A better solution would be to rank the candidate, but then the best method of tabulation is not 100% clear.
This is called the Alternative Vote system (or Single Transferable Vote, if combined with multi-seat constituencies), and is in use all over the place. The UK is due to have a referendum on implementing this system in May, assuming the bill gets through the House of Lords in time.
Er, it's the UK, and David Willetts is a Conservative Party politician (and a relatively small-statist one).
Funding public-good university research is a widely accepted role of government in the UK. Usually it's dealt with via the Research Councils rather than directly via a ministry, but it's not that unusual.
If things that are that sensitive are connected to the internet, then I wonder what would happen to them when the kill switch gets hit?
To take a few (admittedly light-hearted) suggestions from other posts- grandma's breathing machine and busy intersection traffic lights. Is there any guarantee that these two systems, probably hacked together independently by various different IT departments, would continue to function properly once their cable has been unexpectedly cut?
Unless you relocate the guys with the big red buttons (i.e., the president of the United States or his adversary du jour) to said moon base, MAD still stays relatively in one piece. Ordering what amounts to your own death and the death of every one of your family and friends isn't made much easier through the knowledge that a few thousand (more like hundred, if you're lucky) of your countrymen might survive in what amounts to a metal can little more sophisticated than a submarine on a desolate, vacuous rock hundreds of thousands of miles away.
And that's assuming said cunning adversary hasn't developed a moon-attacking weapon of their own in the mean time. Like, say, an R-7 rocket with a bundle of cheap fission bombs strapped on top.
For one, that assumes that you'd want to send every interstellar probe you build to the same destination. The galaxy has several billion prime destinations to choose from (with at least hundreds of locals on scientific wish lists for a fly-in visit). The probe you build 20 years later can always be sent elsewhere, and you can still enjoy double the science without the first probe being made redundant.
More importantly though, it has now been 42 years since Neil and Buzz set foot on the moon. Could we today do any better? Would Apollo 11 in the 21st century be quicker, or carry more cargo? Voyager 1 is just now becoming our first ever spacecraft to study the heliopause first hand, 34 years after launch, and will hopefully go on to be the first ever scientific equipment to directly study interstellar space and the interstellar medium. At what point are our new, mega high-tech probes going to overtake it and make it redundant? Not within the craft's lifetime, that's for sure. Predicting that our space tech is going to go out of fashion every couple of decades is nothing but a quaint throw-back to the idealistic 60's. Things will always improve, but I'm not sure we've got any earth-shattering breakthroughs in store for us in the near future.
According to the summary (yeah, yeah...) 75% of all downloads and 66% of all uploads. That does rather imply that more than two thirds of all internet p2p traffic is back-and-forth between the same 100 people.
I guess the internet is a lot smaller than I thought...
I'd be willing to be that these are the most common ways of connecting to Facebook are as follows, in order:
1) Using a favourite, bookmark, or phone app. Bookmarking the site should reflect the end destination, not the redirect portal (so HTTPS, assuming you set up a new bookmark), and apps would soon be configured to point at the correct (HTTPS) URL if it were the only working option.
2) Typing the word "facebook" or "facebook.com" into the address bar. The redirect is then in the hands of your browser, usually powered by either Google or Bing (depending on browser), and you would assume this would point you straight at the "correct" address (HTTPS). Possible to put a MITM in there I suppose, but not as straight forward.
3) Going to a search engine and typing "facebook", an clicking on the resulting link. Again, the redirect is in the hands of your search provider, and would presumably point at HTTPS. Still possible to MITM, but again trickier.
I can't imagine that in this day and age anyone still actually types "http://" in their address bar, and would therefore be relying on Facebook to do the redirect.
It was a mod for Starcraft 2. They were making a mod of Starcraft 2 with serious RPG elements (all of which is perfectly reasonable, given the tools that are available) and named their mod "World of Starfcraft" (for obvious reasons).
