Indie developers in their spare time did something that the big game houses have been claiming was impossible for decades. "We can only support 4/8/16/32" has been the mantra of gaming companies for decades.
Now here a group of unpaid modders proves them spectacularly wrong.
The point of the article is half lost without factoring in that the people who accomplished it are not "professional, top tire game developers at the pinnacle of game research and captains of the gaming industry" but rather is 7 friends who decided to just do it.
Your combativeness towards this headline suggests that you missed the real point of it all.
Except that the big companies were limiting these games to 4/8/16/32 people not out of server demands, but most likely due to network constraints. Most of these FPS require you to have low latency with all of the other players in order to have fun. It sucks shooting at someone's head only to find out that you are shooting at where the person was and not where they really are. The more people you add to the game, the higher the chance that someone will have a poor experience due to latency. This is exacerbated when the game companies do not run their own servers, but require one of the players to be host, and therefore everyone has to have a good connection to that single player. That causes NAT and other issues as well.
you don't 'stick it to the man', when you unionize, you equalize what HAS BECOME an increasingly unlevel playing ground.
you show social responsibility when you fight to get a union installed in a bad company. and this surely sounds like they need some EQ there..
and while it may be bad for those fighting, they'll make life better for those that follow.
we USED to care about stuff like that. we used to. what happened to us? why do we have this 'got mine, fark you!' mentality?
your grandparents - that fought for unions and a better work life for you - feel you have abandoned them and all the hard work they fought for!
You're assuming (wrongly in most cases), that unions exist to make life better for the employees. Certainly they do sometimes make things better, but unions often become large and corrupt, and the leaders there are just as corrupt as any politician. Was the labor movement important to our generation? Absolutely. But when labor unions are able to raise enough money to affect political outcomes in society, or coerce members of their union to vote a specific way, they become just as bad as the corporations they are fighting against. The problem here is people, and I don't know what the solution is. Labor unions have done good for the worker, but how do you prevent them from becoming as bad or worse than those they are supposed to be protecting you from?
Well you have to remember that these cameras are generally higher up than the beam of a headlight would be. I'm not saying that you could blind them easily with a normal light. As you say, the flash will help illuminate everything in the picture evenly. However, since they are so very sensitive and infrared lasers have a lot of energy, I believe you could easily blind one day or night with a laser light. If you'd like, I can contact one of my old friends and have them test it on some night cameras. They won't have the exact flash setup, but I am sure they can tell us whether the laser is sufficient to blind the camera.
They had the same problems with the PS3 when it released. After people were making cash hand over fist with the 360 people ordered as many PS3s as they could. I personally know someone who got stuck with 9 of them. Is the demand high because people want the console, or because people are hoping to make a quick buck? Even with the iPad 3, most people seemed to be ordering to make money. I will not consider preorders a solid indication of the long term demand of a product.
Except that even cell phones charge at 5W. Every HTC, Motorola, and other microUSB android phone I have seen uses 1A at 5V to charge when you use the wall-plug. Even my desktop motherboard outputs up to 5W over USB 2.0
Yes, yes you can. Why the NExus 7 comes with a 2A 5V USB to 110V adapter and charges via microUSB. SO does the HP Touchpad. I haven't seen any problems with burned out cables, fires, or other issues.
That article would be incorrect. I have an iPad 2 and an iPad 3 that I use for development. Both of them can (and do) charge via 1A USB port on my computer. I have never, in the 6 months since my company issued me the iPad 2, had to plug it into anything but my computer to keep it charged.
Secondly, the Nexus 7 tablet that I use charges just fine over micro-USB. Its adapter puts out the exact same 2A at 5V as the iPad 3 charger. In fact, I can swap chargers between it and the iPad without any issue. So if it can charge the Nexus 7, or the HP Touchpad, Asus Transformer, and every other android tablet out there, why can't it charge the iPad 1,2 or 3? Because Apple said so, and made their own special connector.
