I'm about ready to grab a sledgehammer and start forcibly tattooing this mantra into the heads of every internet commenter and Slashdot editor who has to complain about the evils of Apple's walled garden: If you don't like it, don't buy it. For Christ's sake, no one is holding a gun to your head and making you buy Apple products. There are, and always will be*, alternatives. Apple gives people a tradeoff: stability and easy of use at the cost of freedom and configurability. Just because you don't like that tradeoff, doesn't mean it's not useful and convenient for others, and when you whine about it, all you're really doing is revealing that you deeply desire an iPad. Put your money where your mouth is by shutting up and buying something is.
* And yes, I've heard all the FUD about how Apple's practices are going to tempt other manufacturers into doing the same thing they are. Give me a break.
This is all just a conspiracy by the liberal media to destroy an American pasttime. There's still no REAL proof that football causes any blane dibblage.
For those who are too lazy to RTFA, here's a very simplified explanation of what's going on:
In current drives a bunch of rather randomly sized and shaped magnetic grains are basically "glued" to the surface of the drive, and the collective orientation of a certain number of those grains (called a domain) determines whether you've got a 1 or a 0.
In this, instead of dumping grains onto the surface, they're using lithography to carve very precise grains onto the disk, which can be made much smaller and more identical in shape, than the random ones allowing for vastly higher storage densities. It's basically applying the same technology used to make computer chips to make hard drives. The technology has actually existed for a while, but the cost per bit to pattern lithograph a hard drive has always been huge; I guess Toshiba has figured out how to bring it under control. Cool stuff.
I'm sorry, I should've been more clear. 100% hydrogen does not explode, but it explodes at a wide range of concentrations in air under ordinary atmospheric pressure (see here), which is quite dangerous enough to bar its use in an airship- a burn starts, leaking hydrogen into the air, which can explode when enough has escaped. Gasoline can explode too but has a much narrower range of concentrations when mixed with air (something like 7% as opposed to 70% for hydrogen). That's what I meant by my above statement.
What on Earth are you two talking about? The incendiary paint theory is deader than dead, it's on the same plane as Moon landing hoaxes. Christ, even the Mythbusters tanked that one, although if you like your science rigorous, there's plenty of documented proof too.
Hydrogen is the correct answer, but people don't want to hear it because of the images of the Hindenburg crash.
This is ridiculous. The Hindenburg crash isn't 9/11: it was nigh 80 years ago and I'm not even distantly related to anyone who died on it. I have no emotional connection to the disaster whatsodamnedever. I reject hydrogen in airships because it's dangerous as hell. There are just too many potential sources of ignition (sparks from machinery, static discharge) for it ever to be safe enough for flight, if we hold it to the same standards of safety that commercial jets are.
Gasoline burns hotter than hydrogen, but thanks to the Hindenburg crash video, we don't have hydrogen cars either.
Gasoline burns, hydrogen explodes. There's a difference. And the issues with hydrogen cars are a multi-paragraph post that I don't feel like writing right now, but (lousy energy density, present impossibility of storage, no infrastructure) are the main reasons, not lingering Hindenburg memories.
Who on earth modded GP Insightful?
I don't know if/how it applies to the rest of the country, but this came up in California when the DEA started doing flyovers with thermal cameras to find pot growers. IANAL, but the gist of the rulings was that you have no expectation of privacy for something visible to the public (so you could be fined for hate speech on the front of your house, for instance), and that since airways are public space (see United States v. Causby- most notably "The common law doctrine that ownership of land extends to the periphery of the universe has no place in the modern world" and "The air above the minimum safe altitude of flight prescribed by the Civil Aeronautics Authority is a public highway and part of the public domain"), anything visible from them is fair game as far as evidence is concerned.
This story is somewhat of a dupe (too lazy to look up the original, though it was less than a year ago), and this point was brought up then too.