If the cease and desist is just because their mod name was too close to that of an official Blizzard product, I'm sure this will be a non-story and the mod will continue with a more original name. If the C&D was just because Blizzard don't want RPG elements to be used in a mod for their strategy game, that is some serious arse-hattery,
That assumes you remember it 5 years down the line when you're trying to access a long-abandoned account. You COULD just make it a secondary strong password- but the chances of you not remembering your first strong password while remembering your second seems far-fetched.
Neanderthals are believed to have had larger brains and better tools than our contemporary ancestors. You do them a great disservice, sir, by comparing them to the worst of our existing population.
Seeing as every gun rampage of the last 3 decades has been (I think quite successfully) linked directly to the perpetrator playing Metroid or listening to Alice Cooper, I think it's satisfying that yet another case has been wrapped up quite so quickly; clearly tick-based browser strategy game "Earth Empires" is the corrupting force behind this travesty.
I hope it, and all games like it, are quickly brought to justice. For the sake of the children, you understand.
So I guess that leaves Sony-Ericsson. And yeah, I've had good experiences with their phones in the past and I wasn't aware that they were doing an Android phone (The only ones I ever seem to hear about are the Motorola and HTC models.).
It's the "Xperia" range- X1 and X2 were WinMo, the rest since have been Android. Mine is an X10 Mini Pro; I like it because it is smaller than most smartphones (good for my pockets) and has a hardware QWERTY (an absolute requirement for me, I've never gotten on well with touch-screen keyboards including the iPhone ones).
Samsung are also a major purveyor of Android devices- you've probably heard of their Galaxy range, if only in connection to the Galaxy Tab as a rival to the iPad. LG make a bunch too, as do a whole swathe of other manufacturers who make a smallish number.
I remain unconvinced that Google- a company with little to no experience in hardware design or manufacture- could automatically do a better job than companies for whom hardware has been their sole existence for decades. I like Google and I like their products, but I don't have blind faith in their ability to pull a whole new department out of their ass overnight.
Being generous to the original post, it is unfathomable that the world will suddenly go off professional music en masse. True business models might change, types of storage media, or listening habits- but it's reasonable to predict that people's taste for professionally produced music is unlikely to go away. Despite this, music is hardly what you'd call useful- it's a fun diversion.
That's being generous to the original poster though. I agree with you- Facebook will go eventually, and some other equally diverting service will slip into the public mindset for a while, until that too gets stale and the cycle continues.
Facebook has spam (unless you consider "BillyJean has bought a chicken!" signal rather than noise).
Facebook has little choice client-wise. It's basically web-browser or one of the mobile apps as your choice.
Facebook's GUI seems to go through constant revisions, and I've never heard a single person happy about it. It's always "aw man, I hate the new Facebook lay out, I hope they bring back $MYFAVOURITEWIDGET".
Facebook's settings ("system") for who received what and who is in which group are notoriously complicated.
Email, with its simple rules and thousand competing clients and webmail providers, is elegant and downright versatile by comparison. And that's saying something.
Twitter? That seems pretty big, and that has a similar feature set.
OK, I'll admit social networking has passed me by somewhat and I don't really understand the appeal of either Twitter or Facebook. But if nothing else they seem like natural competitors.
You may have forgotten the fact that Apple still outsources all hardware manufacturing to contract manufacturers. This famously includes Foxconn, whom also manufacture phones for Nokia and Sony Ericsson. You also may have forgotten the hardware-related woes that afflicted the iPhone 4 release recently, or the iPod classic back in the day (not to rag on Apple too hard, these things do happen to the best of them).
You also seem to be implying that the only company in the world that is capable of designing nice phone hardware is Apple. That is, you assume they cannot be matched by HTC, Motorola, Nokia, RIM, Samsung, Sony, Alcatel, Dell or Acer in any way. If this is your position- that is, that Apple has absolute superiority over all of their competition- then it is clear that you've already made your mind up (I hesitate to call you a "fanboi", but it's very tricky not to in the circumstances), and I can't imagine you suddenly being impressed by an in-house design from non-hardware-manufacturer Google.
For what it's worth, I've been very impressed by my Sony Ericsson Android phone so far, and have no complaints of any sort.