I don't care if my iDevice or android device has a separate port for TV, or whatever else I want to use it for, but I want all my devices to charge via micro USB or induction. Why? Because I don't want to have to dig out a special cable to charge my device while traveling. Or if I am at a friends house and need some extra juice. And there is certainly no reason for me to throw away a power brick that puts out the exact same power that an iPhone needs just because it doesn't have Apple's connector on it. So yes, there will still be Apple-specific accessories, but there should be uniformity for the most important accessory of all, the charger.
If you Google around you'll find that most counties and cities have those red light cameras controlled by private corporations who monitor for violators. The private company gets a portion of the ticket revenue, and often is successful in getting the yellow light time shortened at these intersections. This actually makes the intersection more dangerous because people have less time to stop for a red.
It depends a lot on the cameras. I used to work in the digital video surveillance industry. A lot of the "Low Light" cameras do in fact use infrared light to see in the dark. Some have lights built into them, and some are so sensitive that they can see just fine in black and white without much light at all. I would find it hard to believe that you couldn't blind the camera with some sort of light. If they close the aperture of the lens to compensate for the extreme brightness of a light, it would make objects with less light on them obscured.
Better yet, the APIs are all compatible, so in targetting iOS n-1, you only need to do a brief test on iOS n, and you'e done. Compare this with android where you'd target android 2.1 probably, and then have a ton of bug fixes to deal with on newer releases because the APIs have changed so much.
This is definitely not true. My company is working on a project that runs perfectly on iOS 5.0 and 5.1 but doesn't run at all on 6.0. Why? I don't know. I am not on that development team. My project does work just fine on iOS 6. However, some things have been deprecated, or changed between iOS versions and there are plenty of instances where you do have to develop separate code based on the OS version.
I don't know where you got the numbers indicating that 95% of the population of iDevices is on iOS 5. I can't see how it is true, though. A lot of people I know either don't care to, or don't know how to update their iDevice. And then the original iPhone and the 3G, as well as the iPod Touch do not support anything past iOS 4, anyway. Once you through in the group of people that like to jailbreak (or have to jailbreak to use ultraSn0w), then you have a percentage of the population that is often at least 1 OS version behind (though this is often just a minor version, like 5.0 had a jailbreak but 5.1 did not. 5.1.1 does).
Amazon continues to support iOS 4, and just recently released an upgrade to fix issues that are specific to 4.x users. I've also seen plenty of recent comments where people have removed stars from apps for not properly supporting iOS 4. I know that this is only one major version behind, as you have said, but I believe that there is a population that will not go past iOS 4 until their devices break. These are mostly going to be kids, and I would be willing to bet that many kids buy more apps and make more in-app purchases than most adults. I'd also be willing to bet most 3GS users would not upgrade to 6.0. If it is anything like what iOS 4 did to the 3G, they will find 6.0 to be almost unusable.
I can tell you that I ran windows 3.0 and 3.1 on DRDos 6 with no problems whatsoever. I never owned or used Microsoft DOS. So if there was some compatibility or stability problem I never saw it.
But it is fragmentation because the devices still exist in the market and developers HAVE to deal with it due to different API versions. You're trying to claim that fragmentation only exists in some limited scope that does not coincide with reality. If you wrote software for iOS you would understand that developers do have to write code that is specific to the different OS versions they want to support. Unless you're absolutely willing and able to completely write off devices that are running older versions of iOS you have to handle different iOS versions in code. Most developers cannot afford to do that. That is the very definition of fragmentation. You can't just wave your hand and say "Everything is okay those old devices all go to the landfill when they are not upgradable." I am not trying to say that it is anything like the world of android, but in reality the problem exists.
That is not all that a developer has to support. They have to support different versions of the API for every iOS version they have to support. That is unless you want to cut off millions of current or potential users just so that you can use the latest widget from iOS 5 or 6.
