Right, I'm sure it has nothing to do with what an enormous pain in the ass it is to convert the entirety of the United States to a different system of measurement. It's not like this is a big place or anything, we could do it in a weekend. No, it must be because we hate the French.
And yet Canada, Russia, China, and several other countries that are bigger, both geographically and by population, had no trouble switching to the metric system. You do realize that Brunei is the only country in the world other than the US that still uses the Imperial system at an official level?
There's a lot of resistance to change in the US, but no more than exists elsewhere in the world. Besides which, do you have any idea how much it's costing industry to have to switch between measurement systems when you move between countries? Several large businesses and industries have already switched themselves over to Metric, because it just makes it easier to work with the rest of the world. It's a question of political will, but it really is about time the US joined the rest of the world in a common measurement system.
The comment about the French was facetious... I'm glad to see it was appreciated.... It was either that, or a joke about Americans being confused by all the multiples of ten.
Celsius is directly related to Kelvin, just offset so that 0C is the freezing point of water instead of Absolute zero. It's easy to convert between the two, just +/- 273.15 depending on where you're going. 0C - 273.15 is 0K.
It's the other way around, but yes. Celsius was calibrated to the freezing and boiling points of distilled water, and for Kelvins, they said "hey, that's an easy to calibrate scale, but let's set 0 at absolute zero".
I believe Fahrenheit has an equivalent called Rankine, whereby 0Ra is absolute zero and the difference between the two is a fixed value, however that does bring the question - what's the point of 0F? What does it represent? Aside from the benefit of having "more" values between boiling and freezing water, is there a benefit to Fahrenheit that Celsius doesn't have?
0'F is the freezing point of salt water. Which salt water... unknown. It has different freezing points for different salt densities... I think it was supposed to be sea water, but again, sea water has different saline densities depending on where in the world you're taking it from, and also how deep you're taking it from.
100'F was supposed to be the human body temperature, but it was calibrated against somebody who was running a fever that day. Normal human body temperature is supposedly 98.6'F, but it does actually vary from person to person, depending on their health and metabolism at the time.
Ultimately, Fahrenheit is a completely arbitrary scale, calibrated to completely unrelated points in nature, some of which aren't reproducible outside of the human species. The reason it still exists is because it was proposed earlier than the Celcius scale, and it caught ground. Also because the only country that still uses it absolutely refuses to consider anything metric, because the French are using it, and that would be wrong.
It's worth pointing out that laws surrounding "mandatory reporting" piercing the doctor-client privlege makes it very dangerous for a pedophile to be honest with a therapist. As a result, the law, designed to protect kids, actually makes pedophiles avoid therapy.
Mandatory reporting only applies if you have committed a crime, or if you are going to commit a crime. If you are not planning to commit a crime, and do not pose an imminent danger, then the therapist does not need to report it to the police.
And no, I'm not a therapist. I have, however, had several of them over the years, and had the mandatory reporting rules explained to me as recently as last week. (no, not for paedophilia... for an lgbt thing... though if you ask certain among the conservative right wing, there isn't a difference between the two....)
I think the concern is more that if people can explore those kinds of thoughts, they're less likely to seek treatment.
The pedophiles seeing a therapist about their thoughts for ways to control them aren't the ones that concern me. The ones spanking off to pictures of kids playing in the park are the ones who do. While the vast majority of them will probably never act on those feelings, some of them will.
While it's debatable whether a drawn picture should be made illegal, there is an understandable logic behind wanting it banned.
A better question is... why would you be stupid enough to cross an international border with something even remotely questionable on your laptop?
It's fairly easy to tell the difference between a signature that was printed with an inkjet and an actual pen being held by a human (forget using a laser, that's even more obvious). Quite aside from the ink having a different composition for a printer than it does for a pen, there's the actual physical indent on the paper caused by the pen.
If they can take the paper you actually signed, and remove the original printing without affecting your signature, it becomes a lot harder to tell.
