AppleCare & AppleCare + are extended warranties NOT insurance. You must be able to bring the old iPhone in for the extended warranty plan. Theft & loss are NOT covered by an extended warranty plan. It is worth noting that AppleCare covers everything that comes in the box & possibly other iPhone related items by Apple (like a dock) that are purchased on the same receipt. Ask at time of purchase. The extended warranty must be purchased at the time that the iPhone is purchased. Otherwise, the iPhone must be checked out by Apple staff in order to qualify for the plan
For loss or theft of an iPhone or any smartphone, review your homeowner's or renter's policy or consider getting a renter's policy from your auto insurer. The rates are usually good, Multi-plan discounts will apply
Cheers !
And most credit cards add at least a year to the warranty of every product you buy. They don't like to advertise those features, but they're pretty easy to use. If you use Amex or most types of Mastercard, you've got this service and can access it by calling the number on the back of your card.
I'll take the possible risk of paying some money over paying up front in case of an accident any day
The mystifying part is a contract smartphone is still like $100/month bill, right? So $200 is pocket change to a smartphone contract victim, its like 2 months service.
I buy insurance for my car because I can't afford a possible million dollar liability settlement out of pocket. Buying $100 of insurance for a $200 loss seems as dumb as buying "oil change insurance" where I could pay only $15/month to avoid the immense expense of paying $30 every quarter for an oil change.
The other part that mystifies be about the story is
I've had the opportunity to file claims with SquareTrade multiple times
My god man, what are you doing? Using your phone as a carpentry hammer? Or the screen as a glass kitchen cutting board? In 15 years I've killed precisely one cellphone, by leaving it in a pants cargo pocket and running it thru the wash. That's $20 down the drain having to buy another new virgin mobile phone.
I think you don't expect broken phones because you don't use iPhones. iPhones break pretty readily because of all the glass and aluminum - a one foot drop onto a hard surface has a solid chance of causing serious damage. They also have issues with heat and humidity that I haven't seen with other phones. A 90 degree F, 90% humid day killed one of mine without any direct sunlight exposure, possibly because of undetected preexisting damage that allowed wet air to get to a bad place and condense when the temperature dropped.
every time I think about it, I realize my old, $100 netBook does the job better than any tablet could in most cases.
Boot time, battery life, and hot laps
I have a netbook with androidx86 installed on it so its basically a keyboard equipped tablet. Doesn't get too much use compared to the ipad because:
Pickup and go "boot" time of androidx86 netbook is about 180 seconds, "boot" time of ipad is about 2 seconds to hit button and unlock
Battery life of netbook is 2 hours, ipad is... I donno but its apparently way longer than I'm willing to work on something in one sitting. Every time I use the netbook I have to plan, OK, now when the battery dies I'll either switch to... or plug in to charge there... or...
Netbook is too hot to handle, literally, after an hour or two. Fan is loud and completely ineffective. ipad never gets too warm to handle and no fan and no cooling vents to block.
I would assume an android tablet is equally useful, not ipad specific... basically my android phone with a bigger screen would be a really nice tablet.
I find I task switch with the ipad a lot. Not switch apps inside the ipad, but in real life. I would not be patient enough to boot up a desktop / laptop / netbook to check the weather. Would I pick up a ipad and "button" "swipe" "click" to check the weather, sure, it only takes 5 seconds. You don't talk about a geographic location in theory, you just google map it. I've got a, one, minute this morning to check my email. Do I spend three minutes booting the desktop or fifteen seconds on the ipad? Lots of little task switching like that.
If you have Windows 7 on your netbook, it would take 1-2 seconds to resume, matching the iPad. If you had a decent netbook, your real useable screen-on-and-doing-stuff battery life on the netbook would be 10 hours, comparable to the iPad. You'd also be able to do a hell of a lot more than you can on the iPad. Typical netbooks are also comparable in temperature to the iPad and have no fans whatsover. In fact, were netbooks ever made with fans? I never saw one so now I'm wondering whether you're just making this up. Everything you describe as slow on your netbook should actually be at least as fast on a netbook as on a tablet.
