In the war for eyeballs, a search engine needs to produce the "best" results for your query, and provide meaningful, useful pages at the top of the list. If your searches on a given provider just bring up link farms or pages which are so strewn with ads that its hard to find the content, you're going to try another search engine. Google makes its money by getting people to search using their engine, and by delivering relevant ads.
I'm a bit surprised they haven't been more aggressive at weeding out crap pages. Or it could just be that they're losing market share, and they looked into why people were going elsewhere.
If you build luxury houses and own tracks of (now nearly worthless) residential land on the outskirts of large cities, why not see if you can market to a new segment? I think they're getting in over their heads, as they're not used to dealing with the cooling and power supplies such a facilities often require, but it's still a cute idea from a marketing perspective.
No, there isn't. That's the difference between morally right and legality. What you have shown is morally wrong - it's breaking the intent of the law (and good citizenship) without crossing the threshold of being convictable in a court of law.
If you believe what you wrote, you're part of the problem with our society.
"last time I checked this part of the law has neither prevented circumvention software being readily available"
Please show me a US based vendor for software which allows ripping my purchased BluRay or DVD media. Better yet, show me a ripping service, like moondogdigital, for DVDs and BluRays so that I don't have to spend months ripping my personal collection of several hundred discs.
It sounds, from his comment, like even he hasn't read it. "If this bill is as bad as you say..." - wtf? He either didn't read it, or can't articulate the benefits - both very, very bad for the supposed author.
Have you seen the average voter? They generally know which party their voting for, and half of those who don't base their choice on the last three days of TV ads.
If weren't aware that "squash" is a game similar to handball that required a great deal of cardiovascular fitness, I would suggest that a game named "squash" is exactly the game a skinny guy does NOT want to challenge a fat guy to play.
I should add - the graphics in XMBC are cool, but I'm one of those guys who has a black desktop with no wallpaper. To me they don't add appreciably to the day to day experience, though they make for nice eye candy when friends see it for the first time.
It was probably 8 months ago. Hulu never installed, I couldn't find netflix, and most of the packages had non-descriptive names and clicking on them to install did nothing. Again, it was an early ATV client. As for scrolling, It would have taken the better part of 10 minutes to get from beginning to end of my movie list with the remote. It didn't see to cache the entire list locally. Plex takes about 15 seconds.
Actually, one of the problems was the all-inclusive interface. Sure, you could get to everything on the server, but you couldn't get to my wife's playlists in iTunes without exiting XMBC, which required actually executing the EXIT tab. In Plex, you just go "back" until you're at the top ATV menu, select her library, and go. That may seem trivial for you and me, but for the rest of the family, it's not.
The problem with tablet interfaces is that they are inconvenient, or very limited, or require lots of custom programming. They do (almost) exist, but are for high end setups and generally require you to be in the vilified 1% to afford them, or devotion of a good chunk of money, programming knowledge, and LOTS of spare time.
What I want is iOS (or android, I suspect, but iOS is simpler) on my TV. A page or three of icons that lead to entertainment portals, all accessible with the common, everyday infrared remote, using standard, learnable code commands.
I want the PC stuff, but I don't want the PC user experience. I don't want a keyboard, I want a remote - preferably one remote for the whole operation. I don't want to have to navigate to a page, sift through web cruft, just to get to the video. I don't want to have to shut down or switch from a browser to a media player to a media streaming application (unBox/Netflix/Hulu+) except by flipping to a "home" menu and selecting the app. Actually, I take that back - I really don't want to have to switch at all, I want a single damned list of everything, already aggregated from my purchased iTunes, personal media server (ripped media), and subscribed streaming services (Hulu, Netflix). I'd like it sorted and easily browsable and searchable. I'd like a single button to turn on or turn off the ability to see content for purchase or rent, ideally from multiple sources, and with a one (well, two really) click purchase-and-add-to-my-server-and-cloud-and-start-streaming button.
I tried it, and it was essentially unusable a couple of months ago. And when I say unusable, I mean that none of the common codecs could be streamed, and you got a crash, a "can't play this content", or an infinite wait for streaming to start. It may have changed, but I also found all the mandatory icons/portals and the advertising on the home page to be somewhat intrusive. I don't really want a $50ppv ultimate fighting championship link as the default first click on the kids TV in the playroom.