People are under the mistaken impression that would-be hackers waste their time trying to brute force passwords. They don't. They either exploit design vulnerabilities (in which case your password doesn't matter), or they try a little social engineering to get your password. The one thing the movie Hackers got right was the scene when Dade called up the night security desk at one of the places he was trying to hack, pretending to be an employee in a panic, and got him to read the phone number off the modem so he could dial in. That's how it really does work... you come up with a ruse, and convince somebody who doesn't know better to give up sensitive information that you can use to gain access to the system.
And that's where passphrases have a huge advantage: they are easy enough to remember that they don't need to be written down.
Yeah, but you can pick up Crazy Machines or any of its standalone xpacs on Steam for $10, and easily get 10-20 hours of gameplay, not to mention fan-created puzzles. Isn't that better economy than paying $60 for a 40 hour game?
Don't get me wrong, for nostalgia alone I'll probably pick up D3, but the only $60 titles I've bought in years have been sequels to games I played a long time ago. I just don't see the point when most AAA games coming out are 10-20 hours, tops, and then expect you to spend *more* money on DLC so that you get the same length/quality of game that you would have gotten 10 years ago. And if it really is one of those "you just have to play it" titles, I'll wait until it goes on sale. Within a few months of original sale, most AAA games drop in price by at least $20.
Marketing, in the US, is designed to develop a pull from the patient, rather than a push by the doctor. Due to changes in the law, drug companies now want to create demand, for patients who need a drug type, for their prescription drugs. It's about market share, not increasing the size of the market.
There's a reason that drug ads in Canada aren't allowed to mention both the drug name, and what it does in the same ad....
Maybe some day the US will follow suit. But I doubt it.
Also, Verizon and Sprint don't use SIM cards, while AT&T and T-Mobile use different frequency bands for 3G.
This.
There's very little choice in carriers in the US, and if you're planning on using your existing handset, check who uses the same frequencies as your existing phone. While voice should work on any GSM handset on any GSM network (assuming they're still running 2G networks), data won't work at all unless your phone supports the same frequencies.
You'd be better off buying a burn phone with a prepaid card. In that case, it won't matter.
Ontario has one up for debate with tri-party support in the legislature right now. While the specifics are different, the essentials are the same as the Manitoba law. One thing I'm particularly fond of is the changes to the early termination fees, which they're looking at turning into an extra charge on your monthly bill. Essentially like the Koodo Tab, only with it being a real charge on top of the monthly fees, so that when you're not on a contract, you pay less.
Rogers probably realizes they can't win this one. In the long run, every province will go this way. What they probably want is for the CRTC to enact a national policy so that they don't get stuck with the administrative hassle that is having 12 separate contract fee and termination structures.
Hypothetically speaking, because I would try to contact the owner and return it, in a real situation, but...
If I were going to steal a cell phone, the first thing I would do is pull the battery. The second thing I would do is factory reset it, either by reflashing it from a computer, or from within the phone if it's not locked. The third thing I would do is change the IMEI.
All of the above are ridiculously easy (well, pulling the battery from an iPhone isn't), and would leave me with a phone that can't be located by you, and which can't be burned by the carrier because it has a different IMEI. Sell it as "off the back of a truck" for a few hundred, and you're done. Rinse. Repeat.
And if it's a GSM phone, there's no "bringing it in to get activated". Buy a SIM. Put it in. Hey look, it's activated!
No argument there... Pool of Radiance became a much better (and more D&D-like) game once you finished clearing old Phlan, and left the city. And I'm not just talking about the stuff in the graveyard, I'm talking about things like the crawl in the pyramid to the north, or the stuff with the kobolds way up in the northeast, or the quests along the coast to the west and in the mountains. There really was a *lot* of gameplay in that one... the combat system left a bit to be desired in terms of scale (though the mechanics were good) but other than that it was pretty good story-telling.
It may not feel as cohesive as some of the Sierra titles (most of which weren't RPG's), or as developed as the Ultima series, but it did bring something to the table that was pretty mind-blowing at the time, and that's a reusable game engine and assets that made developing future releases much easier.
Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures. It was a pool of radiance style game and a creator of such games. I remember making so many adventures and monsters with that game, well into the late 90's even.