No that's not it. Think of it like SCM. Successive versions isn't fragmentation. Multiple live branches is fragmentation.
Models following one after another IN SERIES do not cause difficult problems.
Have you ever developed for iOS? Depending on what your app does, you can quite easily have #ifdef IOS3 #ifdef IOS4 ifdef iOS5 and now #idef IOS6 going on. How does that not cause difficult problems? If you use a feature that was unofficially available in iOS4 in an app and Apple sees it, they will reject your software. Certainly it is possible to abstract some of that away with custom classes, but that does add complexity to the code. It is even worse when you can't implement a feature without alienating your older iOS customers.
But that's not true. The iPhone 1 and iPhone 3G are no longer supported by older versions of the OS. And there are also people who have used jailbreak and ultraSn0w or something like that to unlock their device to use on other carriers who will always be behind the general population until the latest OS version is exploited.. There are also people that just don't choose to upgrade their OS for a myriad of reasons. So yes, there is fragmentation on iOS and as a developer you have to choose which devices you want to support via the API that you use. And I know dozens of people who are still using a 3G or an iPod Touch 1st Gen. There are millions of those old devices out there. The question is, how many are still in use and which ones do you feel required to support as a developer?
I'm currently doing iOS development for a Fortune 500 company. The app integrates with their SAP backend and lets them use their data via WiFi or cellular data. In my case I am fortunate that I can dictate what version of iOS the company runs. I can tell you now that Amazon just released a new version of their Amazon Instant Video app to fix bugs in iOS 4.0 and I see plenty of people writing negative reviews because an app doesn't support iOS 3 or 4 properly. The fact of the matter is that iOS has been fragmented since iOS 3.0 came out (or was it 4?) when the iPhone 1 was left behind. Is it as bad as Android? No. But you cannot deny that there is fragmentation.
This is so true and it drives me nuts. The school bus comes and picks HIGH SCHOOL aged kids in my neighborhood. The highschool is less than a mile away. A lot of the houses in the neighborhood are backed up against the damned high school. They could hop the fence and be in class in 2 seconds. If you have to walk around, it might take you 10 minutes to get there, tops.
Oh you think that the people who run the TSA are going to stop at airports? Please. They have an empire to build! They already are talking about scanning people at bus stops, train stations, and do randomly stop people on interstate highways to search their vehicles. They will celebrate the day that they get to expand their empire to schools, malls, and everything else.
The interesting thing that a lot of Australian Internet Users miss is that we (Australians) do not have a provision garanteeing or protecting free speech. All internet posts are pretty much covered under the libel and slander laws.
Most countries do not protect libel and slander through free speech. In the US, or UK, or Australia I could not knowingly lie and defame someone without being liable for my actions. In fact, with freedom comes responsibility. You really are free to say whatever you want, but you must face the consequence of your actions if you do something that violates the rights of another. However, I do think that this law sounds a bit much. People have been trolling anonymously since the invention of the printing press, and perhaps even earlier.
Not only that, but the article I read last night on the BBC talked about how these QR codes are done. First of all, they imbed the QR code on the bill using a special ink that is only luminescent with an exact frequency of laser light, which is invisible to the naked eye. Using a process of (I believe they called it) "photon upconversion" the light becomes visible to sensors in another segment of the spectrum. They can alter the ink they use to change the frequencies in question. This means you would have to have special equipment to see the QR code. They also said that they can imbed two QR codes on top of each other, which respond to different frequencies of light. They can use the two QR codes together to help validate the authenticity of the bill.
So certainly someone with the right scientists may be able to reproduce the ink, bleach the bill, and print a new face and QR code on it, but it would be very difficult. And who would hook their bill verifying machine up to the internet? And why would you use a URL? You could embed anything into that code, and you could probably even cryptographically sign the data embedded in the bill.