Both measles and rubella can cause severe birth defects and even miscarriage or still birth if caught during pregnancy. For non-pregnant people, it can cause blindness, and is one of the main killers for people with immunodeficiencies, such as HIV sufferers.
My GF had an extreme allergic reaction to the MMR vaccine and so is not immune. She is 100% reliant on herd immunity to keep her safe when we have children. Failure to vaccinate your children put people like her an severe risk.
And lets be honest folks: There is probably a damned good reason why they were looking at MS products only, and it was most likely because they have an assload of MS Stuff that would cost a mint to convert. I mean if they require Exchange and Sharepoint, they have a metric ton of VBA stuff being used, and Windows desktops everywhere, why in the hell should they be forced to accept bids that won't work? If Google wanted to submit bids on MS products as a VAR that is one thing, but Google docs ain't no MS Word.
It would be like forcing a design house to accept bids from some guy who wanted to rip out all their Macs and replace it with Ubuntu desktops running the Gimp. Does ANYBODY think that is a useful bid? Would they ever in a million years give up all that experience and custom in house code written for Photoshop just to use the Gimp? of course not.
By the same token I bet if we walked into the DOI tomorrow and did an audit on what they are running you'd find a bazillion Windows desktops, with tons of VBA macros, everything controlled by Active directory, with Exchange and Sharepoint. What good will come of having to waste tax dollars on a bid for a solution that won't actually solve anything? Is Google gonna pay to rewrite all that code for free? Are they gonna spring for the cost of retraining everyone out of the goodness of their hearts? No in the end they'll make the DOI jump through hoops before they finally hand them a list that says "These are the MS products we require, because all our stuff is tied into that and we will NOT pay for a complete overhaul!" and then Google will say "Uhhh...sorry we don't sell MS Products" and the money will have been blown for exactly jack and squat. If the DOI had said only MSFT was allowed to bid that would be one thing, but this is just stupid. It is trying to force a product that the customer does not want because they don't want a competitor to sell them a product they DO want. And in the end it is just that more added to the debt for absolutely nothing gained.
Pitiful actions and bad form Google, and from someone that has as much marketshare as you do it just comes off as looking petty and vengeful.
You clearly don't work in procurement.
The point of "considering a bid" is to establish all of those things you just said; a company can't be considered to just intrinsically know a bid from Google won't be any good, they need to actually see the bid so they can establish the facts.
A bid consists of a all sorts of things- firstly the price, but also consideration of the complete package, including costs to make everything compatible, converting archives, staff capacities for implementation, etc. If Google could offer to do absolutely everything required to make their solution work for considerably less than MS could offer the same (even if this entailed far less work for the MS engineers) then Google should win it. If they can't, they shouldn't.
That's the whole point of a fair tendering system. Ignoring that process is wrong, and a state agency deserves to be called out on it.
The insidious thing with MMORPG's is they have you play the same bits over and over and over and over. Which might be fine if those sections were fun games in and of themselves but that's just it, they're not fun. That's why people pay gold farmers so they can get new gear and go back to the fun stuff.
Sometimes the dull bits make the good bits better.
I used to play EVE Online. One of the most distinctive features of EVE is that there are severe consequences when you die; your ship blows up and you don't get it back, you lose your equipment, you can even lose skill points.
This made battles thrilling. When you're locked in 10 minutes of energetic combat with a human foe, your heart is pumping and your adrenaline swirling. The reason for this is because you know the investment of time and effort that you've put into your set up, and you know what you stand to lose. If you had unlimited money ("cutting out the dull bits so you can get back to the fun stuff") it wouldn't be anywhere near as fun.
One of my all time best memories of the game was once when I was trying to ship the majority of my kit out to our new Alliance base in 0.0 security space (PvP territory) in my very last surviving battleship. Halfway there, I was ambushed by an enemy raiding party. I throw the alarm up to my Alliance mates, who throw together a raiding party of their own and head in my direction. I proceed to dip, duck, hide and sprint across 15 mins of open space, under constant pursuit, fighting running battles, before finally dragging my battered craft to the relief of my rescue party.
If I had known I could pop back into existence with a fresh ship moments after my fiery virtual death, there would have been no excitement there at all.