I'm glad you got XBMC to work. I got it to work, but not being a linux guy was pretty baffled by the options to install the various packages. It also had issues with streaming when I was playing with it, and the interface sucks. Every try and scroll/page through 400+ movies? Yeah, try that with plex and it's a whole different world, with very little setup required, plus it has supported clients for iOS devices. XMBC can do more, but Plex does what I need it to without requiring that I mess with the internals, and I appreciate that. I'm even willing to show my appreciation of the saved time with my wallet.
If Plex gets an official client on ATV, esp. in a non-JB condition, every single TV in my house is going to have an ATV the next day. It's that awesome (when it works, which is most of the time).
I've got sickbeard and couch potato with sabnzbd running on a win box at the moment, feeding a 6TB unRaid server. If I were more confident in my linux skillz I'd put it all on the unRaid box, but I'm just too concerned I'll screw something up - or more specifically, that I won't be able to get the server back to the pre-altered configuration. Again, it's worth a couple extra dollars in power a month not to mess with a system I will have trouble fixing.
Set top boxes (or pucks, as they're becoming) are still an open field. Nobody has managed to create one without screwing some portion of the consumer market, or getting screwed by content providers, or both.
I've had a Roku box and an AppleTV, along with a not-quite-the-same Popcorn Hour and a HTPC. What I've decided is that these things, when combined with a TV, are a lot like tablets. They're great for consumption, but the key is having applications which cater to various niche markets. To me, that means two things. You have to offer a framework for the content providers to make money, and you need to give application developers the chance to expand the usefulness and content options available.
I gave up on the old Popcorn Hour a long time ago. The HTPC is nice, but I don't have the time to "manage" they system regularly and keep up with patches and bugfixes in add-ons. It works as a media player with the real remote control. I've tried the online streaming and it works, but the content is woefully limited. The Roku had some major launch issues with their v2, and I gave up after a month of poor streaming and difficult-to-manage navigation. The AppleTV is the easiest to use, but is a tough sell with their pay-for-everything-all-over-again model. I've jailbroken the ATV2 and use PLEX to stream my library for now. It's stable enough that the family is using it, and knows to just let it reboot when the application crashes (which it does frequently, as it's not a supported client).
That's a very longwinded way of getting to applications. The iFoo and Android platforms are successful because they offer a huge array of content and content sources, all supported by their own separate dev teams. I don't have to wait for Google or Apple to create a Hulu+ client - the Hulu guys will do that. If it sucks, I won't buy their service. Same for Netflix, or Pandora, or any other service.
I expect that if, and I say if, Apple opens the doors to applications on the ATV, the market doors will close very, very quickly on everyone else. They're the only box that has the silky-smooth, easy to use interface that makes it easy for a non-techie to use. Even when things go wrong, it like a weeble - the screen blinks black, and two seconds later you're back at the home menu, like nothing every happened. That's comforting to the average Joe or Jane, and it's easy to get the family to understand (i.e. - a reset requires zero interaction and nearly zero time). If it weren't for the (nearly) iTunes-only content model, it would be an absolute winner.
So yes, there's an opportunity here - but it does require not fucking it up. And tech companies have proven that, on the whole, that's the one thing they're really good at. Your move, Google.
The test was devised, mostly likely. There are hundreds - no, probably tens of thousands - of tests on this craft. You can probably trace every single raw material element back to where it was mined, refined, billeted, shipped, stored, manufactured, machined, binned, tagged, selected, gaged, installed, torqued, tested, and approved for flight. Every single time a human touches a part it costs $100 (well, that was a decade ago, it's probably $200 now).
The anal retentiveness of the work flow on a satellite is mind boggling, and it's one of the reasons spacecraft are so fucking expensive. Over time, you try and weed out the tests which have traditionally had a very low failure rate in order to reduce the overall expense. A $1200 line scope doesn't sound like much. That scope on 4 lines is $5k. A pre-and post assembly scope makes it $10k. There are a thousand other parts that need to be checked with a single test pre and post assembly and now it's $10x10^6. That's after everything is fabricated (and each of those parts has been tested). How many of the 1300 nuts are you going to check with a go-no go gage? How many will you pull from the line and send out for destructive testing to verify chemical composition, temper condition? How many welds will you do no destructive testing on, and should you run both dye pen and magnetic? How about a few with ultrasound. Don't forget to check 10% with x-ray to check for oxides which can lead to fatigue failure that would be invisible with the dye pen test. And make sure that each welder makes a sample before he starts for each type and position of weld, then destructively test for signs of voids or other operator error.