When you're talking about advanced aircraft, the "25 years effect" is not the same as it is for overhyped things like fusion power; here, there's actually a reason. Aircraft take a loooooooong time to go from concept to flight: recall that Airbus starting thinking about the A380 in 1988, made it an official project in 1994, and it started commercial flight in 2007. And that's for a conservative design that was just building on existing principles. For a radical, untested design it would be considerably longer. Looking at it from that point of view, 2035 is actually a very reasonable target.
Re:What's the deal with eldavojohn
on
Beautiful Data
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· Score: 3, Funny
Let me respond in the Socratic way, by answering your question with one of my own: did you buy that 4-digit UID, or have you just been living under a rock since you registered in '98?
It's almost as if they're deliberately trying to confuse customers, to get them to buy the wrong cable twice and then pay Geek Squad $130 an hour to explain to them which cable to use and how to set it up probably.
You're missing the point. It's not about "being nice"; if you were really being nice you'd just release it into the public domain. If you're not willing to enforce the terms of a license, then it's the same as not using one. You can moan, "But I'm using Creative Commons!" all you want, but unless you sue, from the corporation's perspective it's the same as if the material had been public domain, since they're not seeing any consequences. Submitter is trying to have it both ways, all of the protections of copyright/licenses with none of the effort. It doesn't work that way.
Suing's all you've got, it's all big corporations will pay attention to. They just shrug off DMCA notices, because a DMCA notice is a piece of paper until it becomes a lawsuit. If you're not willing to suck it up and do it, then you shouldn't be surprised when they walk all over you. When people learn that actions have no consequences, they tend to repeat them.
On the bright side, there have been successful suits brought against CC violators.
1. More cores means lower clock speed, by necessity, because it means more power consumption, so you have to turn down the frequency to keep the TDP the same. This doesn't mean you have to get cheated out of clock speed though. You will note that Apple is not forcing you to get the 12-core version: 8- and 6- core versions are available at higher speeds.
2. What you need out of the architecture depends on what you're doing. Many Mac Pro customers are doing embarrassingly parallel workloads like 3-D rendering, where increasing your cores increases your performance almost linearly. That's a way better tradeoff then a couple percent of performance from a higher clock rate. Or, if that's not what you're doing, you can get the faster chips, see above.
3. Yeah, architecture matters, but... the architecture's all the same? No matter which core count/frequency you get, they're all Xeon chips, they're all Nehalem. It's not like you have another choice. And for my money, Nehalem is a damn good architecture for workstation/server machines (laptops, less so, but it's still an improvement over Core 2).
Thank you. For the/.ers who are (still) unclear about this, having a monopoly is not illegal. IBM is basically the only company left selling mainframes; it's not their fault if everyone else chose to leave what is an incredibly high-risk market that requires oodles of investment. Similarly, tying your hardware to your software is not illegal in itself either (so you can stop clamoring for antitrust litigation against Apple).
What's illegal is abusing a monopoly, you have to have both a dominant market position and anticompetitive activity like software/hardware lock-in before the government has a case. Which I think they do, in this instance.
Quelle surprise. Does Slashdot display any Unicode characters correctly, apart from English letters and punctuation? I think I saw some madman use the British pound symbol once, but that was Dark Magic and he was burned at the stake.
I've never discovered a vulnerability in Windows or anything else, but if I did I'd be fine to sit it for as long as needed, as long as Microsoft got back to me and said "Yeah, we're working on it, here's when you can expect a fix." What's maddening (and actually Microsoft seems to be good about this, it's Apple and Oracle that are the worst offenders) is when someone sends a bug report into a black hole, never hearing anything from the company for months and months. At that point, I see no reason why the researcher shouldn't just publish to the world. The company clearly doesn't take security seriously, why should he?
Not really. Lasers are strongly attenuated in air, especially in the humid air in marine environments. Trying to get around this problem is the reason we're just getting weapons like this now, as opposed to thirty years ago, and even now they're limited to short ranges.