It wasn't just a Pool of Radiance-style game, it *was* the same game. PoolRad was the first game they released with the engine, and UA was just another adventure, coupled with the game editor so you could create your own.
They also had a tendency to feel like they were made with a construction set instead of coded from scratch.
They were, sort of. SSI came up with an engine for Dungeons and Dragons, and games like Pool of Radiance were adventures pieced together using the engine. There were two other D&D games they released using the exact same engine, and there used to be a map editor floating around that would let you write your own. The toolchain wasn't as advanced as something like Aurora or Eclipse (the engines for Neverwinter Nights and NWN2), but it was essentially the same idea.
I'm almost pushing mid 30s and this list is "before my time". Sure, I was around during the 80s, but home computers with any decent amount of processing power (for their time) were horrendously expensive. Today, my outdated (not getting an official update to Ice Cream Sandwich) smartphone runs DOS programs under DOSBox faster than my first PC ran actual DOS.
I dunno... I just turned 31 a couple of weeks ago, and I've played at least half of those games when they were still "current". My family got our first computer in 1984, and basically everything on that list (and several that aren't) which came out after that, I've played.
Hell, my default "insecure" password (which I use for systems that shouldn't be asking for a password and won't let you turn it off) still comes from the copy protection code wheel for 1988's Pool of Radiance.
Re:I have an organ donor card...
on
When Are You Dead?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
How do you know what treatments will become available tomorrow?
If I'm braindead today, who cares what becomes available tomorrow? Maybe if a viable way to restart brain impulses after brain death occurs, I'll reconsider having signed my organ donor card. Anything could happen, I suppose, but I'm doubtful that technology will happen in my lifetime. As it is, I have signed it, and I have made a living will which states clearly that if I'm brain dead they're to line up organ transplant recipients and terminate life support. I'd rather give others a chance at life than continue to exist as a vegetable in the hopes that they might, maybe, some day come up with a way to undo that damage.
The constitution was in active service for longer than the Enterprise, but it's no longer in active service. It's been a museum for 100 years.
Very nice ship, if you like tall ships. They don't make them like that any more. A shame that Enterprise won't be turned into a museum as well, but the last thing I really want is another reminder of a movie made by Tom Crazy....;)
Everything else being equal, would you live in the house with the nuclear power plant down the street?
No, but not because of the point you're getting at. Nuclear plants are usually built in industrial areas, and the aesthetics of the area would prevent me from building/buying a house there. They are usually catastrophically ugly.
Take a place like Chalk River, Ontario, however, and I'd have no problem living there, despite the proximity to one of the largest nuclear research labs in the world, and multiple test and production nuclear reactors. Chalk River is in an earthquake-prone area (had a 5.0 not that far away a year ago, and the geological record shows that they've had up to an 8.0 in the past, not to mention being in an area with a lot of leda clay, which has been known to amplify the effects of an earthquake), though it's too far inland to be at any kind of risk for a tsunami.
If the nuclear reactor in your example were somehow rendered invisible, and wouldn't be an eyesore, then I wouldn't have a problem living near it at all. They tend to over-engineer these things, and pay very careful attention to the amount of radiation at curbside. While there's risk associated with a 9.0 earthquake, I'm equally likely to die in said 9.0 earthquake itself. Statistically speaking, I'm far more likely to die from a car accident than I am in a nuclear accident, and I absorb more ionizing radiation during a 5-minute cell phone call than I would spending an entire day next-door to a nuclear plant. Why aren't you asking if people would be willing to drive their car to work, or order a pizza on their cell phone?
We can argue until the cows come home about whether they made design mistakes in Fukushima. There's almost certainly things they could have done differently, but hindsight is always 20/20. Nuclear energy on the whole is quite safe. I'd certainly rather that they were using renewable alternatives, as I'm a tree-hugging dirt-worshipper, but nuclear energy produces a lot less pollution than the non-renewable alternatives, and that pollution causes much more harm to my health on a daily basis than the radiation from a nuclear power plant would.
