better than I thought they would, and they are faster than 3G. Future versions of iPhone will undoubtedly offer 3G, and I'll be happy when they do, but if I had to pick between them, right now, I'd pick WiFi over 3G in a heartbeat.
Good grief. You know you already own a MacBook Pro, you just can't use it in public or the board will have your ass in a sling. Bummer, dude.
There are other ways to judge the magnitude of the business success which iPhone achieved. AT&T said that they've never had a device launch sell so many units, ever. That's pretty amazing when you think about it. The Motorola RAZR, which is now one of the most popular phones (if not the most popular phone) on the market, had a massive PR campaign which preceded its launch, just like iPhone. The devices which have been launched prior to iPhone were launched by established players using established distribution channels.
Here's another interesting bit... Google the two phones, iPhone, and RAZR.
Results 1 - 10 of about 174,000,000 for iphone. (0.06 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 17,700,000 for RAZR. (0.12 seconds)
Clearly there must be some amount of grass roots level interest in iPhone, which doesn't exist for the Motorola RAZR phone which was probably the hottest selling single model of phone for most of 2005 and 2006. (Nokia's response to the RAZR hegemony was to proliferate models and offer a wider array of "choice", basically external styling with features randomly mixed and matched in ways that made little sense. The strategy, combined with software that, in general, sucked less than the RAZR software, worked.)
Motorola Loses Cell Phone Market Share to Samsung and Nokia
The established players compete in a very dynamic market, with relatively large shifts in market position every year or so. Apple might well capture an interesting portion of that market. Sure, a few geeks like us are pretty annoyed by the twisted nature of the cell phone market, with private networks and exclusive vendor lock-in contracts. The bulk of the market doesn't yet have the sophistication to be aware of the possibilities. Or maybe they do. Maybe they see the worthless pile of poo which is the virus laden botnet zombie PC in their den, and they realize that the trade offs might be worth it. If cell phone networks remain free of this plague, maybe just maybe it's worth it for my phone to remain useful without the consumer spending untold zillions of hours "keeping it secure". Maybe they give up their freedoms willingly, in exchange for a device that "just works" quite a bit better than their home PC. OK, I doubt that there is this level of conscious analysis going on. OK, there clearly isn't. But it was a fun little thought experiment, before I woke up just now. Anyway, the market doesn't care about the things that tick you, and a handful of other gadget geeks, off. iPhone will continue to be an amazing market success, if Apple continues to build successive generations of the device which continue to improve in capability and performance, as they have done with the Macintosh and the iPod. You really don't need to wait for a few years of market data to see where this is going.
iPhone success is nearly as much a story about the *failure* of these previous phones to satisfy the cell phone using public as it is about the iPhone itself. Sure, iPhone isn't perfect, but it's already solved a number of problems that plagued previous phones, and you are already seeing the other cell phone vendors trying to catch up. iPhone software has been updated 3 times already. How many times has the crap software on the RAZR been updated? Exactly zero. To get newer firmware on a RAZR you have to flash it yourself with underground grey market flash images and risk bricking the phone, mind you, or *buy a new phone*. The first many millions of consumers who bought the RAZR had to contend with serious software defects over the life of the device that could not be fixed. Well, which the vendor(s) refused to fix, really. Consumers have been burned by previous love affairs with phones made by companies that thought their customer was the cell phone company, not the cell phone user.
Finally, there is the price of AAPL, compared to vendors of other cell phone platf
I'm not really sure why this myth continues to propagate. iPhone has a SIM slot. iPhone has a SIM slot. It's visible on the top of the phone, with a tiny pin hole. Inserting a pin or paper clip ejects the SIM card from the slot. You can use this SIM in any other GSM phone.
Before I started using iPhone, I thought that the lack of 3G was a minor disappointment in the design. After using it a few months, I realized that I'm in a WiFi hotspot so often that I really don't miss 3G. The applications perform well enough over EDGE to use them when I need to do that, which isn't very often. Sure, 3G would be great, and I'll be excited when the iPhone 3G happens, but the lack of this feature really is a simple design trade-off right now, and I get a better battery life in the current device in the trade. I get a great deal more use out of iPhone on a single charge than I ever did any previous cell phone, even the Motorola RAZR, and that phone was useful only for talking due to the poor quality or poor performance of the other features of the phone. iPhone WiFi is faster now than the fastest mapped out 3G protocols, and far faster than most current 3G implementations. WiFi was the right design choice for this device at this time. Apple figured that out by doing what they generally do with these choices. They stepped back from their gut level geek cool factor emotional response to the newest hottest technology, 3G, which you know they all wanted in this phone, and they said, OK, what do ordinary people really want? Fast, plus battery life. How do we give them both, in a world where 3G chipsets slurp too much juice? Wifi + EDGE.