Of course not. I didn't say that we should do nothing. Like I said, I understand that people want to live as long as possible. But there is only so much you can do, and living in fear is not a good choice for anyone. Especially for Westerners that have nothing to worry about except terrorists. The odds of dying from terrorism in the West is slim, and is not worth the sacrifice we have made to our liberties. Those sacrifices would have never been made if people had a reasonable understanding of what the real dangers in their lives are.
As others mentioned above, you can potentially charge multiple devices on the same charging pad. For instance, I know there is an aftermark device for iOS devices that would charge as many iDevices as you can fit on the pad. For airports this is especially nice as wall sockets are usually hard to come by. But even in the home I'd much rather put my tablet, camera, and phone on a single pad than to plug them all in separately, even if they had cradles.
The Cold War was peace and harmony compared to this Islamic fundamentalist shit. This is fucking terrifying.
Why are you so terrified? You're not in the middle of it. And people die every day. To be afraid of death is just silly. Now I would not blame anyone for wanting to live as long as possible, but any one of us could die tomorrow of an infection from a cut, a car accident, an illness, an aneurism, or a thousand other things. You can't live your life in fear of every possible thing that could happen. Now if you're a soldier fighting against these people, then you would have to be crazy to not be scared. But all living things must die, and people need to learn to accept it, and not sacrifice all their rights, freedoms, and happiness in an ever illusory sense of safety.
Dentists have been offering this technology for a long time. It's basically a CNC machine to mold a tooth. The thing is that its insanely expensive. I had to get a crown and the mail-order crown was 1/3 of the cost of the "Crown while you wait"
That is probably how it should be. Most people have a hard time understanding the kind of language they use in contracts anyway. I had the advantage of working for lawyers for most of my college career first doing help desk for the Attorney General and then later doing transcription as a psuedo-legal secretary for a large bankruptcy firm. Otherwise, the contract might have seemed like Latin...
The point you failed to connect on is:
Indie developers in their spare time did something that the big game houses have been claiming was impossible for decades. "We can only support 4/8/16/32" has been the mantra of gaming companies for decades.
Now here a group of unpaid modders proves them spectacularly wrong.
The point of the article is half lost without factoring in that the people who accomplished it are not "professional, top tire game developers at the pinnacle of game research and captains of the gaming industry" but rather is 7 friends who decided to just do it.
Your combativeness towards this headline suggests that you missed the real point of it all.
Except that the big companies were limiting these games to 4/8/16/32 people not out of server demands, but most likely due to network constraints. Most of these FPS require you to have low latency with all of the other players in order to have fun. It sucks shooting at someone's head only to find out that you are shooting at where the person was and not where they really are. The more people you add to the game, the higher the chance that someone will have a poor experience due to latency. This is exacerbated when the game companies do not run their own servers, but require one of the players to be host, and therefore everyone has to have a good connection to that single player. That causes NAT and other issues as well.
you don't 'stick it to the man', when you unionize, you equalize what HAS BECOME an increasingly unlevel playing ground.
you show social responsibility when you fight to get a union installed in a bad company. and this surely sounds like they need some EQ there..
and while it may be bad for those fighting, they'll make life better for those that follow.
we USED to care about stuff like that. we used to. what happened to us? why do we have this 'got mine, fark you!' mentality?
your grandparents - that fought for unions and a better work life for you - feel you have abandoned them and all the hard work they fought for!
You're assuming (wrongly in most cases), that unions exist to make life better for the employees. Certainly they do sometimes make things better, but unions often become large and corrupt, and the leaders there are just as corrupt as any politician. Was the labor movement important to our generation? Absolutely. But when labor unions are able to raise enough money to affect political outcomes in society, or coerce members of their union to vote a specific way, they become just as bad as the corporations they are fighting against. The problem here is people, and I don't know what the solution is. Labor unions have done good for the worker, but how do you prevent them from becoming as bad or worse than those they are supposed to be protecting you from?