Now, we've barely scratched the surface, but when you add up all the tests, you start wondering if $500M in testing on a $2B payload might not be a bit high - why not take the ones that have NEVER come up as failures and evaluate which of those are likely to have the lowest probability of failure and eliminate them. There may be a couple million dollars. You're trading maybe 0.2% of the cost for a risk that may be out to the 8th or 9th decimal place in reliability.
As much shit as I'm willing to give contractors in a lot of cases, the guys on the floor are emotionally invested in the success of a big mission. These tests will go back in, and the next one will be more expensive (well, not really - the engineering is done, the next one will cost less, but not an insignificant amount). It's impossible to account for every eventuality, and also economically irresponsible. At some point, there will be risk. This time, risk won.
Actually pre-flight final won't catch that kind of thing; it's already buried in the system (and you don't fire thrusters on a flight unit prior to launch). This is likely one of those cases where a scrap of cleaning"rag" was torn off within the path in an area not visible at either end and went unnoticed. To save money, a visual of the system prior to final assembly was determined to be sufficient and the endoscope procedure was eliminated, saving several thousand dollars (combined on all the lines). Sure, in hindsight a compressed air test would have been sufficient, but it's a little late to play what-if now.
This is slashdot. Missing an apostrophe in the contraction for "it is" is a hanging offense. Rounding up 10% and not fessing up makes you look like a marketer, which is nearly as bad as an (MS astroturfer/Apple fanboi) and can lead to tarring and feathering in these parts.
(Not really, of course. That's just hyperbole, but I amplified the punishments for dramatic effect)
FWIW, I read Airframe while traveling cross country and back. My co-workers at the time thought I was nuts. Hell, I'm an aerospace engineer; it would be like a surgeon reading Coma before getting some minor surgery done.
4000£ "extra" a year may not sound like much, but for many small organizations it's a huge change in their budget. Sure, top earners may lose that kind of change in their sofa, but if your group is mostly average working people that money's going to be hard to come by. The economy of the past 3-4 years has not exactly been great for small organizations which rely on fundraisers and donations.
Heck, my town (of 40,000) in the US doesn't have a functioning dramatic theater that's available for community productions. In fact, there isn't one in the surrounding three towns either (total pop of 100,000+). To get a basic one up and running in one f our old warehouses, we figured it could be done - with lots of volunteer labor - for as little as $600,000. Of the 3-4 small dramatic companies in the towns mentioned, that's somewhere around 6x our combined annual operating budgets, and about 80x our annual surplus when we all have successful productions. Unless you've got a very wide appeal, or backing of a successful regional or national corporation that wants some exposure, niche endeavors are tough to keep funded.
Lazy fucks. I worked for NASA, they should have hired me as a consultant. We had a free orbiting retro reflector satellite we used to detect small changes in the gravity field with a laser on the space shuttle. After the experiment was done, the small, cylindrical satellite just reentered. My suggestion for it's name was the Ballistic Exo-atmospheric Experimental Research CANister. I was terribly disappointed that it was not chosen as the official name.
Why not just store it on the computer, then. Something you know (password) and something you have (computer). There's no advantage to the power brick being your second authentication, as it's useless without the computer.
This seems like a pretty cool idea until you realize that you are likely to store your adapter (password key) with the computer, and it's probably nearly as likely to be stolen along with the laptop in it's carrying case. Better to have a USB on a keyring. (Not that Steve Jobs would be caught dead with a keyring...well, I guess that's not a real argument anymore).
Seriously. Unless you have a very special need, it's mostly geek bling. Same with a good SLR.
Go with a compact superzoom (preferred, you'll carry it everywhere), or a regular superzoom if you have the patience to carry a bulkier camera. I've had probably a dozen cameras over the last 8 years. I am an engineer who has to evaluate buildings, so I'm outdoors, shooting stuff on roofs and up in attics, down in subgrade basement/steam tunnels. Good lighting, crappy lighting, close to stuff, far from stuff. I've got a Lumix ZS5 and a ZS7. I put a carabiner on the wrist-strap ring and clip it to my side belt loop. I get surprisingly good pictures - not perfect, but I never miss a shot.
FWIW, I also own a D3 and about $10k worth of glass, from a 14/f2.8 up to 300/F2.8. It takes fucking awesome pictures, and I get stuff that's just darned near impossible to do with almost any other camera. You know what I take on vacation? Yup - the ZS5. I don't want multiple pieces and I don't want a camera bag.
Slashdot Mirror
In the war for eyeballs, a search engine needs to produce the "best" results for your query, and provide meaningful, useful pages at the top of the list. If your searches on a given provider just bring up link farms or pages which are so strewn with ads that its hard to find the content, you're going to try another search engine. Google makes its money by getting people to search using their engine, and by delivering relevant ads.