But then, different gamers will have different tastes in what they find fun.
Haha, no. More that it was a sign of Microsoft gearing up to try to dislodge Apple in their core markets; something they seem to have gradually lost interest in as the set-backs mount up. Similarly to how ChromeOS is seen as Google "gearing up to tackle Microsoft"- despite the fact the smart money isn't on Google getting 90% market share in the next decade...
To be fair, my phone contract offers me "unlimited" text messages (it might actually be 3000 SMS, but I never go near that), and a high-but-finite data allowance (I've never gone over it, but probably could if I started using my phone for web-video and the like more regularly).
I doubt Jabber uses much data in the grand scheme of things, but there's no reason why I shouldn't continue to use the SMS service that (as the GP already pointed out) is going on anyway, rather than moving that traffic to the already crowded data traffic.
The problem isn't that users shouldn't be using SMS, the problem is with some unscrupulous contracts charging through the teeth for it.
Actually a separate MP3 player is a must when in the gym. Trying to carry around even the smallest smartphone is a chore. Either you carry it in your hand or get one of those dorky looking armband harnesses.
You make a great case for Apple's Nano (and the billion of just-as-good competitor devices). But the GP's point still stands for the iPods Classic and Touch. They're as big as a smartphone, and do nothing a smartphone can't do. Almost as expensive too.
It's funny really; the Slashdot crowd has been predicting for years that $COMPANY will challenge Apple's dominance in their various markets. Google (with Nexus, and their various software) looked good, but didn't happen. MS with WinMo7, the Kin, the Zune, etc., looked like a fair bet too. Talk of a Dell phone and Dell tablets put them in the picture too, but no.
Who'd have thought it'd be Samsung, in the end, to release the best iPad competitor, some of the top-selling Android phones, and now a iPod Touch competitor? Not me, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
A better solution would be to rank the candidate, but then the best method of tabulation is not 100% clear.
This is called the Alternative Vote system (or Single Transferable Vote, if combined with multi-seat constituencies), and is in use all over the place. The UK is due to have a referendum on implementing this system in May, assuming the bill gets through the House of Lords in time.
Er, it's the UK, and David Willetts is a Conservative Party politician (and a relatively small-statist one).
Funding public-good university research is a widely accepted role of government in the UK. Usually it's dealt with via the Research Councils rather than directly via a ministry, but it's not that unusual.
If things that are that sensitive are connected to the internet, then I wonder what would happen to them when the kill switch gets hit?
To take a few (admittedly light-hearted) suggestions from other posts- grandma's breathing machine and busy intersection traffic lights. Is there any guarantee that these two systems, probably hacked together independently by various different IT departments, would continue to function properly once their cable has been unexpectedly cut?
Probably best to torrent it. Taking down P2P files is always more of a hassle than cease-and-desisting hosting companies.
Unless you relocate the guys with the big red buttons (i.e., the president of the United States or his adversary du jour) to said moon base, MAD still stays relatively in one piece. Ordering what amounts to your own death and the death of every one of your family and friends isn't made much easier through the knowledge that a few thousand (more like hundred, if you're lucky) of your countrymen might survive in what amounts to a metal can little more sophisticated than a submarine on a desolate, vacuous rock hundreds of thousands of miles away.
And that's assuming said cunning adversary hasn't developed a moon-attacking weapon of their own in the mean time. Like, say, an R-7 rocket with a bundle of cheap fission bombs strapped on top.
For one, that assumes that you'd want to send every interstellar probe you build to the same destination. The galaxy has several billion prime destinations to choose from (with at least hundreds of locals on scientific wish lists for a fly-in visit). The probe you build 20 years later can always be sent elsewhere, and you can still enjoy double the science without the first probe being made redundant.