I'm now on my third Android handset. My first was an HTC Dream (known in the US as a G1), and I bought it when there was no other game in town. To this day, I have not spent any money directly in the Google market. I sincerely doubt I ever will spend money on it... almost all of the functionality I want from my phone is available either from stock apps, or from stuff that's available free on the market.
A small handful of apps I use are ad-supported. I don't have a problem with that. I never buy anything that's advertised at me, but if advertisers want to pay developers to develop free stuff for me, then I'm fine with that. The ads don't use a lot of bandwidth, and don't actually cost me anything to use. Free but ad-supported is the way to make money on Android, I think.
But really even if that is the reason, if a significant number of Android phones that are sold don't have a GPU (which many of the low end phones don't). That still means that fragment ration is a problem. If you can't count on at minimum a real GPU. No software emulation won't usually cut it.
It would surprise me that a significant number of low end phones don't have a GPU. Unless we're redefining low end... The phone sitting on the desk next to me cost $150 at retail, no contract. Admittedly, I bought it within the last week, but it's a model that's been on the market for over a year now, and hasn't dropped significantly in price (Samsung Galaxy Ace). It's got an MSM7227 SoC powering it, which includes a 128MHz Adreno 200 GPU. That's exactly the same GPU that's found in several higher end smartphones, in a phone that I would consider "entry level" for smartphones. The other alternatives I had from my carrier in the same price range were equally powered... actually, with the carrier I'm with, every Android-powered smartphone they have has the same GPU in it, whether it's powered by the 600MHz MSM7227, the 800MHz MSM7227 (like the phone I got), or the higher end Snapdragons.
Even dumphones are starting to ship with GPU's built in, because it's becoming easier to just buy a SoC that has a GPU than to get a chip fabricated without one.
You didn't read the article, did you? The Chrome bugs were used to break free of the sandbox, and run arbitrary code on the operating system, which was a fully patched and up-to-date Windows 7.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, I'm sure it has nothing to do with what an enormous pain in the ass it is to convert the entirety of the United States to a different system of measurement. It's not like this is a big place or anything, we could do it in a weekend. No, it must be because we hate the French.
And yet Canada, Russia, China, and several other countries that are bigger, both geographically and by population, had no trouble switching to the metric system. You do realize that Brunei is the only country in the world other than the US that still uses the Imperial system at an official level?
There's a lot of resistance to change in the US, but no more than exists elsewhere in the world. Besides which, do you have any idea how much it's costing industry to have to switch between measurement systems when you move between countries? Several large businesses and industries have already switched themselves over to Metric, because it just makes it easier to work with the rest of the world. It's a question of political will, but it really is about time the US joined the rest of the world in a common measurement system.
The comment about the French was facetious... I'm glad to see it was appreciated.... It was either that, or a joke about Americans being confused by all the multiples of ten.
And as for "boiling point of water", well, what pressure?
STP. ambient temperature of 0'C, and pressure of 100KPa.
Celsius is directly related to Kelvin, just offset so that 0C is the freezing point of water instead of Absolute zero. It's easy to convert between the two, just +/- 273.15 depending on where you're going. 0C - 273.15 is 0K.
It's the other way around, but yes. Celsius was calibrated to the freezing and boiling points of distilled water, and for Kelvins, they said "hey, that's an easy to calibrate scale, but let's set 0 at absolute zero".
I believe Fahrenheit has an equivalent called Rankine, whereby 0Ra is absolute zero and the difference between the two is a fixed value, however that does bring the question - what's the point of 0F? What does it represent? Aside from the benefit of having "more" values between boiling and freezing water, is there a benefit to Fahrenheit that Celsius doesn't have?
0'F is the freezing point of salt water. Which salt water... unknown. It has different freezing points for different salt densities... I think it was supposed to be sea water, but again, sea water has different saline densities depending on where in the world you're taking it from, and also how deep you're taking it from.
100'F was supposed to be the human body temperature, but it was calibrated against somebody who was running a fever that day. Normal human body temperature is supposedly 98.6'F, but it does actually vary from person to person, depending on their health and metabolism at the time.