Vous n'êtes pas Français.
Although you're right that the "tech-ignorant media" and the blogosphere are spreading their conspiracy theory about the iPhone update, there is a reasonable amount of information about what the update did. You just have to spend about 3 seconds googling for it:
iPhone update 1.1.1 security items
Apple iPhone update 1.1.1
Uh... and a video. Yeah. A video that tells you about the software update.
iPhone September '07 software update
Well, it seems to me that Apple could offer a service. If your iPhone is now a brick, maybe they'll engrave your name on it and epoxy it into a sculpture in a park in Silicon Valley somewhere, for a small fee. For a slightly larger fee they'll re-flash the firmware, assuming it's even possible to fix what's broke without opening the case of the phone. If you must open the case and replace a part to fix a bricked iPhone, then it's likely that the cost of repair would exceed the cost of a new device. It also seems that there is some potential liability to be borne by the supplier of the software and instructions for modifying the iPhone. If those fine people were not appropriately careful about warning their victims, uh, customers, the might see some hostility directed their way at some point by people who figure they were misled. They probably won't be sued, though, since they can't fix the underlying issue (locked phones and the broken cell phone industry) nor do they have a mountain of cash to covet.
By the way, when did they stop allowing idiots to post here? I hadn't noticed.
*ducks*
The day isn't even over and the Slashdot Comment of the Day Award has been granted, to you. Congratulations! Comments like yours, rational, informative, interesting, well written and maybe even checked for spelling and grammar, are a reason to keep reading Slashdot. Thank you for contributing to Signal amidst the growing crap flood of Noise. I will make you a Friend, regardless of how many times your insightful comments have been flagged as Troll or Flamebait.
What is that, something like: "diarrhea of the instant message shorthand"?
What does that mean?
What the hell does that mean?
on second thought...
I don't even want to know what the hell that means.
Uh... Macintosh computers *are* UNiX.
* ducks *
Instant runoff voting (aka ranked choice voting is another good idea.
Did somebody post a sign prohibiting people from *reading* before they post?
Something to hide. Good grief. Take your unconscious double entendre fallacy ( Plurium interrogationum and ad hominem) to a ZDNet forum, where it belongs.
I was merely making an observation, and yet I included four, count 'em, four references to "fucktard", which you apparently failed to notice. What more do you want? You also failed to notice that I was not the one being questioned by the Anonymous Fucktard.
According to NASA, the assertion in the thread parent is considered common knowledge 'round these parts (are you new here?), even though it actually seems to be a bit of a legal grey area and may be incorrect or subject to interpretation on a case by case basis by a court. I shouldn't need to post a link to a discussion of fair use and copyright law for every Anonymous fucktard that asks for one, nor should you.
So, uh... how do you know unfounded assertions are a lazy rhetorical technique? Where is your reference?
*ducks*
*peeks*
Is it safe to come out, now? If I don't get a Funny mod for this, you people are drain bamaged.
One of these days how about you set 'em up, and I knock 'em down, eh?
: )
The people who don't vote cannot save your democracy. Talk to some of them. They are mostly un-informed. They don't vote because they don't care enough to learn what to vote for. We need to look for another solution. Educating these people might be a start. If they knew more, they would start voting on their own, you wouldn't need to convince them.
See, it's this. Your subconscious recognizes that the joke contains inherent racism or sexism or classism... or the underling meta-discriminatory-ism. The authors of the joke know that nobody would get the joke if they used "Han Solo" or "Luke Skywalker" or "Princess Leah". Chewie is the victim of *ism. He's covered in fur. He's different. Ewoks are covered in fur. Chewie must live on Endor. Nobody *else* would ever think to live on Endor. Maybe the Princess has a secret thing for fur, eh?
"Citation, please?" is a lazy rhetorical technique which in online discussion forums like Slashdot has come to imply much more about the person asking the question than about anything else. It roughly translates from moronese to English as:
- I'm a moron,
- I disagree with you, but
- I'm too ill-informed to argue my side of the debate, and
- I'm too lazy to look up the resources which are freely available which would help me construct an argument, so
- I'm going to take the low road, and snidely suggest that you defend your argument, whereafter
- I'll assume that you are wrong and I am right because you didn't respond by falling all over yourself by quoting chapter and verse to me,
- but because I have this lingering sense that I might not know what the hell I'm talking about, I'll just post this retort as "Anonymous".