Well you have to remember that these cameras are generally higher up than the beam of a headlight would be. I'm not saying that you could blind them easily with a normal light. As you say, the flash will help illuminate everything in the picture evenly. However, since they are so very sensitive and infrared lasers have a lot of energy, I believe you could easily blind one day or night with a laser light. If you'd like, I can contact one of my old friends and have them test it on some night cameras. They won't have the exact flash setup, but I am sure they can tell us whether the laser is sufficient to blind the camera.
They had the same problems with the PS3 when it released. After people were making cash hand over fist with the 360 people ordered as many PS3s as they could. I personally know someone who got stuck with 9 of them. Is the demand high because people want the console, or because people are hoping to make a quick buck? Even with the iPad 3, most people seemed to be ordering to make money. I will not consider preorders a solid indication of the long term demand of a product.
Except that even cell phones charge at 5W. Every HTC, Motorola, and other microUSB android phone I have seen uses 1A at 5V to charge when you use the wall-plug. Even my desktop motherboard outputs up to 5W over USB 2.0
Yes, yes you can. Why the NExus 7 comes with a 2A 5V USB to 110V adapter and charges via microUSB. SO does the HP Touchpad. I haven't seen any problems with burned out cables, fires, or other issues.
Also worth noting is that micro-USB is incapable of charging an iPad according to that article, which this new dock connector will surely be used for.
That article would be incorrect. I have an iPad 2 and an iPad 3 that I use for development. Both of them can (and do) charge via 1A USB port on my computer. I have never, in the 6 months since my company issued me the iPad 2, had to plug it into anything but my computer to keep it charged.
Secondly, the Nexus 7 tablet that I use charges just fine over micro-USB. Its adapter puts out the exact same 2A at 5V as the iPad 3 charger. In fact, I can swap chargers between it and the iPad without any issue. So if it can charge the Nexus 7, or the HP Touchpad, Asus Transformer, and every other android tablet out there, why can't it charge the iPad 1,2 or 3? Because Apple said so, and made their own special connector.
I don't care if my iDevice or android device has a separate port for TV, or whatever else I want to use it for, but I want all my devices to charge via micro USB or induction. Why? Because I don't want to have to dig out a special cable to charge my device while traveling. Or if I am at a friends house and need some extra juice. And there is certainly no reason for me to throw away a power brick that puts out the exact same power that an iPhone needs just because it doesn't have Apple's connector on it. So yes, there will still be Apple-specific accessories, but there should be uniformity for the most important accessory of all, the charger.
If you Google around you'll find that most counties and cities have those red light cameras controlled by private corporations who monitor for violators. The private company gets a portion of the ticket revenue, and often is successful in getting the yellow light time shortened at these intersections. This actually makes the intersection more dangerous because people have less time to stop for a red.
Or maybe he's going to burn the camera watching the camera, and then burn the camera? Or maybe he'll just wear a mask or a hat and a disguise?
It depends a lot on the cameras. I used to work in the digital video surveillance industry. A lot of the "Low Light" cameras do in fact use infrared light to see in the dark. Some have lights built into them, and some are so sensitive that they can see just fine in black and white without much light at all. I would find it hard to believe that you couldn't blind the camera with some sort of light. If they close the aperture of the lens to compensate for the extreme brightness of a light, it would make objects with less light on them obscured.
>
Better yet, the APIs are all compatible, so in targetting iOS n-1, you only need to do a brief test on iOS n, and you'e done. Compare this with android where you'd target android 2.1 probably, and then have a ton of bug fixes to deal with on newer releases because the APIs have changed so much.
This is definitely not true. My company is working on a project that runs perfectly on iOS 5.0 and 5.1 but doesn't run at all on 6.0. Why? I don't know. I am not on that development team. My project does work just fine on iOS 6. However, some things have been deprecated, or changed between iOS versions and there are plenty of instances where you do have to develop separate code based on the OS version.