I'm a bit surprised they haven't been more aggressive at weeding out crap pages. Or it could just be that they're losing market share, and they looked into why people were going elsewhere.
Sony and Chevy are both competing for the new self-destruct battery contract.
If you build luxury houses and own tracks of (now nearly worthless) residential land on the outskirts of large cities, why not see if you can market to a new segment? I think they're getting in over their heads, as they're not used to dealing with the cooling and power supplies such a facilities often require, but it's still a cute idea from a marketing perspective.
No, there isn't. That's the difference between morally right and legality. What you have shown is morally wrong - it's breaking the intent of the law (and good citizenship) without crossing the threshold of being convictable in a court of law.
If you believe what you wrote, you're part of the problem with our society.
"last time I checked this part of the law has neither prevented circumvention software being readily available"
Please show me a US based vendor for software which allows ripping my purchased BluRay or DVD media. Better yet, show me a ripping service, like moondogdigital, for DVDs and BluRays so that I don't have to spend months ripping my personal collection of several hundred discs.
It sounds, from his comment, like even he hasn't read it. "If this bill is as bad as you say..." - wtf? He either didn't read it, or can't articulate the benefits - both very, very bad for the supposed author.
Have you seen the average voter? They generally know which party their voting for, and half of those who don't base their choice on the last three days of TV ads.
If weren't aware that "squash" is a game similar to handball that required a great deal of cardiovascular fitness, I would suggest that a game named "squash" is exactly the game a skinny guy does NOT want to challenge a fat guy to play.
I should add - the graphics in XMBC are cool, but I'm one of those guys who has a black desktop with no wallpaper. To me they don't add appreciably to the day to day experience, though they make for nice eye candy when friends see it for the first time.
It was probably 8 months ago. Hulu never installed, I couldn't find netflix, and most of the packages had non-descriptive names and clicking on them to install did nothing. Again, it was an early ATV client. As for scrolling, It would have taken the better part of 10 minutes to get from beginning to end of my movie list with the remote. It didn't see to cache the entire list locally. Plex takes about 15 seconds.
Actually, one of the problems was the all-inclusive interface. Sure, you could get to everything on the server, but you couldn't get to my wife's playlists in iTunes without exiting XMBC, which required actually executing the EXIT tab. In Plex, you just go "back" until you're at the top ATV menu, select her library, and go. That may seem trivial for you and me, but for the rest of the family, it's not.
The problem with tablet interfaces is that they are inconvenient, or very limited, or require lots of custom programming. They do (almost) exist, but are for high end setups and generally require you to be in the vilified 1% to afford them, or devotion of a good chunk of money, programming knowledge, and LOTS of spare time.
What I want is iOS (or android, I suspect, but iOS is simpler) on my TV. A page or three of icons that lead to entertainment portals, all accessible with the common, everyday infrared remote, using standard, learnable code commands.
I want the PC stuff, but I don't want the PC user experience. I don't want a keyboard, I want a remote - preferably one remote for the whole operation. I don't want to have to navigate to a page, sift through web cruft, just to get to the video. I don't want to have to shut down or switch from a browser to a media player to a media streaming application (unBox/Netflix/Hulu+) except by flipping to a "home" menu and selecting the app. Actually, I take that back - I really don't want to have to switch at all, I want a single damned list of everything, already aggregated from my purchased iTunes, personal media server (ripped media), and subscribed streaming services (Hulu, Netflix). I'd like it sorted and easily browsable and searchable. I'd like a single button to turn on or turn off the ability to see content for purchase or rent, ideally from multiple sources, and with a one (well, two really) click purchase-and-add-to-my-server-and-cloud-and-start-streaming button.
And I want a pony.
I tried it, and it was essentially unusable a couple of months ago. And when I say unusable, I mean that none of the common codecs could be streamed, and you got a crash, a "can't play this content", or an infinite wait for streaming to start. It may have changed, but I also found all the mandatory icons/portals and the advertising on the home page to be somewhat intrusive. I don't really want a $50ppv ultimate fighting championship link as the default first click on the kids TV in the playroom.
I'm glad you got XBMC to work. I got it to work, but not being a linux guy was pretty baffled by the options to install the various packages. It also had issues with streaming when I was playing with it, and the interface sucks. Every try and scroll/page through 400+ movies? Yeah, try that with plex and it's a whole different world, with very little setup required, plus it has supported clients for iOS devices. XMBC can do more, but Plex does what I need it to without requiring that I mess with the internals, and I appreciate that. I'm even willing to show my appreciation of the saved time with my wallet.
