I do hope it turns into a real currency, and the deflation problem should go away with time. The proof-of-work follows an asymptotic curve (I think), easy at first and then steadily more difficult, meaning that the massive deflation has/will soon have occurred and hoarding should cease to be viable. Bitcoin is very cool, not least because it is based in math (very very cool math at that), and it fits better with the Internet than any other monetary system. It needs to be come widespread and used by many companies to become accepted, though, and I just don't see that happening anytime soon. Really, a large part of the problem is that most of the holders of Bitcoins are private entities. A major non-Internet company (much less government) doesn't want to be the first to accept payment in Bitcoins, in case they loose their value overnight (and because other major companies won't accept them), and without a stockpile of them they can't make purchases either. We might move past that wall eventually, but it might take a complete reboot of the system to do so, and that would itself reduce trust in the system.
The good thing about gold is it holds it's value very, very well, as you say. The bad thing is it doesn't increase it's value at all. What do I mean? When you own money, you typically (at least) put it into a bank, or more likely, you invest it. This is because, otherwise, it would loose it's value rapidly. Very few millionaires hold their money in massive vaults. Rather, they put it into companies like, say, Apple, Microsoft, SpaceX, whatever. In some cases, these companies fail and they loose money. But in many cases (probably most), it succeeds, and they can wind up making lots of money. Or (even more commonly) they put it into loans and make moderate but much more reliable (hopefully) income. In other words, inflation can help to drive economies by forcing investment. Obviously massive inflation is bad, but moderate amounts does good things for countries.
On the other hand, as you said, the value of gold has a consistent buying power for thousands of years. You don't even need to loan it or put it into a bank, you can keep it in a vault in your basement and in 100 years you will have exactly as much as you started with. That sounds like a good thing: until you realize that, had you been investing that, you could have 10 or a hundred times what you started with (I don't really feel like doing compound interest maths right now). Which is why banks keep so much gold: as an insurance policy. They know that even if many of their loans start to default, they can still pay people back if necessary. But it doesn't make them money.
And yes, gold bubbles do happen and you can make money of gold investments, but that tends to be the exception and not the rule. The point is: to drive an economy, especially a consumption-based one, you want inflation. Gold prevents that, which alleviates collapse, but also restricts expansion, and doesn't work as well for an active economy. And that is Kurgman's point.
By "discussing its similarity to the gold standard" the summary means "he points out one way Bitcoin is flawed." Specifically, that people hoard it instead of spending it (creating an unstable monetary system). Fewer transactions actually means less value, since the whole point of a monetary system that lacks intrinsic value (gold at least had that) is that it gets spent. Since the amount of Bitcoins is limited, and as time goes on the early adopters get "richer" (since less is being mined), they have an incentive not to spend. But the system will only succeed if they do spend and create a thriving system.
This is a massive gaping flaw in Bitcoin that I haven't seen pointed out yet. It means that Bitcoin will nearly always be a deflationary system. It also requires people to keep investing computing time, while their return on investment only gets less and less over time, and early adopters have no reason to spend, creating fewer transactions to be verified. And this can't be fixed: the limit to the number of Bitcoins is builtin to the system and cannot be changed.
So to everyone going "not another Bitcoin story!": read it. It actually points out a way that Bitcoin is (possibly) flawed (unlike so many of the stories on/.) And from a real economist, too.
It's California. Logic doesn't apply there, especially to the politicians and laws.
I'm kind of serious: while I'm not sure if its true or not, I have heard that many of the potheads there voted against legalizing marijuana, because it would make it more expensive (taxes)/ too mainstream/ whatever. May not be true, but it wouldn't shock me. At all. This is also the state that is home to Hollywood, and a state that wanted to drain the Great Lakes to provide water for them.
Why would they, though? Apple doesn't charge high prices (and low volume? Apple does decidedly none-low volume runs for most of their products) because they are targeting high-end markets with superior performing equipment. No, they generally target middle-range consumers looking for stuff that works and is easy to use. High end consumers and low end consumers go elsewhere. They can do this because of a whole host of reasons, but it has little to do with a superior product. Generally speaking, if they can make a consumer grade product they will because they make up in quantity what they loose in margins, and the high end market will pay extra (a lot extra) for their top-of-the-line low volume stuff. There simply wouldn't be a good reason not to make it for all markets, especially if (as they say) the process is cheaper than conventional methods.