I don't know where you got the numbers indicating that 95% of the population of iDevices is on iOS 5. I can't see how it is true, though. A lot of people I know either don't care to, or don't know how to update their iDevice. And then the original iPhone and the 3G, as well as the iPod Touch do not support anything past iOS 4, anyway. Once you through in the group of people that like to jailbreak (or have to jailbreak to use ultraSn0w), then you have a percentage of the population that is often at least 1 OS version behind (though this is often just a minor version, like 5.0 had a jailbreak but 5.1 did not. 5.1.1 does).
Amazon continues to support iOS 4, and just recently released an upgrade to fix issues that are specific to 4.x users. I've also seen plenty of recent comments where people have removed stars from apps for not properly supporting iOS 4. I know that this is only one major version behind, as you have said, but I believe that there is a population that will not go past iOS 4 until their devices break. These are mostly going to be kids, and I would be willing to bet that many kids buy more apps and make more in-app purchases than most adults. I'd also be willing to bet most 3GS users would not upgrade to 6.0. If it is anything like what iOS 4 did to the 3G, they will find 6.0 to be almost unusable.
I can tell you that I ran windows 3.0 and 3.1 on DRDos 6 with no problems whatsoever. I never owned or used Microsoft DOS. So if there was some compatibility or stability problem I never saw it.
But it is fragmentation because the devices still exist in the market and developers HAVE to deal with it due to different API versions. You're trying to claim that fragmentation only exists in some limited scope that does not coincide with reality. If you wrote software for iOS you would understand that developers do have to write code that is specific to the different OS versions they want to support. Unless you're absolutely willing and able to completely write off devices that are running older versions of iOS you have to handle different iOS versions in code. Most developers cannot afford to do that. That is the very definition of fragmentation. You can't just wave your hand and say "Everything is okay those old devices all go to the landfill when they are not upgradable." I am not trying to say that it is anything like the world of android, but in reality the problem exists.
That is not all that a developer has to support. They have to support different versions of the API for every iOS version they have to support. That is unless you want to cut off millions of current or potential users just so that you can use the latest widget from iOS 5 or 6.
No that's not it. Think of it like SCM. Successive versions isn't fragmentation. Multiple live branches is fragmentation.
Models following one after another IN SERIES do not cause difficult problems.
Have you ever developed for iOS? Depending on what your app does, you can quite easily have #ifdef IOS3 #ifdef IOS4 ifdef iOS5 and now #idef IOS6 going on. How does that not cause difficult problems? If you use a feature that was unofficially available in iOS4 in an app and Apple sees it, they will reject your software. Certainly it is possible to abstract some of that away with custom classes, but that does add complexity to the code. It is even worse when you can't implement a feature without alienating your older iOS customers.
But that's not true. The iPhone 1 and iPhone 3G are no longer supported by older versions of the OS. And there are also people who have used jailbreak and ultraSn0w or something like that to unlock their device to use on other carriers who will always be behind the general population until the latest OS version is exploited.. There are also people that just don't choose to upgrade their OS for a myriad of reasons. So yes, there is fragmentation on iOS and as a developer you have to choose which devices you want to support via the API that you use. And I know dozens of people who are still using a 3G or an iPod Touch 1st Gen. There are millions of those old devices out there. The question is, how many are still in use and which ones do you feel required to support as a developer?
I'm currently doing iOS development for a Fortune 500 company. The app integrates with their SAP backend and lets them use their data via WiFi or cellular data. In my case I am fortunate that I can dictate what version of iOS the company runs. I can tell you now that Amazon just released a new version of their Amazon Instant Video app to fix bugs in iOS 4.0 and I see plenty of people writing negative reviews because an app doesn't support iOS 3 or 4 properly. The fact of the matter is that iOS has been fragmented since iOS 3.0 came out (or was it 4?) when the iPhone 1 was left behind. Is it as bad as Android? No. But you cannot deny that there is fragmentation.