I don't think tablets suck. Tablets are awesome because of the form factor, the generally awesome displays, and the examples you didn't choose (like reading a book or using a variety of specialized apps to do things netbooks don't do as well). Your examples, however, just show that you're worse at computers than the average dude on the street.
"that largely legalized the George W. Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program"
Sorry for the tangent, but I have a question. Does the constitutional prohibition of ex post facto laws prevent the legalization of illegal activity as a means to annul the culpability of preexisting perpetrators? In other words, should the people involved in warrantless wiretapping before our hideously evil overlords legalized this rape of our rights be culpable for their crimes?
Also, someone do us the favor of linking to a list of the despicable scum in the House who voted in favor of further rape today.
Wow that's baffling. In the biotech industry the interview schedule goes like this: 30 minute phone interview with the HR department to see if you should even talk to the hiring manager. 30-60 minute phone interview with the hiring manager to see if you should have an in person interview. These two steps are serious business and both cull applicants. For the in person interview you fly in (local interviews are rare) on day one, have a one to two hour long dinner with the hiring manager and possibly their boss. Day two you have a one on one interview with the hiring manager, a facilities tour, and then for scientist level positions a 45 minute job talk plus 15 minutes of Q&A, the audience may include those listening in at another facility via skype or whatever. Then you'll round out the day with three to five panel interviews with fellow scientists, probably one panel composed of 3-4 technicians, lunch is another panel interview plus food, a one on one with the hiring manager's boss, usually another one on one with the hiring manager's boss's boss, and then a wrap up with HR and/or the hiring manager. I've never had an interview last less than eight hours and the longest was 13 hours. This is for industry postdocs and scientist I positions, so only a PhD plus 2-7 years experience is expected of the applicant.
That's similar to my field, though I'd give a broader range of 10-24 hours of interviewing for a typical candidate. Thank FSM we don't have such a thing as an "industry postdoc."
Keep in mind that "tech job" on slashdot means programmer, not something that's arguably much more technical like research scientist. And "only a PhD" is a phrase that doesn't really fit with the perspective of the/. audience, either.
Think about that. All those facebook addicts out there. I bet that most of them would be willing to pay $1 a month to use it. That's about $800,000,000 a MONTH in revenue. Even if only half of them sign up that's still $400,000,000. If you pay the dollar you get an add free version and maybe a little more control on how your data is used and shared. People pay to use Dropbox why not facebook?
Facebook already makes almost $4/month/user. An extra $1/month/user wouldn't significantly change their financials. To get in line with comparable stocks in terms of P/E, they'd need you to pay around $20/month. Would you do that?
As more and more of USA industry is nationalized this is exactly where we are heading.
WELCOME TO THE LAND OF THE SOVIETS WHERE LABOR IS FREE
Since Obama's inauguration we've seen a huge drop in public sector employment and an increase in private sector employment. In other words, industry is less and less nationalized on our current trajectory.
What exactly have you been looking for? Are there Windows 8 versions of all of this? Oh wait, your account is brand new, you're obviously a shill. An actual "Android Power User" wouldn't care one jot about Windows Phone.. it's irrelevant really.
I'm an Android "power user" who thinks that Android is a terrible OS, less stable and mature than Windows 3.11. I think that iOS (with which I have experience as a user, but I've never fiddled with the OS) is at the same level as Android. I suspect that Windows Phone is probably also crap, but since it's the major smartphone OS I haven't yet tried I'm interested in giving it a shot before I declare all mobile operating systems garbage. I think that anyone who has spent real time with Android or iOS and has any experience with software or a remotely critical mind would be pretty interested in jumping ship, even if the life raft is probably just as leaky.
He isn't saying that they're shoehorning multiplayer into every game. He's saying that every game should include an online component of some sort, as he says right here. They're not saying that games should all have multiplayer involved. They're saying that they should involve the internet in some way. There is nothing wrong with this. For example, take optional high score challenges in Mirror's Edge. The Sim City example, where online is required, is a bad example because that's just one game and the game was designed to be multiplayer-centric from the start. There are many, many single player games, like Mass Effect, that don't require the multiplayer or online functionality whatsoever. This is just FUD. EA isn't the best company around, sure, but including online features in single player games is definitely possible and it can't always be a bad thing depending on how it's implemented.