Ultimately, Fahrenheit is a completely arbitrary scale, calibrated to completely unrelated points in nature, some of which aren't reproducible outside of the human species. The reason it still exists is because it was proposed earlier than the Celcius scale, and it caught ground. Also because the only country that still uses it absolutely refuses to consider anything metric, because the French are using it, and that would be wrong.
Personally, I just check out Facebook while sitting.
That would certainly explain the vast majority of the content on Facebook...
It's worth pointing out that laws surrounding "mandatory reporting" piercing the doctor-client privlege makes it very dangerous for a pedophile to be honest with a therapist. As a result, the law, designed to protect kids, actually makes pedophiles avoid therapy.
Mandatory reporting only applies if you have committed a crime, or if you are going to commit a crime. If you are not planning to commit a crime, and do not pose an imminent danger, then the therapist does not need to report it to the police.
And no, I'm not a therapist. I have, however, had several of them over the years, and had the mandatory reporting rules explained to me as recently as last week. (no, not for paedophilia... for an lgbt thing... though if you ask certain among the conservative right wing, there isn't a difference between the two....)
I think the concern is more that if people can explore those kinds of thoughts, they're less likely to seek treatment.
The pedophiles seeing a therapist about their thoughts for ways to control them aren't the ones that concern me. The ones spanking off to pictures of kids playing in the park are the ones who do. While the vast majority of them will probably never act on those feelings, some of them will.
While it's debatable whether a drawn picture should be made illegal, there is an understandable logic behind wanting it banned.
A better question is... why would you be stupid enough to cross an international border with something even remotely questionable on your laptop?
It's fairly easy to tell the difference between a signature that was printed with an inkjet and an actual pen being held by a human (forget using a laser, that's even more obvious). Quite aside from the ink having a different composition for a printer than it does for a pen, there's the actual physical indent on the paper caused by the pen.
If they can take the paper you actually signed, and remove the original printing without affecting your signature, it becomes a lot harder to tell.
People are under the mistaken impression that would-be hackers waste their time trying to brute force passwords. They don't. They either exploit design vulnerabilities (in which case your password doesn't matter), or they try a little social engineering to get your password. The one thing the movie Hackers got right was the scene when Dade called up the night security desk at one of the places he was trying to hack, pretending to be an employee in a panic, and got him to read the phone number off the modem so he could dial in. That's how it really does work... you come up with a ruse, and convince somebody who doesn't know better to give up sensitive information that you can use to gain access to the system.
And that's where passphrases have a huge advantage: they are easy enough to remember that they don't need to be written down.
Yeah, but you can pick up Crazy Machines or any of its standalone xpacs on Steam for $10, and easily get 10-20 hours of gameplay, not to mention fan-created puzzles. Isn't that better economy than paying $60 for a 40 hour game?
Don't get me wrong, for nostalgia alone I'll probably pick up D3, but the only $60 titles I've bought in years have been sequels to games I played a long time ago. I just don't see the point when most AAA games coming out are 10-20 hours, tops, and then expect you to spend *more* money on DLC so that you get the same length/quality of game that you would have gotten 10 years ago. And if it really is one of those "you just have to play it" titles, I'll wait until it goes on sale. Within a few months of original sale, most AAA games drop in price by at least $20.
Marketing, in the US, is designed to develop a pull from the patient, rather than a push by the doctor. Due to changes in the law, drug companies now want to create demand, for patients who need a drug type, for their prescription drugs. It's about market share, not increasing the size of the market.
There's a reason that drug ads in Canada aren't allowed to mention both the drug name, and what it does in the same ad....
Maybe some day the US will follow suit. But I doubt it.
Also, Verizon and Sprint don't use SIM cards, while AT&T and T-Mobile use different frequency bands for 3G.
This.
There's very little choice in carriers in the US, and if you're planning on using your existing handset, check who uses the same frequencies as your existing phone. While voice should work on any GSM handset on any GSM network (assuming they're still running 2G networks), data won't work at all unless your phone supports the same frequencies.
You'd be better off buying a burn phone with a prepaid card. In that case, it won't matter.