This is so true and it drives me nuts. The school bus comes and picks HIGH SCHOOL aged kids in my neighborhood. The highschool is less than a mile away. A lot of the houses in the neighborhood are backed up against the damned high school. They could hop the fence and be in class in 2 seconds. If you have to walk around, it might take you 10 minutes to get there, tops.
Oh you think that the people who run the TSA are going to stop at airports? Please. They have an empire to build! They already are talking about scanning people at bus stops, train stations, and do randomly stop people on interstate highways to search their vehicles. They will celebrate the day that they get to expand their empire to schools, malls, and everything else.
The interesting thing that a lot of Australian Internet Users miss is that we (Australians) do not have a provision garanteeing or protecting free speech. All internet posts are pretty much covered under the libel and slander laws.
Most countries do not protect libel and slander through free speech. In the US, or UK, or Australia I could not knowingly lie and defame someone without being liable for my actions. In fact, with freedom comes responsibility. You really are free to say whatever you want, but you must face the consequence of your actions if you do something that violates the rights of another. However, I do think that this law sounds a bit much. People have been trolling anonymously since the invention of the printing press, and perhaps even earlier.
Not only that, but the article I read last night on the BBC talked about how these QR codes are done. First of all, they imbed the QR code on the bill using a special ink that is only luminescent with an exact frequency of laser light, which is invisible to the naked eye. Using a process of (I believe they called it) "photon upconversion" the light becomes visible to sensors in another segment of the spectrum. They can alter the ink they use to change the frequencies in question. This means you would have to have special equipment to see the QR code. They also said that they can imbed two QR codes on top of each other, which respond to different frequencies of light. They can use the two QR codes together to help validate the authenticity of the bill.
So certainly someone with the right scientists may be able to reproduce the ink, bleach the bill, and print a new face and QR code on it, but it would be very difficult. And who would hook their bill verifying machine up to the internet? And why would you use a URL? You could embed anything into that code, and you could probably even cryptographically sign the data embedded in the bill.
Of course not. I didn't say that we should do nothing. Like I said, I understand that people want to live as long as possible. But there is only so much you can do, and living in fear is not a good choice for anyone. Especially for Westerners that have nothing to worry about except terrorists. The odds of dying from terrorism in the West is slim, and is not worth the sacrifice we have made to our liberties. Those sacrifices would have never been made if people had a reasonable understanding of what the real dangers in their lives are.
As others mentioned above, you can potentially charge multiple devices on the same charging pad. For instance, I know there is an aftermark device for iOS devices that would charge as many iDevices as you can fit on the pad. For airports this is especially nice as wall sockets are usually hard to come by. But even in the home I'd much rather put my tablet, camera, and phone on a single pad than to plug them all in separately, even if they had cradles.
The Cold War was peace and harmony compared to this Islamic fundamentalist shit. This is fucking terrifying.
Why are you so terrified? You're not in the middle of it. And people die every day. To be afraid of death is just silly. Now I would not blame anyone for wanting to live as long as possible, but any one of us could die tomorrow of an infection from a cut, a car accident, an illness, an aneurism, or a thousand other things. You can't live your life in fear of every possible thing that could happen. Now if you're a soldier fighting against these people, then you would have to be crazy to not be scared. But all living things must die, and people need to learn to accept it, and not sacrifice all their rights, freedoms, and happiness in an ever illusory sense of safety.
Dentists have been offering this technology for a long time. It's basically a CNC machine to mold a tooth. The thing is that its insanely expensive. I had to get a crown and the mail-order crown was 1/3 of the cost of the "Crown while you wait"
That is probably how it should be. Most people have a hard time understanding the kind of language they use in contracts anyway. I had the advantage of working for lawyers for most of my college career first doing help desk for the Attorney General and then later doing transcription as a psuedo-legal secretary for a large bankruptcy firm. Otherwise, the contract might have seemed like Latin...