Mass Effect is a great example. Thanks for bringing it up. When the series began, Bioware wasn't part of EA and there was no online component. EA's Mass Effect 3, on the other hand, requires players to either pvp or play an awful iPhone game to improve the effectiveness of their forces and unlock the most positive ending. This is the sort of shoehorning EA demands.
So to reiterate my initial claim, now with annoyingly indirect but still strong evidence, the PC platform is both (1) the largest and (2) fastest growing and it has been for many years. And to those linking to today's very nice XKCD, claim (1) means that the comic isn't relevant to claim (2). Anyway, pwned.
Does anyone actually care about microsoft phones? There seems to be a million articles on this site regarding them, and I don't know one person in all the technology people I know that would even glance at a windows phone.
Among the neutral commentators (Anandtech, for instance), WP8 and even WP7 gets the best reviews of any of the major mobile operating systems. If Sprint picks up one of the new Nokias I'll ditch my disappointing GS2 and try a Lumia.
For example, sound and light from the device could be disabled when entering a movie theater, or communications with other devices could be disabled in a science laboratory.
How is that patentable? Not only is a obvious, it is already implemented by various android applications. Tasker probably being the most famous.
Can you now patent stuff people are already doing?
I think it depends on the relative size of legal budgets. There's no way the people behind Tasker, for instance, could win a law suit against Apple about this. In fuzzy fake numerical terms, the ratio of legal budgets is the inverse of the ratio between the legal standards to which the companies is held. If can outspend you by a factor of 10 on lawyers, then you need to be at least 10x more "in the right" to beat them. Considering the money Apple can actually spend on lawyers, they could probably get away with firebombing the homes of indie developers.
On 30th August 2012 00:44 GMT, there was an article on The Register titled "Customers dumping Samsung phones in wake of Apple suit"
Apple CEO Tim Cook might be pleased with the verdict in his company's recent patent legislation against Samsung, but Samsung customers are definitely not, according to the market watchers at mobile phone trade-in firm Gazelle.
"Consumers seem to be jumping ship," Anthony Scarsella, Gazelle's "chief gadget officer," told MarketWatch. "We expect this trend to continue, especially with this latest verdict."
Scarsella says his company, which buys used mobile phones from consumers, has seen a 50 per cent increase in the number of customers looking to unload Samsung kit since Monday alone. The sudden upsurge in supply has led Gazelle to drop the prices it pays for Samsung mobiles by 10 per cent.
So which is it? Buying or dumping?
In the case you cite, it's just speculation by a non-expert backed up by data with an unreasonably small sample size.
Chemical, electrical, mechanical, bio, structural, civil all use evolution in a variety of ways. A lot of computer modeling is done based on genetic algorithms, for instance.
Half of India's population is now in the middle class. It's about time to throw out the old preconceptions about the rising powers of China and India. They simply aren't true any more.
This is wishful thinking or tautological nonsense. India's average income is under $2k per person per year, and that's a dollar-averaged mean - the median earner makes far, far less. Maybe you're simply defining Indian middle class to be some arbitrary number like "between $500 and $5000 of annual income," but that's rather useless. Instead, let's compare this average income to the $10k cost of the car and see that the half of India's population you declare to be middle class won't be buying many of these.
The losers is everybody who depends on innovation. Which is to say everybody, including Apple, though they they will see some short term financial benefits.
That's facile. The opposite decision was reached in the Apple v Microsoft lawsuit back in the day and instead of a golden age of innovation we got a computing dark age. Microsoft didn't really understand the GUI (according to some they still don't) and it took them years after their copy job to come up with anything halfway decent. Likewise Samsung doesn't know the first thing about building a mobile computing platform, just enough to skin someone else's OS and copy some hardware once they see what works. Innovation is what was protected here today. If you want to argue the right to copy that's fine, but innovation it is not.
Right, the 90s were a computing dark age. You've convinced me, Mr. Internet Guy!