Ontario has one up for debate with tri-party support in the legislature right now. While the specifics are different, the essentials are the same as the Manitoba law. One thing I'm particularly fond of is the changes to the early termination fees, which they're looking at turning into an extra charge on your monthly bill. Essentially like the Koodo Tab, only with it being a real charge on top of the monthly fees, so that when you're not on a contract, you pay less.
Rogers probably realizes they can't win this one. In the long run, every province will go this way. What they probably want is for the CRTC to enact a national policy so that they don't get stuck with the administrative hassle that is having 12 separate contract fee and termination structures.
Hypothetically speaking, because I would try to contact the owner and return it, in a real situation, but...
If I were going to steal a cell phone, the first thing I would do is pull the battery. The second thing I would do is factory reset it, either by reflashing it from a computer, or from within the phone if it's not locked. The third thing I would do is change the IMEI.
All of the above are ridiculously easy (well, pulling the battery from an iPhone isn't), and would leave me with a phone that can't be located by you, and which can't be burned by the carrier because it has a different IMEI. Sell it as "off the back of a truck" for a few hundred, and you're done. Rinse. Repeat.
And if it's a GSM phone, there's no "bringing it in to get activated". Buy a SIM. Put it in. Hey look, it's activated!
No argument there... Pool of Radiance became a much better (and more D&D-like) game once you finished clearing old Phlan, and left the city. And I'm not just talking about the stuff in the graveyard, I'm talking about things like the crawl in the pyramid to the north, or the stuff with the kobolds way up in the northeast, or the quests along the coast to the west and in the mountains. There really was a *lot* of gameplay in that one... the combat system left a bit to be desired in terms of scale (though the mechanics were good) but other than that it was pretty good story-telling.
It may not feel as cohesive as some of the Sierra titles (most of which weren't RPG's), or as developed as the Ultima series, but it did bring something to the table that was pretty mind-blowing at the time, and that's a reusable game engine and assets that made developing future releases much easier.
Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures. It was a pool of radiance style game and a creator of such games. I remember making so many adventures and monsters with that game, well into the late 90's even.
It wasn't just a Pool of Radiance-style game, it *was* the same game. PoolRad was the first game they released with the engine, and UA was just another adventure, coupled with the game editor so you could create your own.
They also had a tendency to feel like they were made with a construction set instead of coded from scratch.
They were, sort of. SSI came up with an engine for Dungeons and Dragons, and games like Pool of Radiance were adventures pieced together using the engine. There were two other D&D games they released using the exact same engine, and there used to be a map editor floating around that would let you write your own. The toolchain wasn't as advanced as something like Aurora or Eclipse (the engines for Neverwinter Nights and NWN2), but it was essentially the same idea.
We're fighting a losing battle against the corpus linguists, mate. I fully expect "alot" to be added to the dictionary soon.
So... you mean they're trying to allot a different meaning to it?
I'm almost pushing mid 30s and this list is "before my time". Sure, I was around during the 80s, but home computers with any decent amount of processing power (for their time) were horrendously expensive. Today, my outdated (not getting an official update to Ice Cream Sandwich) smartphone runs DOS programs under DOSBox faster than my first PC ran actual DOS.
I dunno... I just turned 31 a couple of weeks ago, and I've played at least half of those games when they were still "current". My family got our first computer in 1984, and basically everything on that list (and several that aren't) which came out after that, I've played.
Hell, my default "insecure" password (which I use for systems that shouldn't be asking for a password and won't let you turn it off) still comes from the copy protection code wheel for 1988's Pool of Radiance.
How do you know what treatments will become available tomorrow?
If I'm braindead today, who cares what becomes available tomorrow? Maybe if a viable way to restart brain impulses after brain death occurs, I'll reconsider having signed my organ donor card. Anything could happen, I suppose, but I'm doubtful that technology will happen in my lifetime. As it is, I have signed it, and I have made a living will which states clearly that if I'm brain dead they're to line up organ transplant recipients and terminate life support. I'd rather give others a chance at life than continue to exist as a vegetable in the hopes that they might, maybe, some day come up with a way to undo that damage.