More importantly though, it has now been 42 years since Neil and Buzz set foot on the moon. Could we today do any better? Would Apollo 11 in the 21st century be quicker, or carry more cargo? Voyager 1 is just now becoming our first ever spacecraft to study the heliopause first hand, 34 years after launch, and will hopefully go on to be the first ever scientific equipment to directly study interstellar space and the interstellar medium. At what point are our new, mega high-tech probes going to overtake it and make it redundant? Not within the craft's lifetime, that's for sure. Predicting that our space tech is going to go out of fashion every couple of decades is nothing but a quaint throw-back to the idealistic 60's. Things will always improve, but I'm not sure we've got any earth-shattering breakthroughs in store for us in the near future.
According to the summary (yeah, yeah...) 75% of all downloads and 66% of all uploads. That does rather imply that more than two thirds of all internet p2p traffic is back-and-forth between the same 100 people.
I guess the internet is a lot smaller than I thought...
I'd be willing to be that these are the most common ways of connecting to Facebook are as follows, in order:
1) Using a favourite, bookmark, or phone app. Bookmarking the site should reflect the end destination, not the redirect portal (so HTTPS, assuming you set up a new bookmark), and apps would soon be configured to point at the correct (HTTPS) URL if it were the only working option.
2) Typing the word "facebook" or "facebook.com" into the address bar. The redirect is then in the hands of your browser, usually powered by either Google or Bing (depending on browser), and you would assume this would point you straight at the "correct" address (HTTPS). Possible to put a MITM in there I suppose, but not as straight forward.
3) Going to a search engine and typing "facebook", an clicking on the resulting link. Again, the redirect is in the hands of your search provider, and would presumably point at HTTPS. Still possible to MITM, but again trickier.
I can't imagine that in this day and age anyone still actually types "http://" in their address bar, and would therefore be relying on Facebook to do the redirect.
A few of the cheap £5-from-PC-World optical mice I've had over the years have broken, developing skips or twitches after a couple of years of use.
I've never had a decent quality one break on me though. My Logitech MX 518 has put in 4 years or so solid service and shows no sign of letting up yet.
No. Read TFS, if not TFA.
It was a mod for Starcraft 2. They were making a mod of Starcraft 2 with serious RPG elements (all of which is perfectly reasonable, given the tools that are available) and named their mod "World of Starfcraft" (for obvious reasons).
If the cease and desist is just because their mod name was too close to that of an official Blizzard product, I'm sure this will be a non-story and the mod will continue with a more original name. If the C&D was just because Blizzard don't want RPG elements to be used in a mod for their strategy game, that is some serious arse-hattery,
That assumes you remember it 5 years down the line when you're trying to access a long-abandoned account. You COULD just make it a secondary strong password- but the chances of you not remembering your first strong password while remembering your second seems far-fetched.
Neanderthals are believed to have had larger brains and better tools than our contemporary ancestors. You do them a great disservice, sir, by comparing them to the worst of our existing population.
Seeing as every gun rampage of the last 3 decades has been (I think quite successfully) linked directly to the perpetrator playing Metroid or listening to Alice Cooper, I think it's satisfying that yet another case has been wrapped up quite so quickly; clearly tick-based browser strategy game "Earth Empires" is the corrupting force behind this travesty.
I hope it, and all games like it, are quickly brought to justice. For the sake of the children, you understand.
So I guess that leaves Sony-Ericsson. And yeah, I've had good experiences with their phones in the past and I wasn't aware that they were doing an Android phone (The only ones I ever seem to hear about are the Motorola and HTC models.).
It's the "Xperia" range- X1 and X2 were WinMo, the rest since have been Android. Mine is an X10 Mini Pro; I like it because it is smaller than most smartphones (good for my pockets) and has a hardware QWERTY (an absolute requirement for me, I've never gotten on well with touch-screen keyboards including the iPhone ones).
Samsung are also a major purveyor of Android devices- you've probably heard of their Galaxy range, if only in connection to the Galaxy Tab as a rival to the iPad. LG make a bunch too, as do a whole swathe of other manufacturers who make a smallish number.
I remain unconvinced that Google- a company with little to no experience in hardware design or manufacture- could automatically do a better job than companies for whom hardware has been their sole existence for decades. I like Google and I like their products, but I don't have blind faith in their ability to pull a whole new department out of their ass overnight.