What makes a 4:3 ratio so much better than a 16:9 ratio for your monitor?
I think that 16:10 is nice, through something in between 4:3 and 16:10 would be ideal. Much of the work I do involves source documents and a working document. Since most of those are formatted for the 8.5" x 11" written page, a 16:10.3 monitor is the right size to hold two. Given some additional space for menus, a taskbar, etc., I think that the idea ratio is about 16:10.5.
Many games make most of their PC sales because of mods. ARMA2 is a good example given by another poster, but each and every Bethesda game is an even bigger one.
What do you mean rebirth? PC gaming is in full swing..
Nor was it ever in serious decline if you look at sales data (hint, right now it's the biggest gaming platform and the fastest growing), but the meta-narrative has asserted its decline for years.
Imho, too much science these days is just vague statistical studies.
Where are the times when science was about actually discovering new things, where you could actually see the effect of it?
Keep in mind that your personal view of science is determined by the pop-culture articles you read, or in this case the pop-culture summary of a pop-culture article referring to a particular scientific paper. I assure you that the "times when science was about actually discovering new things" are still upon us.
Slashdot Mirror
AppleCare & AppleCare + are extended warranties NOT insurance. You must be able to bring the old iPhone in for the extended warranty plan. Theft & loss are NOT covered by an extended warranty plan. It is worth noting that AppleCare covers everything that comes in the box & possibly other iPhone related items by Apple (like a dock) that are purchased on the same receipt. Ask at time of purchase. The extended warranty must be purchased at the time that the iPhone is purchased. Otherwise, the iPhone must be checked out by Apple staff in order to qualify for the plan
For loss or theft of an iPhone or any smartphone, review your homeowner's or renter's policy or consider getting a renter's policy from your auto insurer. The rates are usually good, Multi-plan discounts will apply
Cheers !
And most credit cards add at least a year to the warranty of every product you buy. They don't like to advertise those features, but they're pretty easy to use. If you use Amex or most types of Mastercard, you've got this service and can access it by calling the number on the back of your card.
I'll take the possible risk of paying some money over paying up front in case of an accident any day
The mystifying part is a contract smartphone is still like $100/month bill, right? So $200 is pocket change to a smartphone contract victim, its like 2 months service.
I buy insurance for my car because I can't afford a possible million dollar liability settlement out of pocket. Buying $100 of insurance for a $200 loss seems as dumb as buying "oil change insurance" where I could pay only $15/month to avoid the immense expense of paying $30 every quarter for an oil change.
The other part that mystifies be about the story is
I've had the opportunity to file claims with SquareTrade multiple times
My god man, what are you doing? Using your phone as a carpentry hammer? Or the screen as a glass kitchen cutting board? In 15 years I've killed precisely one cellphone, by leaving it in a pants cargo pocket and running it thru the wash. That's $20 down the drain having to buy another new virgin mobile phone.
I think you don't expect broken phones because you don't use iPhones. iPhones break pretty readily because of all the glass and aluminum - a one foot drop onto a hard surface has a solid chance of causing serious damage. They also have issues with heat and humidity that I haven't seen with other phones. A 90 degree F, 90% humid day killed one of mine without any direct sunlight exposure, possibly because of undetected preexisting damage that allowed wet air to get to a bad place and condense when the temperature dropped.
every time I think about it, I realize my old, $100 netBook does the job better than any tablet could in most cases.
Boot time, battery life, and hot laps
I have a netbook with androidx86 installed on it so its basically a keyboard equipped tablet. Doesn't get too much use compared to the ipad because:
Pickup and go "boot" time of androidx86 netbook is about 180 seconds, "boot" time of ipad is about 2 seconds to hit button and unlock
Battery life of netbook is 2 hours, ipad is ... I donno but its apparently way longer than I'm willing to work on something in one sitting. Every time I use the netbook I have to plan, OK, now when the battery dies I'll either switch to ... or plug in to charge there... or ...
Netbook is too hot to handle, literally, after an hour or two. Fan is loud and completely ineffective. ipad never gets too warm to handle and no fan and no cooling vents to block.