So while your concern has some merit (a lot more than I thought it did, sorry about that) it just doesn't seem like they would follow that route. Very few other true hardware manufacturers do (what Apple really sells software that happens to be bundled with hardware). AMD, Intel, RAM manufacturers, even SSD makers generally make products for widely varying target markets. Also happens to work better that way for performance-related hardware (see: Product Binning ) such as memory. So I think we will see this technology, it just might take a while for it to work at the kinks and get up to mass-production status.
Yeah, except you wouldn't find VW parts, you would find model T parts. A billion years (give or take a few hundred million) of evolution is a really, really long time even by evolutionary standards. Unless such migration happened recently (i.e. in the order of millions of years, making it impossible for our life to have evolved from Martian bacteria), life on Mars won't look remotely similar to life on Earth, even if one came from the other. Remains might not be quite enough to tell, true.
Also, considering Martian atmospheric and orbital conditions, it would be more like finding a VW bug in the middle of the Sahara desert or an African jungle. (The Sahara example is deliberate, since conditions there are radically different than what they were in the past, which is possible for Mars as well).
Patent fees? Why would Tessera charge itself patent fees? I think you have been staring at software patents too long.
They may or may not license this to other companies, and once they start building them they will have to have low enough prices to be competitive with existing DRAM technology. The world of hardware is not quite like the software world where companies routinely submarine others in areas they often don't even make product. In hardware, you can patent an excellent technology, but you either have to build it yourself or license it for affordable rates to actually make money off it. Unlike software where you can look at someone else's product, patent it, then sue their asses off and get a settlement. AFAIK that has never worked in hardware (it probably has, but it is certainly much, much rarer.)
The main issue would be if, as some people have speculated, bacteria can be carried away from Earth by ejecta, so it would be possible to find one on Mars identical to Earth. You could only confirm that if you find it and know you didn't bring it on the rover itself. It also might not survive on Mars (then again, some bacteria are pretty tough), but remains or other signs of its existence might, and that is one of the things we are looking for (not existing life, since Mars is fairly unlikely to have that, but former life, which it very well might.)
1. Hack one CA
2. Post on pastebin claiming to have hacked more
3. Watch as they scramble in panic
4. ??????
5. Profit?
It seems quite possible that the hacker is just being a total jerk, if they wanted to actually use certs from a company (like they did Diginotar) they wouldn't announce the hack until it was discovered. So most likely they didn't actually pull off the hack.
Unless 4 is "be a rival CA", in which case you do profit. Or if you hacked a different CA and want people to use that company. Which adds a whole layer of conspiracy possibilities on an already conspiracy-laden hack.
Yeah, the problem is, there is nothing that we can really do, morally speaking. You can't really tell people they can't have kids (unless you want to live in a dictatorship), exams for parentship would definitely fall under eugenics, and pretty much any other system would be morally questionable (at best). In many first and second world nations, the population isn't growing (or is shrinking), but the result is that those countries will inevitably be crushed by demographics (immigrants, massive hordes of Mongolians... whatever). There isn't a very good way to prevent population growth, aside from war, force, famine, or disease, and all of those are things we seek to eradicate, and justifiably so.
Of course, we can't eradicate all those things (disease especially). In some ways, the harder we try, the worse things get (witness the birth of anti-biotic strains of tuberculosis that take years of expensive treatments with multiple anti-biotics to cure, while the original could be cured in a month or so with one fairly cheap antibiotic), and the fewer viruses that people are exposed to the less developed their immune system often becomes, which can turn an otherwise minor bug into a nasty pandemic. My bet would be a virus (bird flu seems most likely) that wipes out billions in 20-30 years, if nuclear war doesn't happen first (I'm looking at you, Iran). Not a good thing, certainly, but nature will have its way one way or the other.
Somehow I doubt this guy will be any better than what Sony had, and clearly Sony's policies and admin were broken before. I think they hired Reitinger more to look like they were doing something than anything else.