How about, instead of logged in Slashdot participants falling all over themselves to defend every other statement they make from Anonymous "show me a link" asshats, the asshats start reading a little more and learning about the world around them? Don't agree with what someone said? Look it up! You're using Slashdot, so you are already USING THE INTERNET. There are dictionaries and encyclopedias and actual laws, on the internet, mere seconds away from where you are now.Google (fucktard)
Wikipedia (fucktard)
Urban Dictionary (fucktard) (particularly useful when somebody calls you a name you haven't heard before)
Encyclopedia Dramatica (fucktard)
United States code (aka "the law" for U.S. residents)
If you care enough to post, then please devote the five or ten minutes that it might take to research the topic and post your own link refuting the statement that you don't agree with. I'll help you get started, here: U.S. Copyright Law. You don't need a degree in law to read and understand well written laws. If you can't read and understand a law, that's a pretty big hint that it might be broken in some way. Finding relevant sections of the code can be challenging, but Google can be quite helpful with that.
Look it up!
I tried to use Skype in. The number they gave me wasn't in my LATA. I couldn't get anyone to respond at Skype to help resolve this issue, so I paid for a year of service that was useless to me. I use skype out on a regular basis, to talk to a friend who moved to Russia for a few years. On two occasions, my Skype Out credit, nearly $20 worth each time) vanished for no apparent reason (it doesn't seem to have been stolen, since there were no logged Skype Out calls using it up, it seems to have been a system glitch of some kind). I received responses from Skype email technical support, but they clearly didn't understand the problem and didn't care to resolve it.
At first this really annoyed me. Then I realized that if AT&T (or any regular telco) had done this to me, I could have complained to the public service commission and went several rounds with yet another front line support person who doesn't understand the problem and just replies with an email that says effectively, "AT&T says it didn't happen. Case closed." At least I would have had a reason to vote against an incumbent somewhere.
So, with Skype, the service quality is crap, the customer support is crap, there is no recourse, but it's cheaper than water. With AT&T the service quality is excellent, there appears to be functioning customer support which sometimes results in a problem resolution, there is recourse to a public oversight agency that is a useless pile of crap, but it's frightfully expensive.
Pick your poison. Six of one. *** Your favorite appropriate cliche here ***
I've noticed every once in a while that the story comment line isn't visible. Reloading the page sometimes seems to bring it back. Restarting the browser sometimes seems to bring it back. I suspect it's not a client side problem, however.
I think you meant, "TNSFS" (The Not So Fine Summary).
Creating algae that crack water at a high rate seems like a bad idea. When they inevitably escape the "perfectly safe" industrial algae farm facility and become established in the general environment, the hydrogen and oxygen will be released into the atmosphere. Hydrogen tends to escape planetary bodies over time. Not exactly ice-nine but if you think human caused global warming is an issue, human caused global drying would be pretty annoying, too. On the bright side, it would probably take longer.
Maybe it would be better to come up with a solar system that could be deployed in parking lots. I've thought about the Walmart roof scenario, too, but it seems like roofs are a problematic place for solar installations. Most roofs are somewhat fragile, and are not really designed to sustain much human activity, aside from repairing the roof. Flat roofs are particularly problematic in this sense. Furthermore, most roofs are not really designed to support much more weight than they already do (limited air conditioning equipment and expected maximum snow load). Roofs are also different in important structural ways, so even if these problems could be overcome for one building design, it wouldn't be reusable to other types of building roofs. So if you started with Walmart, you might not be able to easily equip all the Best Buy stores without a redesign.
Parking lots, on the other hand, are almost ideal places to install solar systems. You can bury stuff, suspend stuff in the air, re-arrange stuff. Even if it was a Walmart-only project, the parking lots are also larger than the roof.
In the It would be interesting to see an engineering class study this idea of rooftop or parking lot solar installations, in a coordinated approach like that used by Gerard O'Neill when his physics classes pondered space habitats and solar power satellites. There would be all manner of interesting possible side effects to study in such a project.
For example, there might be benefits unrelated to the power production. Suburban office buildings (which are generally surrounded by enormous parking lots) might generate enough power to meet their needs, which is an unlikely outcome for solar power rooftop installations. The installations would shade the cars, too, during the day when they tend to be in parking lots rather than in garages. This would extend the life of fragile car interior parts which degrade with UV exposure, possibly extending the life of the car. Proper design of these installations and large scale deployment might help reduce the heat island effect, although there are other ways to do this, such as pervious concrete and allocating more space for trees and shade in city designs, solar installations in parking lots could be easily retrofitted without restructuring the already-deployed land use allocation.