I would assume an android tablet is equally useful, not ipad specific... basically my android phone with a bigger screen would be a really nice tablet.
I find I task switch with the ipad a lot. Not switch apps inside the ipad, but in real life. I would not be patient enough to boot up a desktop / laptop / netbook to check the weather. Would I pick up a ipad and "button" "swipe" "click" to check the weather, sure, it only takes 5 seconds. You don't talk about a geographic location in theory, you just google map it. I've got a, one, minute this morning to check my email. Do I spend three minutes booting the desktop or fifteen seconds on the ipad? Lots of little task switching like that.
If you have Windows 7 on your netbook, it would take 1-2 seconds to resume, matching the iPad. If you had a decent netbook, your real useable screen-on-and-doing-stuff battery life on the netbook would be 10 hours, comparable to the iPad. You'd also be able to do a hell of a lot more than you can on the iPad. Typical netbooks are also comparable in temperature to the iPad and have no fans whatsover. In fact, were netbooks ever made with fans? I never saw one so now I'm wondering whether you're just making this up. Everything you describe as slow on your netbook should actually be at least as fast on a netbook as on a tablet.
I don't think tablets suck. Tablets are awesome because of the form factor, the generally awesome displays, and the examples you didn't choose (like reading a book or using a variety of specialized apps to do things netbooks don't do as well). Your examples, however, just show that you're worse at computers than the average dude on the street.
"that largely legalized the George W. Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program"
Sorry for the tangent, but I have a question. Does the constitutional prohibition of ex post facto laws prevent the legalization of illegal activity as a means to annul the culpability of preexisting perpetrators? In other words, should the people involved in warrantless wiretapping before our hideously evil overlords legalized this rape of our rights be culpable for their crimes?
Also, someone do us the favor of linking to a list of the despicable scum in the House who voted in favor of further rape today.
Why make them work on YOUR problem, unpaid? Just get them to submit some code they wrote to you.
--PM
And standardized tests should be replaced with "give me a recent problem set of your choice in calc."
Wow that's baffling. In the biotech industry the interview schedule goes like this: 30 minute phone interview with the HR department to see if you should even talk to the hiring manager. 30-60 minute phone interview with the hiring manager to see if you should have an in person interview. These two steps are serious business and both cull applicants. For the in person interview you fly in (local interviews are rare) on day one, have a one to two hour long dinner with the hiring manager and possibly their boss. Day two you have a one on one interview with the hiring manager, a facilities tour, and then for scientist level positions a 45 minute job talk plus 15 minutes of Q&A, the audience may include those listening in at another facility via skype or whatever. Then you'll round out the day with three to five panel interviews with fellow scientists, probably one panel composed of 3-4 technicians, lunch is another panel interview plus food, a one on one with the hiring manager's boss, usually another one on one with the hiring manager's boss's boss, and then a wrap up with HR and/or the hiring manager. I've never had an interview last less than eight hours and the longest was 13 hours. This is for industry postdocs and scientist I positions, so only a PhD plus 2-7 years experience is expected of the applicant.
That's similar to my field, though I'd give a broader range of 10-24 hours of interviewing for a typical candidate. Thank FSM we don't have such a thing as an "industry postdoc."
Keep in mind that "tech job" on slashdot means programmer, not something that's arguably much more technical like research scientist. And "only a PhD" is a phrase that doesn't really fit with the perspective of the /. audience, either.
This point is true and that's the reason they give, but it's more bogus H.R. reasoning and it turns out to be an excuse.
Anyone will move on if they are given a better opportunity, not just the overqualified.
But the overqualified are more likely to find a better opportunity.
Think about that. All those facebook addicts out there. I bet that most of them would be willing to pay $1 a month to use it. That's about $800,000,000 a MONTH in revenue. Even if only half of them sign up that's still $400,000,000. If you pay the dollar you get an add free version and maybe a little more control on how your data is used and shared. People pay to use Dropbox why not facebook?
Facebook already makes almost $4/month/user. An extra $1/month/user wouldn't significantly change their financials. To get in line with comparable stocks in terms of P/E, they'd need you to pay around $20/month. Would you do that?