No offense, but it always makes me laugh whenever anyone uses maths to extrapolate over what will happen in 300+ years. Because the logic behind it is horribly flawed. For instance, if a pair of rabbits produce 8 offspring, then in 12 generations (and rabbits breed about every month, for 9 months a year, and are sexually viable after 6-7 months, so at a conservative estimate 6 years) there would be 16 million rabbits from that one pair alone, and in twice that time (24 generations) there would be 281 trillion rabbits (that's just 12 short years). Math, it is wonderful. Also, horribly, horribly misleading.
Although I kind of agree. Either something bad is going to happen within 50 years, or something good, which reduces the population or makes it more sustainable (example of the latter would be cheap space travel, the former would be something like nuclear war).
Yeah I had a friend that had a 35mW green laser (from Wicked Lasers, IIRC). It was mildly dangerous, but only if you looked at the beam directly (apparently, it could blind, but so long as you were careful the effects wouldn't be permanent). That is the brightest I would ever want a hand-held laser to be. The reflections were almost painfully bright, but not enough to blind, and the beam was very clearly visible. Also, it could light dark objects on fire with some time, making it just about perfect. Oh and it was waterproof. That would be about what I would recommend unless you have a valid reason to get a more powerful one.
Also, as coherent light they can be focused better (much much better) than normal beams. Actually the problem will be making them unfocused enough to see the whole road.
One word: recycling. Most resources are recyclable, but simply end up in trash heaps because (for now) the energy and sorting costs of recycling makes it inefficient. That will change when easily mineable deposits shrink. That combined with (hopefully) space-based mining means we should be able to continue expanding for quite some time yet. The reality is, every time someone thinks the world is getting overpopulated (and this is not new, people have been saying that for at least a hundred years) they are proved wrong. Doesn't mean they always will be, true, but they keep crying "wolf" and they keep being wrong.
Now, as for oil and non-renewables: we'll have to find something else, but that is true no matter how large the population grows or doesn't. Growth just means we'll have to do it sooner.
Note I am not mentioning food: eventually, we will probably have to switch to a hydroponics or similar solution, but that is a very long way away yet. There is a lot of arable land unused. The main reason people go hungry today is mostly local economics and government. We could feed everyone in the world easily: it's just a matter of transporting food to local areas that need it, and getting rid of the warlords/ governments that restrict it. Hell, in the US we pay farmers to either not grow crops or to grow crops for ethanol (a total and complete waste in oh so many ways.) On a related note, Monsanto should die a swift death... but that is somewhat tangential.
The linked source even says that Microsoft agreed to help train handicapped workers to telecommute so they could get employment. MS: being evil by helping all those damned cripples. The whole summary is a massive sensationalist attempt to create a "scandal" where none really exists, or rather where no proof of one really exists (maybe MS helped Tunisia, maybe they didn't.) Otherwise, this is just a pretty standard trade deal for IT software. Not illegal, probably not even immoral at all. Maybe there is more to it, but I don't think so. Computer training is not hard to find, these days, what MS was really selling was the licenses (which don't help Tunisia with it's crackdown at all) and what MS got was Tunisia using less pirated software. Oh, and note the part where all this happened before the trouble, and it was a five-year in the making deal.
No, that wouldn't really work. Most of the energy to propel a plane is used up by wind resistance (deliberately). The plane needs to actually force the air downwards with the wings to fly, so no matter how low a drag the rest of the system has most of the energy isn't going to be retained. Most jumbojets run at pretty close to max power for the whole flight, because they need to due to energy loss. A subway, on the other hand, runs through mostly inertia (similar to how most cars work.) Most of the energy is used getting up to speed, very little staying there and most of this can be recouped. This is also why hybrid cars are more fuel efficient than regular vehicles. Their theoretical highway mileage would in fact be the same if non-hybrids didn't need such a large engine for acceleration.
Not to say your idea is terrible, it just wouldn't have much impact. Also, storing energy from a plane would be technically extremely difficult, although the US Navy's new electromagnetic launch system might be able to do it.
