Exactly my point. A bunch of whiners are always making stupid complaints like "KDE is ugly" (I don't think so, but whatever), yet it can be configured to look like whatever you want it to look like, without having to fork the whole project. It'd be a whole lot easier to make a new theme for KDE and tweak some behaviors rather than build that Unity shell up from scratch (yes, I realize it uses the Gnome libraries).
It's an illustration of the definition of "magic", which is "any technology sufficiently advanced that the observer can't comprehend it and blames it on supernatural forces".
Well of course they haven't, because this is all completely theoretical. But the point is, if this FTL speed is possible at all (which the math seems to say it is), such "warp gates" or whatever are probably going to be what's needed, as accelerating past c clearly isn't doable. For now, these devices remain in the realm of sci-fi, but who knows, maybe someone will figure out a method one day. We're constantly learning more and more about weird physics (quantum mechanics isn't that old, and it's pretty weird), exotic matter, metamaterials, etc. I do find it interesting however that many (but not all) of the sci-fi writers did already sorta predict this situation with the whole "hyperspace" thing or "FTL jumps"; you don't really see any sci-fi, except maybe very old and bad stuff, where they try to accelerate past c.
We're not talking about cars here, where you have to smoothly accelerate from a slow speed to a fast speed. Maybe there's a way to "jump" into this "hyperspace" realm and instantly be traveling FTL. Notice the way they did it in the recent Battlestar Galactica series; there was no "warp speed" there, only jumps of a limited distance. No one's walking around the ship during that time, they just disappear one place and reappear another, possibly by traveling at an absurdly-high FTL speed through a realm where physics are quite different.
Now obviously, figuring out how to shift into hyperspace is going to be a major challenge, but maybe before long we'll learn enough about exotic matter to be able to do such a thing.
You're assuming that you need to actually travel at lightspeed at some point. That may not be the case at all. While theoretical, tachyons do not ever travel at sublight speeds, only FTL. The idea here is that maybe lightspeed is indeed impossible, but FTL speeds are not, so the trick is to figure out how to shift your ship into this FTL realm (let's call it "hyperspace") and back again.
Well, maybe the equations are describing "hyperspace" (or "subspace" as Star Trek calls it). In lots of sci-fi, there's some kind of device that moves you into "subspace", and back out of it too, so there's some kind of "jump" event, rather than a clean transition between sublight and FTL speeds. So maybe all that sci-fi was closer to the mark than previous suspected by physicists. The trick of course is to figure out how to move into this FTL realm. We're learning more and more about things like metamaterials and exotic matter, so maybe something like that will have a physical effect that can be exploited this way.
This is what you get when you have a system where there's no configurability, and everything has to be hard-coded one way only: if you want to do anything slightly different, you have to fork the whole project.
If they had just gone with KDE instead, they could have made their own "plasma" variant or had a different set of configuration options (and even added new features selectable in the configuration options), and the KDE team would have been happy to accept these changes for inclusion.
Yes, I realize this now. Did you not see the two other replies which said the exact same thing, and where I responded to one saying maybe they were Russians?
Isn't that most countries? What country has always had a three-prong outlet, unless it's some country that only recently became electrified? The European plugs, for instance, are a total mess with the Schuko plug which has many variants (which are made to interchange, but the grounding prongs were added later, just like we did in the USA), the Italian plug, the two-prong Europlug, etc. So inevitably in old buildings you're going to find old wiring in places where they didn't have the extra ground wire and no one bothered to rewire it properly or screwed up.
Some of the most profitable smartphones in the industry have a non-removable battery and no microSD expansion slot. I don't think many people care about these features outside of Slashdot.
So what? If I'm some person who doesn't care about these things, then why would I want an HTC phone? What does it offer that I can't get from Apple or Samsung or whoever else makes highly profitable phones with non-removable batteries and no SD slot? If HTC is making something that's no better than these offerings from larger competitors, there's no point in buying an HTC phone.
However, if I'm someone who would like those features, they might sway me away from the larger competitors, and make me consider this smaller company's offerings.
The bottom line is: underdogs don't do well when all they do is copy the bigger competitors and don't offer any additional value.