I see, most of the drones here do not.
As more and more of USA industry is nationalized this is exactly where we are heading.
WELCOME TO THE LAND OF THE SOVIETS WHERE LABOR IS FREE
Since Obama's inauguration we've seen a huge drop in public sector employment and an increase in private sector employment. In other words, industry is less and less nationalized on our current trajectory.
What exactly have you been looking for? Are there Windows 8 versions of all of this? Oh wait, your account is brand new, you're obviously a shill. An actual "Android Power User" wouldn't care one jot about Windows Phone.. it's irrelevant really.
I'm an Android "power user" who thinks that Android is a terrible OS, less stable and mature than Windows 3.11. I think that iOS (with which I have experience as a user, but I've never fiddled with the OS) is at the same level as Android. I suspect that Windows Phone is probably also crap, but since it's the major smartphone OS I haven't yet tried I'm interested in giving it a shot before I declare all mobile operating systems garbage. I think that anyone who has spent real time with Android or iOS and has any experience with software or a remotely critical mind would be pretty interested in jumping ship, even if the life raft is probably just as leaky.
He isn't saying that they're shoehorning multiplayer into every game. He's saying that every game should include an online component of some sort, as he says right here. They're not saying that games should all have multiplayer involved. They're saying that they should involve the internet in some way. There is nothing wrong with this. For example, take optional high score challenges in Mirror's Edge. The Sim City example, where online is required, is a bad example because that's just one game and the game was designed to be multiplayer-centric from the start. There are many, many single player games, like Mass Effect, that don't require the multiplayer or online functionality whatsoever. This is just FUD. EA isn't the best company around, sure, but including online features in single player games is definitely possible and it can't always be a bad thing depending on how it's implemented.
Mass Effect is a great example. Thanks for bringing it up. When the series began, Bioware wasn't part of EA and there was no online component. EA's Mass Effect 3, on the other hand, requires players to either pvp or play an awful iPhone game to improve the effectiveness of their forces and unlock the most positive ending. This is the sort of shoehorning EA demands.
Yes, and he asserted it with zero evidence.
I assumed we all remembered the quarterly stories reminding us. I'm at work now so it's hard to the most relevant sites, but here are two links:
http://vr-zone.com/articles/pc-gaming-fastest-growing-platform/16749.html to support the "fastest growing" claim and http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-pc-console-sales-battlefield-3-bf3-pc-gaming,13499.html to compare PC game software sales to the sum of all console sales. It doesn't show PC game sales vs. each individual console, which is related to my claim, but notice that in 2008 PC game software sales were over 50% of the total sales of all consoles combined and since then that fraction has been growing every year.
So to reiterate my initial claim, now with annoyingly indirect but still strong evidence, the PC platform is both (1) the largest and (2) fastest growing and it has been for many years. And to those linking to today's very nice XKCD, claim (1) means that the comic isn't relevant to claim (2). Anyway, pwned.
Does anyone actually care about microsoft phones? There seems to be a million articles on this site
regarding them, and I don't know one person in all the technology people I know that would even glance
at a windows phone.
Among the neutral commentators (Anandtech, for instance), WP8 and even WP7 gets the best reviews of any of the major mobile operating systems. If Sprint picks up one of the new Nokias I'll ditch my disappointing GS2 and try a Lumia.
My Droid 1 is running ICS and will soon run JB.
That is the advantage of an open source OS.
What advantage? The iPhone 3GS was released a few months before the Droid and the 3GS runs the latest version of iOS 5 and will soon be running iOS 6.
The 3GS is painfully slow in iOS5. It's good that it works, but users should be warned before upgrading.
Eventually, devs will move back to the PC
No, eventually MS/Sony/Nintendo will release a new generation of consoles. But do keep dreaming.
In terms of sales the PC is the largest and fastest growing game platform every single quarter.
For example, sound and light from the device could be disabled when entering a movie theater, or communications with other devices could be disabled in a science laboratory.
How is that patentable?
Not only is a obvious, it is already implemented by various android applications. Tasker probably being the most famous.
Can you now patent stuff people are already doing?