If Plex gets an official client on ATV, esp. in a non-JB condition, every single TV in my house is going to have an ATV the next day. It's that awesome (when it works, which is most of the time).
I've got sickbeard and couch potato with sabnzbd running on a win box at the moment, feeding a 6TB unRaid server. If I were more confident in my linux skillz I'd put it all on the unRaid box, but I'm just too concerned I'll screw something up - or more specifically, that I won't be able to get the server back to the pre-altered configuration. Again, it's worth a couple extra dollars in power a month not to mess with a system I will have trouble fixing.
Set top boxes (or pucks, as they're becoming) are still an open field. Nobody has managed to create one without screwing some portion of the consumer market, or getting screwed by content providers, or both.
I've had a Roku box and an AppleTV, along with a not-quite-the-same Popcorn Hour and a HTPC. What I've decided is that these things, when combined with a TV, are a lot like tablets. They're great for consumption, but the key is having applications which cater to various niche markets. To me, that means two things. You have to offer a framework for the content providers to make money, and you need to give application developers the chance to expand the usefulness and content options available.
I gave up on the old Popcorn Hour a long time ago. The HTPC is nice, but I don't have the time to "manage" they system regularly and keep up with patches and bugfixes in add-ons. It works as a media player with the real remote control. I've tried the online streaming and it works, but the content is woefully limited. The Roku had some major launch issues with their v2, and I gave up after a month of poor streaming and difficult-to-manage navigation. The AppleTV is the easiest to use, but is a tough sell with their pay-for-everything-all-over-again model. I've jailbroken the ATV2 and use PLEX to stream my library for now. It's stable enough that the family is using it, and knows to just let it reboot when the application crashes (which it does frequently, as it's not a supported client).
That's a very longwinded way of getting to applications. The iFoo and Android platforms are successful because they offer a huge array of content and content sources, all supported by their own separate dev teams. I don't have to wait for Google or Apple to create a Hulu+ client - the Hulu guys will do that. If it sucks, I won't buy their service. Same for Netflix, or Pandora, or any other service.
I expect that if, and I say if, Apple opens the doors to applications on the ATV, the market doors will close very, very quickly on everyone else. They're the only box that has the silky-smooth, easy to use interface that makes it easy for a non-techie to use. Even when things go wrong, it like a weeble - the screen blinks black, and two seconds later you're back at the home menu, like nothing every happened. That's comforting to the average Joe or Jane, and it's easy to get the family to understand (i.e. - a reset requires zero interaction and nearly zero time). If it weren't for the (nearly) iTunes-only content model, it would be an absolute winner.
So yes, there's an opportunity here - but it does require not fucking it up. And tech companies have proven that, on the whole, that's the one thing they're really good at. Your move, Google.
And just like in surgery, sometimes those counts aren't enough.
Luckily, nothing ever gets left inside anybody in surgery.
Oops..that's right. Even with the best procedures, shit happens.
The test was devised, mostly likely. There are hundreds - no, probably tens of thousands - of tests on this craft. You can probably trace every single raw material element back to where it was mined, refined, billeted, shipped, stored, manufactured, machined, binned, tagged, selected, gaged, installed, torqued, tested, and approved for flight. Every single time a human touches a part it costs $100 (well, that was a decade ago, it's probably $200 now).
The anal retentiveness of the work flow on a satellite is mind boggling, and it's one of the reasons spacecraft are so fucking expensive. Over time, you try and weed out the tests which have traditionally had a very low failure rate in order to reduce the overall expense. A $1200 line scope doesn't sound like much. That scope on 4 lines is $5k. A pre-and post assembly scope makes it $10k. There are a thousand other parts that need to be checked with a single test pre and post assembly and now it's $10x10^6. That's after everything is fabricated (and each of those parts has been tested). How many of the 1300 nuts are you going to check with a go-no go gage? How many will you pull from the line and send out for destructive testing to verify chemical composition, temper condition? How many welds will you do no destructive testing on, and should you run both dye pen and magnetic? How about a few with ultrasound. Don't forget to check 10% with x-ray to check for oxides which can lead to fatigue failure that would be invisible with the dye pen test. And make sure that each welder makes a sample before he starts for each type and position of weld, then destructively test for signs of voids or other operator error.