Also, HTC is really an underdog here compared to the heavyweights of Apple and Samsung. An underdog needs to outdo the competition to survive and thrive; it has to offer a better value than the incumbents do. So while the others may be OK with leaving out the SD slot for instance, the underdog needs to put in nice features like this to get customers, otherwise the customers will just stick with the larger (and presumably more stable and safe) incumbent options. Just think about it: if the smaller competitor is making something that's no better than what the buy guys are making, why should I go with the small guy who might not be around that much longer? But if the small guy has some really cool features I can't get with the big companies that have cut corners to improve their profits, I may very well go with the small guy to get those cool features, even if it's a little riskier.
New houses, sure. In older houses, fake earth grounded mains are quite common (i.e., the ground prong goes nowhere, because some amateur electrician swapped out the 2-prong outlets for 3-prong outlets since so many things need the third prong).
I've dropped my HTC several times onto concrete. It did have a rubber-and-plastic Seidio case however, though I dropped it once on concrete before I got that; it never suffered any damage. The big problem I've found with it is that in some cases, the impact knocked the SD memory card out of its socket, so I'd have to take the back off and re-insert it.
I don't think so. Stamped aluminum, sure, but not milled. I have an HTC Sensation 4G, and the back case is indeed aluminum, but it's obviously stamped. It doesn't make any sense at all to mill something like that; the cost is enormous, and for a thin, shaped piece of metal it makes far more sense to stamp it from a sheet.
No, actually it's not, it's a type of glass. Go read about it. It's not like standard cheap-ass window glass; it's very shatter-resistant and slightly flexible, but it's still glass. Glass isn't all the same.
Interestingly, however, some other posters have pointed out that this doesn't apply to just anything, it only applies to things purchased overseas and imported without permission. Of course, with that, I really wonder: how do you tell if something is imported with permission or not?
I don't know about that, but it's common knowledge that Japanese (and German) labor rates are significantly higher than American (non-union) labor rates. Lower labor rates == lower manufacturing costs. Hence, we have lots of Honda, Toyota, BMW, and Mercedes plants here in the US.
As for the luxury Japanese brands, those were created so they could sell upscale Japanese cars. Back in the 80s, "Honda" and "Toyota" were brands equated with cheap, reliable, but non-fancy transportation. American buyers weren't going to buy a "Honda" that cost as much as a Cadillac, when this was the same company that sold the inexpensive bare-bones Civic. So they copied the Americans: they created luxury divisions. No one would buy a highly expensive Ford or Chevy (except the Corvette, but that's not a luxury car), however they will buy a Lincoln or Cadillac.
Um, I'm pretty sure amber signals are required in Japan (or at least they were, maybe they changed it). That's why the Japanese cars usually had them and American cars didn't; it was easy enough for the Japanese mfgrs to just reuse the same parts in both markets, and the American mfgrs didn't really sell many models over there so they didn't bother.
- 'legit' used car market evaporates or used car prices skyrocket to nearly the price of new (with all of the extra money going to the IP trolls)
Well you can count on the entire auto market collapsing, because not many people can afford to buy a brand-new car and then throw it away when it's having trouble. New cars can only cost as much as they do because people are able to recover part of the price by reselling the car after 3-10 years when they get tired of it or it starts having mechanical problems. People would only be able to buy a car and never resell it, meaning they'd have to keep it as long as possible; new car sales will absolutely plummet.
The simple fact is that it costs more to build a car in the U.S. than it does to build, and deliver, a car made in Japan or Korea.
What kind of stupid statement is this? It costs more to build cars in Japan than the US; in case you didn't know, Japan has extremely high labor costs. That's why every major Japanese manufacturer has assembly plants here in the US (usually in the South or in Ohio), because it's cheaper to build US-market cars here than to build them in Japan and ship them here.
Personally, I think it'll be great. After they ban the resale of everything, they can set up a big new federal government department to handle enforcement of this, and clamp down on all Ebay sales, yard sales, Craigslist sales, etc. It'll be fun watching the US economy implode.
Exactly. When was the last time you heard of someone being murdered by a flintlock, or better yet a halbard or pike or even a crossbow? Those are all still weapons, even if they're totally obsolete and no one uses them any more, and most surviving examples are in museums.
It's not just microchips; you can't make anything electronic in America any more, because the most mundane components (capacitors, resistors, etc.) are all made abroad, usually in Asia. We do still make things like Intel CPUs (dies only, packaging is in Malaysia), and a lot of other microchips (I think Microchip's (the company) factories are all here in the US for instance). But the low-value stuff isn't made here at all.