The constitution was in active service for longer than the Enterprise, but it's no longer in active service. It's been a museum for 100 years.
Very nice ship, if you like tall ships. They don't make them like that any more. A shame that Enterprise won't be turned into a museum as well, but the last thing I really want is another reminder of a movie made by Tom Crazy.... ;)
Everything else being equal, would you live in the house with the nuclear power plant down the street?
No, but not because of the point you're getting at. Nuclear plants are usually built in industrial areas, and the aesthetics of the area would prevent me from building/buying a house there. They are usually catastrophically ugly.
Take a place like Chalk River, Ontario, however, and I'd have no problem living there, despite the proximity to one of the largest nuclear research labs in the world, and multiple test and production nuclear reactors. Chalk River is in an earthquake-prone area (had a 5.0 not that far away a year ago, and the geological record shows that they've had up to an 8.0 in the past, not to mention being in an area with a lot of leda clay, which has been known to amplify the effects of an earthquake), though it's too far inland to be at any kind of risk for a tsunami.
If the nuclear reactor in your example were somehow rendered invisible, and wouldn't be an eyesore, then I wouldn't have a problem living near it at all. They tend to over-engineer these things, and pay very careful attention to the amount of radiation at curbside. While there's risk associated with a 9.0 earthquake, I'm equally likely to die in said 9.0 earthquake itself. Statistically speaking, I'm far more likely to die from a car accident than I am in a nuclear accident, and I absorb more ionizing radiation during a 5-minute cell phone call than I would spending an entire day next-door to a nuclear plant. Why aren't you asking if people would be willing to drive their car to work, or order a pizza on their cell phone?
We can argue until the cows come home about whether they made design mistakes in Fukushima. There's almost certainly things they could have done differently, but hindsight is always 20/20. Nuclear energy on the whole is quite safe. I'd certainly rather that they were using renewable alternatives, as I'm a tree-hugging dirt-worshipper, but nuclear energy produces a lot less pollution than the non-renewable alternatives, and that pollution causes much more harm to my health on a daily basis than the radiation from a nuclear power plant would.
There's a very simple explanation for Bieber:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusia
This.
I'm now on my third Android handset. My first was an HTC Dream (known in the US as a G1), and I bought it when there was no other game in town. To this day, I have not spent any money directly in the Google market. I sincerely doubt I ever will spend money on it... almost all of the functionality I want from my phone is available either from stock apps, or from stuff that's available free on the market.
A small handful of apps I use are ad-supported. I don't have a problem with that. I never buy anything that's advertised at me, but if advertisers want to pay developers to develop free stuff for me, then I'm fine with that. The ads don't use a lot of bandwidth, and don't actually cost me anything to use. Free but ad-supported is the way to make money on Android, I think.
But really even if that is the reason, if a significant number of Android phones that are sold don't have a GPU (which many of the low end phones don't). That still means that fragment ration is a problem. If you can't count on at minimum a real GPU. No software emulation won't usually cut it.
It would surprise me that a significant number of low end phones don't have a GPU. Unless we're redefining low end... The phone sitting on the desk next to me cost $150 at retail, no contract. Admittedly, I bought it within the last week, but it's a model that's been on the market for over a year now, and hasn't dropped significantly in price (Samsung Galaxy Ace). It's got an MSM7227 SoC powering it, which includes a 128MHz Adreno 200 GPU. That's exactly the same GPU that's found in several higher end smartphones, in a phone that I would consider "entry level" for smartphones. The other alternatives I had from my carrier in the same price range were equally powered... actually, with the carrier I'm with, every Android-powered smartphone they have has the same GPU in it, whether it's powered by the 600MHz MSM7227, the 800MHz MSM7227 (like the phone I got), or the higher end Snapdragons.
Even dumphones are starting to ship with GPU's built in, because it's becoming easier to just buy a SoC that has a GPU than to get a chip fabricated without one.
You didn't read the article, did you? The Chrome bugs were used to break free of the sandbox, and run arbitrary code on the operating system, which was a fully patched and up-to-date Windows 7.