*) Better accuracy
Yes and no. In order to heat up the target's surface enough to cause destruction, you either need to focus the laser on the exact same spot for long enough time, or just crank the power up and/or widen the beam enough so that it doesn't matter. The first has proven almost impossible, and so we've resorted to the second.
*) Unlimited ammunition
No. There are two kinds of lasers in consideration by the military: chemical and solid-state. Chemical lasers need tons of (duh) chemicals to form the reaction that generates the laser light, and when you run out, you're done shooting. Solid-state lasers require heavy amounts of electricity, which needs to come from somewhere.
*) No pollution from spent weapons
Again, no. Chemical lasers leave behind highly toxic waste products when the reactants are expended; that's the main reason why they're not in heavy use in the military today. Solid-state lasers leave behind pollution from whatever power source you use to generate the electricity.
I'm not saying lasers are awful tools, they're certainly useful in specific applications. But they're not the Wunderwaffen you're making them out to be.
You're missing the point. The point is that instead of the windmills dumping their dangerously varying loads straight into the grid, use them to charge something like this, which can be discharged (even simultaneously) at a steady pace, and that's what goes into the grid.
I'm not sure this technology is really necessary though. Magnetic flywheels achieve similar efficiencies and they've been around forever. What improvement does this offer?
as soon as they start issuing salaries that are competitive with the private sector. When I was at university job fairs last year, entry level positions at Microsoft offered almost 50% more than equivalent government jobs, and the latter seemed to have better career opportunities later in life. Not sure if this applies to all professions, or just programmers/computer scientists, but that's who they want apparently.
I have heard that at the moment wages are increasing faster in the government than the private sector due to the recession, but that's a temporary situation at best.
Well, "cognitive dissonance" has always been sort of an armchair theory, there have always been people who doubt that it actually even exists, and that its effects can just as easily be explained by other psychological phenomena (and I have to say, seeing the Tea Partiers who parade around with signs like "Get the Government out of my Medicaid!" without the slightest hint of irony seems to lend credence to this opinion). This is an experiment which evaluates a behavior, instead of creating a theory to fit observed behaviors. So, no, it's not really the same.
Are you familiar with the saying, "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity"? If you read their post announcing the turn-around, they say very clearly, "We did this because we thought it would improve the quality of the forums, and having heard your reaction, we're not going to do it." They thought they were acting in the best of their customers. Yeah, it was an appallingly stupid idea, but one with good intentions.
You can call me naive if you want, but ask yourself: what the hell does Blizzard gain from you posting your real name on their forums? They already know it from your subscription info, it's not like you're giving them new data. It makes no difference to them whatsoever. That's the problem with conspiracy theories: people come up with them before realizing that the conspiracy would not provide any benefit to the alleged conspirators if true
This was just a lousy call by well-meaning individuals, and the fact that they did such a complete turnarond is a positive sign that Blizzard does care about their customers.
Maybe some biologists can answer this.. but why haven't humans or other mammalian species evolved to see/detect/transmit infrared or microwave radio? It seems that long neurons could act as conductor antennas. No evolutionary advantage? Just the night sensing possibilities alone seem worthwhile.
-molo
That's pretty much it. The reason we've evolved to be able to see the frequencies we can see is that those are the most useful. For example, at an extreme end, if your eyes could only see gamma radiation, everything would be completely black all the time, unless you were right next to some radioactive material. Microwaves too would be pretty useless from an evolutionary standpoint: there are basically no sources of naturally occurring microwaves on earth; again, if you could only see in microwaves, you'd be in darkness (at least, before humans started making artificial ones). Keep in mind also that the atmosphere blocks huge swathes of the EM spectrum, and so evolution would necessarily only produce creatures able to see the remaining parts.
Near infrared and UV would seem more useful (and some animals can see in those regions), but remember that every enhancement to your capabilities requires more energy and biological complexity, and so puts you at an evolutionary disadvantage unless your extra capability makes up for it. Evidently, for humans, the benefit of seeing IF and UV didn't make up for the cost, so we can't do it.