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Exactly my point. A bunch of whiners are always making stupid complaints like "KDE is ugly" (I don't think so, but whatever), yet it can be configured to look like whatever you want it to look like, without having to fork the whole project. It'd be a whole lot easier to make a new theme for KDE and tweak some behaviors rather than build that Unity shell up from scratch (yes, I realize it uses the Gnome libraries).
It's an illustration of the definition of "magic", which is "any technology sufficiently advanced that the observer can't comprehend it and blames it on supernatural forces".
Well of course they haven't, because this is all completely theoretical. But the point is, if this FTL speed is possible at all (which the math seems to say it is), such "warp gates" or whatever are probably going to be what's needed, as accelerating past c clearly isn't doable. For now, these devices remain in the realm of sci-fi, but who knows, maybe someone will figure out a method one day. We're constantly learning more and more about weird physics (quantum mechanics isn't that old, and it's pretty weird), exotic matter, metamaterials, etc. I do find it interesting however that many (but not all) of the sci-fi writers did already sorta predict this situation with the whole "hyperspace" thing or "FTL jumps"; you don't really see any sci-fi, except maybe very old and bad stuff, where they try to accelerate past c.
Magic IS real. Go back in time and show an ancient Greek person a smartphone, and ask him if it isn't magic.
We're not talking about cars here, where you have to smoothly accelerate from a slow speed to a fast speed. Maybe there's a way to "jump" into this "hyperspace" realm and instantly be traveling FTL. Notice the way they did it in the recent Battlestar Galactica series; there was no "warp speed" there, only jumps of a limited distance. No one's walking around the ship during that time, they just disappear one place and reappear another, possibly by traveling at an absurdly-high FTL speed through a realm where physics are quite different.
Now obviously, figuring out how to shift into hyperspace is going to be a major challenge, but maybe before long we'll learn enough about exotic matter to be able to do such a thing.
You're assuming that you need to actually travel at lightspeed at some point. That may not be the case at all. While theoretical, tachyons do not ever travel at sublight speeds, only FTL. The idea here is that maybe lightspeed is indeed impossible, but FTL speeds are not, so the trick is to figure out how to shift your ship into this FTL realm (let's call it "hyperspace") and back again.
Well, maybe the equations are describing "hyperspace" (or "subspace" as Star Trek calls it). In lots of sci-fi, there's some kind of device that moves you into "subspace", and back out of it too, so there's some kind of "jump" event, rather than a clean transition between sublight and FTL speeds. So maybe all that sci-fi was closer to the mark than previous suspected by physicists. The trick of course is to figure out how to move into this FTL realm. We're learning more and more about things like metamaterials and exotic matter, so maybe something like that will have a physical effect that can be exploited this way.
This is what you get when you have a system where there's no configurability, and everything has to be hard-coded one way only: if you want to do anything slightly different, you have to fork the whole project.
If they had just gone with KDE instead, they could have made their own "plasma" variant or had a different set of configuration options (and even added new features selectable in the configuration options), and the KDE team would have been happy to accept these changes for inclusion.
Yes, I realize this now. Did you not see the two other replies which said the exact same thing, and where I responded to one saying maybe they were Russians?
Isn't that most countries? What country has always had a three-prong outlet, unless it's some country that only recently became electrified? The European plugs, for instance, are a total mess with the Schuko plug which has many variants (which are made to interchange, but the grounding prongs were added later, just like we did in the USA), the Italian plug, the two-prong Europlug, etc. So inevitably in old buildings you're going to find old wiring in places where they didn't have the extra ground wire and no one bothered to rewire it properly or screwed up.
Some of the most profitable smartphones in the industry have a non-removable battery and no microSD expansion slot. I don't think many people care about these features outside of Slashdot.
So what? If I'm some person who doesn't care about these things, then why would I want an HTC phone? What does it offer that I can't get from Apple or Samsung or whoever else makes highly profitable phones with non-removable batteries and no SD slot? If HTC is making something that's no better than these offerings from larger competitors, there's no point in buying an HTC phone.
However, if I'm someone who would like those features, they might sway me away from the larger competitors, and make me consider this smaller company's offerings.
The bottom line is: underdogs don't do well when all they do is copy the bigger competitors and don't offer any additional value.