I think it depends on the relative size of legal budgets. There's no way the people behind Tasker, for instance, could win a law suit against Apple about this. In fuzzy fake numerical terms, the ratio of legal budgets is the inverse of the ratio between the legal standards to which the companies is held. If can outspend you by a factor of 10 on lawyers, then you need to be at least 10x more "in the right" to beat them. Considering the money Apple can actually spend on lawyers, they could probably get away with firebombing the homes of indie developers.
On 30th August 2012 00:44 GMT, there was an article on The Register titled "Customers dumping Samsung phones in wake of Apple suit"
Apple CEO Tim Cook might be pleased with the verdict in his company's recent patent legislation against Samsung, but Samsung customers are definitely not, according to the market watchers at mobile phone trade-in firm Gazelle.
"Consumers seem to be jumping ship," Anthony Scarsella, Gazelle's "chief gadget officer," told MarketWatch. "We expect this trend to continue, especially with this latest verdict."
Scarsella says his company, which buys used mobile phones from consumers, has seen a 50 per cent increase in the number of customers looking to unload Samsung kit since Monday alone. The sudden upsurge in supply has led Gazelle to drop the prices it pays for Samsung mobiles by 10 per cent.
So which is it? Buying or dumping?
In the case you cite, it's just speculation by a non-expert backed up by data with an unreasonably small sample size.
Chemical, electrical, mechanical, bio, structural, civil all use evolution in a variety of ways. A lot of computer modeling is done based on genetic algorithms, for instance.
Half of India's population is now in the middle class.
It's about time to throw out the old preconceptions about the rising powers of China and India. They simply aren't true any more.
This is wishful thinking or tautological nonsense. India's average income is under $2k per person per year, and that's a dollar-averaged mean - the median earner makes far, far less. Maybe you're simply defining Indian middle class to be some arbitrary number like "between $500 and $5000 of annual income," but that's rather useless. Instead, let's compare this average income to the $10k cost of the car and see that the half of India's population you declare to be middle class won't be buying many of these.
The losers is everybody who depends on innovation. Which is to say everybody, including Apple, though they they will see some short term financial benefits.
That's facile. The opposite decision was reached in the Apple v Microsoft lawsuit back in the day and instead of a golden age of innovation we got a computing dark age. Microsoft didn't really understand the GUI (according to some they still don't) and it took them years after their copy job to come up with anything halfway decent. Likewise Samsung doesn't know the first thing about building a mobile computing platform, just enough to skin someone else's OS and copy some hardware once they see what works. Innovation is what was protected here today. If you want to argue the right to copy that's fine, but innovation it is not.
Right, the 90s were a computing dark age. You've convinced me, Mr. Internet Guy!
What makes a 4:3 ratio so much better than a 16:9 ratio for your monitor?
I think that 16:10 is nice, through something in between 4:3 and 16:10 would be ideal. Much of the work I do involves source documents and a working document. Since most of those are formatted for the 8.5" x 11" written page, a 16:10.3 monitor is the right size to hold two. Given some additional space for menus, a taskbar, etc., I think that the idea ratio is about 16:10.5.
How much do I make off mods?
Nothing
Many games make most of their PC sales because of mods. ARMA2 is a good example given by another poster, but each and every Bethesda game is an even bigger one.
What do you mean rebirth?
PC gaming is in full swing..
Nor was it ever in serious decline if you look at sales data (hint, right now it's the biggest gaming platform and the fastest growing), but the meta-narrative has asserted its decline for years.
Why spend $2k on a pc rig, in order to play a game that I can play for free on onlive?
Because OnLive will cause you to hit your ISP's monthly cap earlier. Or because not all games are on OnLive.
Or because OnLive under the very best conditions has terrible graphical degradation and noticeable input lag.
Imho, too much science these days is just vague statistical studies.
Where are the times when science was about actually discovering new things, where you could actually see the effect of it?
Keep in mind that your personal view of science is determined by the pop-culture articles you read, or in this case the pop-culture summary of a pop-culture article referring to a particular scientific paper. I assure you that the "times when science was about actually discovering new things" are still upon us.