Yeah, there are way too many movies which use CGI as a substitute for decent plot, but it sort of irks me when people (typically artsy snobs) generalize this to say that CGI alone is always insufficient to make a film. I won't pretend there aren't movies that I enjoy just for the eye candy, if it's good enough; film is a sensory experience, after all. Avatar had no plot to speak of, and was carried along just by the visuals, but I felt I got my money's worth. You're of course welcome to disagree, but try to understand that movies are entertainment, and can qualify as "entertainment" for different reasons, including looking really pretty. Tron Legacy might be like that.
Can you say "entitlement complex"? Compared to all the digital offerings from Hollywood up until now, this is a godsend: for a fraction of the price of a cable subscription, you are getting unlimited streaming, on as many devices as you want, over Wi-Fi or 3G, and (for some shows) access to not just current episodes but the entire back catalog. Three years ago I'd have sworn the seas would boil before we would get something like this. As several other comments are pointing out, providing these shows means that both bandwidth and content have to be paid for: the fee does one, the ads do the other. You know, the way television has worked for decades.
And for god's sake, the ads on Hulu are as un-irritating as advertising can possibly be. Over the course of a 40-minute show, you have to watch maybe five 30-second spots, as opposed to eight or ten per break on television.
Get off your high horse and understand that things need to be paid for, and that this is as fantastic a deal as we're ever going to get.
Kudos to this guy for answering a curiosity of mine: I've always wondered what would actually happen if I sent a bunch of e-mails with phrases like "bomb the G20 summit", "death to the capitalist swine" and "one hundred pounds of nitrated fertilizer". I guess now we know.
Whenever you install an application on Android, you're given a list of permissions the application wants to have in order to run, including accessing your data and making phone calls. You have to explicitly agree to this list before the app is installed. Is CNET saying that a fifth of Android apps can get your data, despite those permissions not appearing in the list? Because if they're not, this is a pointless "Well, duh" story: the user was told what the application is doing. If they just breeze through and click "OK" when that's clearly inappropriate (i.e., a tip calculator really shouldn't be requesting access to your call log), that's their damn problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm about ready to grab a sledgehammer and start forcibly tattooing this mantra into the heads of every internet commenter and Slashdot editor who has to complain about the evils of Apple's walled garden: If you don't like it, don't buy it. For Christ's sake, no one is holding a gun to your head and making you buy Apple products. There are, and always will be*, alternatives. Apple gives people a tradeoff: stability and easy of use at the cost of freedom and configurability. Just because you don't like that tradeoff, doesn't mean it's not useful and convenient for others, and when you whine about it, all you're really doing is revealing that you deeply desire an iPad. Put your money where your mouth is by shutting up and buying something is.
* And yes, I've heard all the FUD about how Apple's practices are going to tempt other manufacturers into doing the same thing they are. Give me a break.
This is all just a conspiracy by the liberal media to destroy an American pasttime. There's still no REAL proof that football causes any blane dibblage.
For those who are too lazy to RTFA, here's a very simplified explanation of what's going on:
In current drives a bunch of rather randomly sized and shaped magnetic grains are basically "glued" to the surface of the drive, and the collective orientation of a certain number of those grains (called a domain) determines whether you've got a 1 or a 0.
In this, instead of dumping grains onto the surface, they're using lithography to carve very precise grains onto the disk, which can be made much smaller and more identical in shape, than the random ones allowing for vastly higher storage densities. It's basically applying the same technology used to make computer chips to make hard drives. The technology has actually existed for a while, but the cost per bit to pattern lithograph a hard drive has always been huge; I guess Toshiba has figured out how to bring it under control. Cool stuff.
I'm sorry, I should've been more clear. 100% hydrogen does not explode, but it explodes at a wide range of concentrations in air under ordinary atmospheric pressure (see here), which is quite dangerous enough to bar its use in an airship- a burn starts, leaking hydrogen into the air, which can explode when enough has escaped. Gasoline can explode too but has a much narrower range of concentrations when mixed with air (something like 7% as opposed to 70% for hydrogen). That's what I meant by my above statement.