Also, HTC is really an underdog here compared to the heavyweights of Apple and Samsung. An underdog needs to outdo the competition to survive and thrive; it has to offer a better value than the incumbents do. So while the others may be OK with leaving out the SD slot for instance, the underdog needs to put in nice features like this to get customers, otherwise the customers will just stick with the larger (and presumably more stable and safe) incumbent options. Just think about it: if the smaller competitor is making something that's no better than what the buy guys are making, why should I go with the small guy who might not be around that much longer? But if the small guy has some really cool features I can't get with the big companies that have cut corners to improve their profits, I may very well go with the small guy to get those cool features, even if it's a little riskier.
New houses, sure. In older houses, fake earth grounded mains are quite common (i.e., the ground prong goes nowhere, because some amateur electrician swapped out the 2-prong outlets for 3-prong outlets since so many things need the third prong).
I've dropped my HTC several times onto concrete. It did have a rubber-and-plastic Seidio case however, though I dropped it once on concrete before I got that; it never suffered any damage. The big problem I've found with it is that in some cases, the impact knocked the SD memory card out of its socket, so I'd have to take the back off and re-insert it.
I don't think so. Stamped aluminum, sure, but not milled. I have an HTC Sensation 4G, and the back case is indeed aluminum, but it's obviously stamped. It doesn't make any sense at all to mill something like that; the cost is enormous, and for a thin, shaped piece of metal it makes far more sense to stamp it from a sheet.
No, actually it's not, it's a type of glass. Go read about it. It's not like standard cheap-ass window glass; it's very shatter-resistant and slightly flexible, but it's still glass. Glass isn't all the same.
The only problem here is, how exactly do you know whether a product was intended for US sale or not? That's going to be pretty hard to police.
I agree entirely.
Interestingly, however, some other posters have pointed out that this doesn't apply to just anything, it only applies to things purchased overseas and imported without permission. Of course, with that, I really wonder: how do you tell if something is imported with permission or not?
I don't know about that, but it's common knowledge that Japanese (and German) labor rates are significantly higher than American (non-union) labor rates. Lower labor rates == lower manufacturing costs. Hence, we have lots of Honda, Toyota, BMW, and Mercedes plants here in the US.
As for the luxury Japanese brands, those were created so they could sell upscale Japanese cars. Back in the 80s, "Honda" and "Toyota" were brands equated with cheap, reliable, but non-fancy transportation. American buyers weren't going to buy a "Honda" that cost as much as a Cadillac, when this was the same company that sold the inexpensive bare-bones Civic. So they copied the Americans: they created luxury divisions. No one would buy a highly expensive Ford or Chevy (except the Corvette, but that's not a luxury car), however they will buy a Lincoln or Cadillac.
Um, I'm pretty sure amber signals are required in Japan (or at least they were, maybe they changed it). That's why the Japanese cars usually had them and American cars didn't; it was easy enough for the Japanese mfgrs to just reuse the same parts in both markets, and the American mfgrs didn't really sell many models over there so they didn't bother.
- 'legit' used car market evaporates or used car prices skyrocket to nearly the price of new (with all of the extra money going to the IP trolls)
Well you can count on the entire auto market collapsing, because not many people can afford to buy a brand-new car and then throw it away when it's having trouble. New cars can only cost as much as they do because people are able to recover part of the price by reselling the car after 3-10 years when they get tired of it or it starts having mechanical problems. People would only be able to buy a car and never resell it, meaning they'd have to keep it as long as possible; new car sales will absolutely plummet.
The simple fact is that it costs more to build a car in the U.S. than it does to build, and deliver, a car made in Japan or Korea.
What kind of stupid statement is this? It costs more to build cars in Japan than the US; in case you didn't know, Japan has extremely high labor costs. That's why every major Japanese manufacturer has assembly plants here in the US (usually in the South or in Ohio), because it's cheaper to build US-market cars here than to build them in Japan and ship them here.
Personally, I think it'll be great. After they ban the resale of everything, they can set up a big new federal government department to handle enforcement of this, and clamp down on all Ebay sales, yard sales, Craigslist sales, etc. It'll be fun watching the US economy implode.
Exactly. When was the last time you heard of someone being murdered by a flintlock, or better yet a halbard or pike or even a crossbow? Those are all still weapons, even if they're totally obsolete and no one uses them any more, and most surviving examples are in museums.
It's not just microchips; you can't make anything electronic in America any more, because the most mundane components (capacitors, resistors, etc.) are all made abroad, usually in Asia. We do still make things like Intel CPUs (dies only, packaging is in Malaysia), and a lot of other microchips (I think Microchip's (the company) factories are all here in the US for instance). But the low-value stuff isn't made here at all.