Being generous to the original post, it is unfathomable that the world will suddenly go off professional music en masse. True business models might change, types of storage media, or listening habits- but it's reasonable to predict that people's taste for professionally produced music is unlikely to go away. Despite this, music is hardly what you'd call useful- it's a fun diversion.
That's being generous to the original poster though. I agree with you- Facebook will go eventually, and some other equally diverting service will slip into the public mindset for a while, until that too gets stale and the cycle continues.
I'm not really sure if you're being sarcastic.
Facebook has spam (unless you consider "BillyJean has bought a chicken!" signal rather than noise).
Facebook has little choice client-wise. It's basically web-browser or one of the mobile apps as your choice.
Facebook's GUI seems to go through constant revisions, and I've never heard a single person happy about it. It's always "aw man, I hate the new Facebook lay out, I hope they bring back $MYFAVOURITEWIDGET".
Facebook's settings ("system") for who received what and who is in which group are notoriously complicated.
Email, with its simple rules and thousand competing clients and webmail providers, is elegant and downright versatile by comparison. And that's saying something.
Twitter? That seems pretty big, and that has a similar feature set.
OK, I'll admit social networking has passed me by somewhat and I don't really understand the appeal of either Twitter or Facebook. But if nothing else they seem like natural competitors.
You may have forgotten the fact that Apple still outsources all hardware manufacturing to contract manufacturers. This famously includes Foxconn, whom also manufacture phones for Nokia and Sony Ericsson. You also may have forgotten the hardware-related woes that afflicted the iPhone 4 release recently, or the iPod classic back in the day (not to rag on Apple too hard, these things do happen to the best of them).
You also seem to be implying that the only company in the world that is capable of designing nice phone hardware is Apple. That is, you assume they cannot be matched by HTC, Motorola, Nokia, RIM, Samsung, Sony, Alcatel, Dell or Acer in any way. If this is your position- that is, that Apple has absolute superiority over all of their competition- then it is clear that you've already made your mind up (I hesitate to call you a "fanboi", but it's very tricky not to in the circumstances), and I can't imagine you suddenly being impressed by an in-house design from non-hardware-manufacturer Google.
For what it's worth, I've been very impressed by my Sony Ericsson Android phone so far, and have no complaints of any sort.
Both measles and rubella can cause severe birth defects and even miscarriage or still birth if caught during pregnancy. For non-pregnant people, it can cause blindness, and is one of the main killers for people with immunodeficiencies, such as HIV sufferers.
My GF had an extreme allergic reaction to the MMR vaccine and so is not immune. She is 100% reliant on herd immunity to keep her safe when we have children. Failure to vaccinate your children put people like her an severe risk.
And lets be honest folks: There is probably a damned good reason why they were looking at MS products only, and it was most likely because they have an assload of MS Stuff that would cost a mint to convert. I mean if they require Exchange and Sharepoint, they have a metric ton of VBA stuff being used, and Windows desktops everywhere, why in the hell should they be forced to accept bids that won't work? If Google wanted to submit bids on MS products as a VAR that is one thing, but Google docs ain't no MS Word.
It would be like forcing a design house to accept bids from some guy who wanted to rip out all their Macs and replace it with Ubuntu desktops running the Gimp. Does ANYBODY think that is a useful bid? Would they ever in a million years give up all that experience and custom in house code written for Photoshop just to use the Gimp? of course not.
By the same token I bet if we walked into the DOI tomorrow and did an audit on what they are running you'd find a bazillion Windows desktops, with tons of VBA macros, everything controlled by Active directory, with Exchange and Sharepoint. What good will come of having to waste tax dollars on a bid for a solution that won't actually solve anything? Is Google gonna pay to rewrite all that code for free? Are they gonna spring for the cost of retraining everyone out of the goodness of their hearts? No in the end they'll make the DOI jump through hoops before they finally hand them a list that says "These are the MS products we require, because all our stuff is tied into that and we will NOT pay for a complete overhaul!" and then Google will say "Uhhh...sorry we don't sell MS Products" and the money will have been blown for exactly jack and squat. If the DOI had said only MSFT was allowed to bid that would be one thing, but this is just stupid. It is trying to force a product that the customer does not want because they don't want a competitor to sell them a product they DO want. And in the end it is just that more added to the debt for absolutely nothing gained.