Hydrogen is the correct answer, but people don't want to hear it because of the images of the Hindenburg crash.
This is ridiculous. The Hindenburg crash isn't 9/11: it was nigh 80 years ago and I'm not even distantly related to anyone who died on it. I have no emotional connection to the disaster whatsodamnedever. I reject hydrogen in airships because it's dangerous as hell. There are just too many potential sources of ignition (sparks from machinery, static discharge) for it ever to be safe enough for flight, if we hold it to the same standards of safety that commercial jets are.
Gasoline burns hotter than hydrogen, but thanks to the Hindenburg crash video, we don't have hydrogen cars either.
Gasoline burns, hydrogen explodes. There's a difference. And the issues with hydrogen cars are a multi-paragraph post that I don't feel like writing right now, but (lousy energy density, present impossibility of storage, no infrastructure) are the main reasons, not lingering Hindenburg memories. Who on earth modded GP Insightful?
I don't know if/how it applies to the rest of the country, but this came up in California when the DEA started doing flyovers with thermal cameras to find pot growers. IANAL, but the gist of the rulings was that you have no expectation of privacy for something visible to the public (so you could be fined for hate speech on the front of your house, for instance), and that since airways are public space (see United States v. Causby- most notably "The common law doctrine that ownership of land extends to the periphery of the universe has no place in the modern world" and "The air above the minimum safe altitude of flight prescribed by the Civil Aeronautics Authority is a public highway and part of the public domain"), anything visible from them is fair game as far as evidence is concerned.
This story is somewhat of a dupe (too lazy to look up the original, though it was less than a year ago), and this point was brought up then too.
When you're talking about advanced aircraft, the "25 years effect" is not the same as it is for overhyped things like fusion power; here, there's actually a reason. Aircraft take a loooooooong time to go from concept to flight: recall that Airbus starting thinking about the A380 in 1988, made it an official project in 1994, and it started commercial flight in 2007. And that's for a conservative design that was just building on existing principles. For a radical, untested design it would be considerably longer. Looking at it from that point of view, 2035 is actually a very reasonable target.
Let me respond in the Socratic way, by answering your question with one of my own: did you buy that 4-digit UID, or have you just been living under a rock since you registered in '98?
It's almost as if they're deliberately trying to confuse customers, to get them to buy the wrong cable twice and then pay Geek Squad $130 an hour to explain to them which cable to use and how to set it up probably.
But that would be crazy.
You're missing the point. It's not about "being nice"; if you were really being nice you'd just release it into the public domain. If you're not willing to enforce the terms of a license, then it's the same as not using one. You can moan, "But I'm using Creative Commons!" all you want, but unless you sue, from the corporation's perspective it's the same as if the material had been public domain, since they're not seeing any consequences. Submitter is trying to have it both ways, all of the protections of copyright/licenses with none of the effort. It doesn't work that way.
Suing's all you've got, it's all big corporations will pay attention to. They just shrug off DMCA notices, because a DMCA notice is a piece of paper until it becomes a lawsuit. If you're not willing to suck it up and do it, then you shouldn't be surprised when they walk all over you. When people learn that actions have no consequences, they tend to repeat them.
On the bright side, there have been successful suits brought against CC violators.
Three points:
1. More cores means lower clock speed, by necessity, because it means more power consumption, so you have to turn down the frequency to keep the TDP the same. This doesn't mean you have to get cheated out of clock speed though. You will note that Apple is not forcing you to get the 12-core version: 8- and 6- core versions are available at higher speeds.
2. What you need out of the architecture depends on what you're doing. Many Mac Pro customers are doing embarrassingly parallel workloads like 3-D rendering, where increasing your cores increases your performance almost linearly. That's a way better tradeoff then a couple percent of performance from a higher clock rate. Or, if that's not what you're doing, you can get the faster chips, see above.