Now, we've barely scratched the surface, but when you add up all the tests, you start wondering if $500M in testing on a $2B payload might not be a bit high - why not take the ones that have NEVER come up as failures and evaluate which of those are likely to have the lowest probability of failure and eliminate them. There may be a couple million dollars. You're trading maybe 0.2% of the cost for a risk that may be out to the 8th or 9th decimal place in reliability.
As much shit as I'm willing to give contractors in a lot of cases, the guys on the floor are emotionally invested in the success of a big mission. These tests will go back in, and the next one will be more expensive (well, not really - the engineering is done, the next one will cost less, but not an insignificant amount). It's impossible to account for every eventuality, and also economically irresponsible. At some point, there will be risk. This time, risk won.
Actually pre-flight final won't catch that kind of thing; it's already buried in the system (and you don't fire thrusters on a flight unit prior to launch). This is likely one of those cases where a scrap of cleaning"rag" was torn off within the path in an area not visible at either end and went unnoticed. To save money, a visual of the system prior to final assembly was determined to be sufficient and the endoscope procedure was eliminated, saving several thousand dollars (combined on all the lines). Sure, in hindsight a compressed air test would have been sufficient, but it's a little late to play what-if now.
This is slashdot. Missing an apostrophe in the contraction for "it is" is a hanging offense. Rounding up 10% and not fessing up makes you look like a marketer, which is nearly as bad as an (MS astroturfer/Apple fanboi) and can lead to tarring and feathering in these parts.
(Not really, of course. That's just hyperbole, but I amplified the punishments for dramatic effect)
This better not be a damned parts story!
FWIW, I read Airframe while traveling cross country and back. My co-workers at the time thought I was nuts. Hell, I'm an aerospace engineer; it would be like a surgeon reading Coma before getting some minor surgery done.
4000£ "extra" a year may not sound like much, but for many small organizations it's a huge change in their budget. Sure, top earners may lose that kind of change in their sofa, but if your group is mostly average working people that money's going to be hard to come by. The economy of the past 3-4 years has not exactly been great for small organizations which rely on fundraisers and donations.
Heck, my town (of 40,000) in the US doesn't have a functioning dramatic theater that's available for community productions. In fact, there isn't one in the surrounding three towns either (total pop of 100,000+). To get a basic one up and running in one f our old warehouses, we figured it could be done - with lots of volunteer labor - for as little as $600,000. Of the 3-4 small dramatic companies in the towns mentioned, that's somewhere around 6x our combined annual operating budgets, and about 80x our annual surplus when we all have successful productions. Unless you've got a very wide appeal, or backing of a successful regional or national corporation that wants some exposure, niche endeavors are tough to keep funded.
Visible Intermodal Prevention and Early Response
QED
Lazy fucks. I worked for NASA, they should have hired me as a consultant. We had a free orbiting retro reflector satellite we used to detect small changes in the gravity field with a laser on the space shuttle. After the experiment was done, the small, cylindrical satellite just reentered. My suggestion for it's name was the Ballistic Exo-atmospheric Experimental Research CANister. I was terribly disappointed that it was not chosen as the official name.
Why not just store it on the computer, then. Something you know (password) and something you have (computer). There's no advantage to the power brick being your second authentication, as it's useless without the computer.
This seems like a pretty cool idea until you realize that you are likely to store your adapter (password key) with the computer, and it's probably nearly as likely to be stolen along with the laptop in it's carrying case. Better to have a USB on a keyring. (Not that Steve Jobs would be caught dead with a keyring...well, I guess that's not a real argument anymore).
Seriously. Unless you have a very special need, it's mostly geek bling. Same with a good SLR.
Go with a compact superzoom (preferred, you'll carry it everywhere), or a regular superzoom if you have the patience to carry a bulkier camera. I've had probably a dozen cameras over the last 8 years. I am an engineer who has to evaluate buildings, so I'm outdoors, shooting stuff on roofs and up in attics, down in subgrade basement/steam tunnels. Good lighting, crappy lighting, close to stuff, far from stuff. I've got a Lumix ZS5 and a ZS7. I put a carabiner on the wrist-strap ring and clip it to my side belt loop. I get surprisingly good pictures - not perfect, but I never miss a shot.
FWIW, I also own a D3 and about $10k worth of glass, from a 14/f2.8 up to 300/F2.8. It takes fucking awesome pictures, and I get stuff that's just darned near impossible to do with almost any other camera. You know what I take on vacation? Yup - the ZS5. I don't want multiple pieces and I don't want a camera bag.