Pitiful actions and bad form Google, and from someone that has as much marketshare as you do it just comes off as looking petty and vengeful.
You clearly don't work in procurement.
The point of "considering a bid" is to establish all of those things you just said; a company can't be considered to just intrinsically know a bid from Google won't be any good, they need to actually see the bid so they can establish the facts.
A bid consists of a all sorts of things- firstly the price, but also consideration of the complete package, including costs to make everything compatible, converting archives, staff capacities for implementation, etc. If Google could offer to do absolutely everything required to make their solution work for considerably less than MS could offer the same (even if this entailed far less work for the MS engineers) then Google should win it. If they can't, they shouldn't.
That's the whole point of a fair tendering system. Ignoring that process is wrong, and a state agency deserves to be called out on it.
The insidious thing with MMORPG's is they have you play the same bits over and over and over and over. Which might be fine if those sections were fun games in and of themselves but that's just it, they're not fun. That's why people pay gold farmers so they can get new gear and go back to the fun stuff.
Sometimes the dull bits make the good bits better.
I used to play EVE Online. One of the most distinctive features of EVE is that there are severe consequences when you die; your ship blows up and you don't get it back, you lose your equipment, you can even lose skill points.
This made battles thrilling. When you're locked in 10 minutes of energetic combat with a human foe, your heart is pumping and your adrenaline swirling. The reason for this is because you know the investment of time and effort that you've put into your set up, and you know what you stand to lose. If you had unlimited money ("cutting out the dull bits so you can get back to the fun stuff") it wouldn't be anywhere near as fun.
One of my all time best memories of the game was once when I was trying to ship the majority of my kit out to our new Alliance base in 0.0 security space (PvP territory) in my very last surviving battleship. Halfway there, I was ambushed by an enemy raiding party. I throw the alarm up to my Alliance mates, who throw together a raiding party of their own and head in my direction. I proceed to dip, duck, hide and sprint across 15 mins of open space, under constant pursuit, fighting running battles, before finally dragging my battered craft to the relief of my rescue party.
If I had known I could pop back into existence with a fresh ship moments after my fiery virtual death, there would have been no excitement there at all.
But then, different gamers will have different tastes in what they find fun.
Haha, no. More that it was a sign of Microsoft gearing up to try to dislodge Apple in their core markets; something they seem to have gradually lost interest in as the set-backs mount up. Similarly to how ChromeOS is seen as Google "gearing up to tackle Microsoft"- despite the fact the smart money isn't on Google getting 90% market share in the next decade...
To be fair, my phone contract offers me "unlimited" text messages (it might actually be 3000 SMS, but I never go near that), and a high-but-finite data allowance (I've never gone over it, but probably could if I started using my phone for web-video and the like more regularly).
I doubt Jabber uses much data in the grand scheme of things, but there's no reason why I shouldn't continue to use the SMS service that (as the GP already pointed out) is going on anyway, rather than moving that traffic to the already crowded data traffic.
The problem isn't that users shouldn't be using SMS, the problem is with some unscrupulous contracts charging through the teeth for it.
Actually a separate MP3 player is a must when in the gym. Trying to carry around even the smallest smartphone is a chore. Either you carry it in your hand or get one of those dorky looking armband harnesses.
You make a great case for Apple's Nano (and the billion of just-as-good competitor devices). But the GP's point still stands for the iPods Classic and Touch. They're as big as a smartphone, and do nothing a smartphone can't do. Almost as expensive too.
It's funny really; the Slashdot crowd has been predicting for years that $COMPANY will challenge Apple's dominance in their various markets. Google (with Nexus, and their various software) looked good, but didn't happen. MS with WinMo7, the Kin, the Zune, etc., looked like a fair bet too. Talk of a Dell phone and Dell tablets put them in the picture too, but no.
Who'd have thought it'd be Samsung, in the end, to release the best iPad competitor, some of the top-selling Android phones, and now a iPod Touch competitor? Not me, anyway.