3. Yeah, architecture matters, but... the architecture's all the same? No matter which core count/frequency you get, they're all Xeon chips, they're all Nehalem. It's not like you have another choice. And for my money, Nehalem is a damn good architecture for workstation/server machines (laptops, less so, but it's still an improvement over Core 2).
Thank you. For the /.ers who are (still) unclear about this, having a monopoly is not illegal. IBM is basically the only company left selling mainframes; it's not their fault if everyone else chose to leave what is an incredibly high-risk market that requires oodles of investment. Similarly, tying your hardware to your software is not illegal in itself either (so you can stop clamoring for antitrust litigation against Apple).
What's illegal is abusing a monopoly, you have to have both a dominant market position and anticompetitive activity like software/hardware lock-in before the government has a case. Which I think they do, in this instance.
Quelle surprise. Does Slashdot display any Unicode characters correctly, apart from English letters and punctuation? I think I saw some madman use the British pound symbol once, but that was Dark Magic and he was burned at the stake.
I've never discovered a vulnerability in Windows or anything else, but if I did I'd be fine to sit it for as long as needed, as long as Microsoft got back to me and said "Yeah, we're working on it, here's when you can expect a fix." What's maddening (and actually Microsoft seems to be good about this, it's Apple and Oracle that are the worst offenders) is when someone sends a bug report into a black hole, never hearing anything from the company for months and months. At that point, I see no reason why the researcher shouldn't just publish to the world. The company clearly doesn't take security seriously, why should he?
*) Longer range
Not really. Lasers are strongly attenuated in air, especially in the humid air in marine environments. Trying to get around this problem is the reason we're just getting weapons like this now, as opposed to thirty years ago, and even now they're limited to short ranges.
*) Better accuracy
Yes and no. In order to heat up the target's surface enough to cause destruction, you either need to focus the laser on the exact same spot for long enough time, or just crank the power up and/or widen the beam enough so that it doesn't matter. The first has proven almost impossible, and so we've resorted to the second.
*) Unlimited ammunition
No. There are two kinds of lasers in consideration by the military: chemical and solid-state. Chemical lasers need tons of (duh) chemicals to form the reaction that generates the laser light, and when you run out, you're done shooting. Solid-state lasers require heavy amounts of electricity, which needs to come from somewhere.
*) No pollution from spent weapons
Again, no. Chemical lasers leave behind highly toxic waste products when the reactants are expended; that's the main reason why they're not in heavy use in the military today. Solid-state lasers leave behind pollution from whatever power source you use to generate the electricity.
I'm not saying lasers are awful tools, they're certainly useful in specific applications. But they're not the Wunderwaffen you're making them out to be.
You're missing the point. The point is that instead of the windmills dumping their dangerously varying loads straight into the grid, use them to charge something like this, which can be discharged (even simultaneously) at a steady pace, and that's what goes into the grid.
I'm not sure this technology is really necessary though. Magnetic flywheels achieve similar efficiencies and they've been around forever. What improvement does this offer?
as soon as they start issuing salaries that are competitive with the private sector. When I was at university job fairs last year, entry level positions at Microsoft offered almost 50% more than equivalent government jobs, and the latter seemed to have better career opportunities later in life. Not sure if this applies to all professions, or just programmers/computer scientists, but that's who they want apparently.
I have heard that at the moment wages are increasing faster in the government than the private sector due to the recession, but that's a temporary situation at best.
Well, "cognitive dissonance" has always been sort of an armchair theory, there have always been people who doubt that it actually even exists, and that its effects can just as easily be explained by other psychological phenomena (and I have to say, seeing the Tea Partiers who parade around with signs like "Get the Government out of my Medicaid!" without the slightest hint of irony seems to lend credence to this opinion). This is an experiment which evaluates a behavior, instead of creating a theory to fit observed behaviors. So, no, it's not really the same.
Are you familiar with the saying, "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity"? If you read their post announcing the turn-around, they say very clearly, "We did this because we thought it would improve the quality of the forums, and having heard your reaction, we're not going to do it." They thought they were acting in the best of their customers. Yeah, it was an appallingly stupid idea, but one with good intentions.
You can call me naive if you want, but ask yourself: what the hell does Blizzard gain from you posting your real name on their forums? They already know it from your subscription info, it's not like you're giving them new data. It makes no difference to them whatsoever. That's the problem with conspiracy theories: people come up with them before realizing that the conspiracy would not provide any benefit to the alleged conspirators if true
This was just a lousy call by well-meaning individuals, and the fact that they did such a complete turnarond is a positive sign that Blizzard does care about their customers.
Maybe some biologists can answer this.. but why haven't humans or other mammalian species evolved to see/detect/transmit infrared or microwave radio? It seems that long neurons could act as conductor antennas. No evolutionary advantage? Just the night sensing possibilities alone seem worthwhile.
-molo
That's pretty much it. The reason we've evolved to be able to see the frequencies we can see is that those are the most useful. For example, at an extreme end, if your eyes could only see gamma radiation, everything would be completely black all the time, unless you were right next to some radioactive material. Microwaves too would be pretty useless from an evolutionary standpoint: there are basically no sources of naturally occurring microwaves on earth; again, if you could only see in microwaves, you'd be in darkness (at least, before humans started making artificial ones). Keep in mind also that the atmosphere blocks huge swathes of the EM spectrum, and so evolution would necessarily only produce creatures able to see the remaining parts.
Near infrared and UV would seem more useful (and some animals can see in those regions), but remember that every enhancement to your capabilities requires more energy and biological complexity, and so puts you at an evolutionary disadvantage unless your extra capability makes up for it. Evidently, for humans, the benefit of seeing IF and UV didn't make up for the cost, so we can't do it.
Yeah, there are way too many movies which use CGI as a substitute for decent plot, but it sort of irks me when people (typically artsy snobs) generalize this to say that CGI alone is always insufficient to make a film. I won't pretend there aren't movies that I enjoy just for the eye candy, if it's good enough; film is a sensory experience, after all. Avatar had no plot to speak of, and was carried along just by the visuals, but I felt I got my money's worth. You're of course welcome to disagree, but try to understand that movies are entertainment, and can qualify as "entertainment" for different reasons, including looking really pretty. Tron Legacy might be like that.
Can you say "entitlement complex"? Compared to all the digital offerings from Hollywood up until now, this is a godsend: for a fraction of the price of a cable subscription, you are getting unlimited streaming, on as many devices as you want, over Wi-Fi or 3G, and (for some shows) access to not just current episodes but the entire back catalog. Three years ago I'd have sworn the seas would boil before we would get something like this. As several other comments are pointing out, providing these shows means that both bandwidth and content have to be paid for: the fee does one, the ads do the other. You know, the way television has worked for decades.
And for god's sake, the ads on Hulu are as un-irritating as advertising can possibly be. Over the course of a 40-minute show, you have to watch maybe five 30-second spots, as opposed to eight or ten per break on television.
Get off your high horse and understand that things need to be paid for, and that this is as fantastic a deal as we're ever going to get.
Kudos to this guy for answering a curiosity of mine: I've always wondered what would actually happen if I sent a bunch of e-mails with phrases like "bomb the G20 summit", "death to the capitalist swine" and "one hundred pounds of nitrated fertilizer". I guess now we know.
... oh shit.
Whenever you install an application on Android, you're given a list of permissions the application wants to have in order to run, including accessing your data and making phone calls. You have to explicitly agree to this list before the app is installed. Is CNET saying that a fifth of Android apps can get your data, despite those permissions not appearing in the list? Because if they're not, this is a pointless "Well, duh" story: the user was told what the application is doing. If they just breeze through and click "OK" when that's clearly inappropriate (i.e., a tip calculator really shouldn't be requesting access to your call log), that's their damn problem.