To be fair to the OP, only about 3 of those MS studies produce something I would call AAA titles. Those three are Lionhead (fable etc), 343 (Halo), and Turn 10 (Forza Motorsports). The others make games like Kinect Adventures or South Park Let's Go Tower Defense Play! (I wish I made that last one up). Most of the Sony ones, on the other hand, produce games like Gran Turismo, SOCOM, Killzone, Shadow of the Colossus, God of War... I could go on, but you get the idea. Not all of them, mind, but many many more than Microsoft's. Microsoft's first-party studios are lacking in good quality IP and games. Nintendo is so focused on casual gaming I won't even mention them.
Yeah, I remember getting a nasty shock a few days ago when I didn't do that (I normally am very obsessive about it), and I noticed my name appearing in other pages. Seriously, Facebook, stop stalking me. Well, that is why browser extensions were made (Ghostery, I hope you work as advertised.)
I know, it kind of astonishes me how the costs have come down. When i built my "current" PC (can I still call it the same PC after replacing video card, monitor, CPU motherboard, and adding RAM?) it cost me about $1,700, and that was about standard for a good but not top end gaming PC. $800 was for budget machines. Now, top end (not very top, but still) is about $800 and the $1.7k budget is for people who want the near-ultimate stuff. Astonishes me, since usually lowering prices only apply if you want crappy or dated technology (look at digital cameras. All the ones in the $100-150 range are pretty much crap). Now you can get genuinely good stuff for quite cheap. I actually think AMD might have caused that. Their processor line forced Intel to not only innovate, but lower prices to compete. Same with the ATI-AMD merger. Even hardcore gamers shouldn't really spend more than a thousand now a days.
I should add that the low prices of the internals makes monitors seem very expensive by comparison (about a third of the value of my PC is probably in the 24" monitor alone), making this whole $200 PC somewhat moot. Oh, and I got lucky on power supply: bought a pretty cheap one, and it hasn't failed me yet (been almost five years yet and it's been abused all to hell from being shipped around.)
Slashdot Mirror
I do hope it turns into a real currency, and the deflation problem should go away with time. The proof-of-work follows an asymptotic curve (I think), easy at first and then steadily more difficult, meaning that the massive deflation has/will soon have occurred and hoarding should cease to be viable. Bitcoin is very cool, not least because it is based in math (very very cool math at that), and it fits better with the Internet than any other monetary system. It needs to be come widespread and used by many companies to become accepted, though, and I just don't see that happening anytime soon. Really, a large part of the problem is that most of the holders of Bitcoins are private entities. A major non-Internet company (much less government) doesn't want to be the first to accept payment in Bitcoins, in case they loose their value overnight (and because other major companies won't accept them), and without a stockpile of them they can't make purchases either. We might move past that wall eventually, but it might take a complete reboot of the system to do so, and that would itself reduce trust in the system.
The good thing about gold is it holds it's value very, very well, as you say. The bad thing is it doesn't increase it's value at all. What do I mean? When you own money, you typically (at least) put it into a bank, or more likely, you invest it. This is because, otherwise, it would loose it's value rapidly. Very few millionaires hold their money in massive vaults. Rather, they put it into companies like, say, Apple, Microsoft, SpaceX, whatever. In some cases, these companies fail and they loose money. But in many cases (probably most), it succeeds, and they can wind up making lots of money. Or (even more commonly) they put it into loans and make moderate but much more reliable (hopefully) income. In other words, inflation can help to drive economies by forcing investment. Obviously massive inflation is bad, but moderate amounts does good things for countries.
On the other hand, as you said, the value of gold has a consistent buying power for thousands of years. You don't even need to loan it or put it into a bank, you can keep it in a vault in your basement and in 100 years you will have exactly as much as you started with. That sounds like a good thing: until you realize that, had you been investing that, you could have 10 or a hundred times what you started with (I don't really feel like doing compound interest maths right now). Which is why banks keep so much gold: as an insurance policy. They know that even if many of their loans start to default, they can still pay people back if necessary. But it doesn't make them money.
And yes, gold bubbles do happen and you can make money of gold investments, but that tends to be the exception and not the rule. The point is: to drive an economy, especially a consumption-based one, you want inflation. Gold prevents that, which alleviates collapse, but also restricts expansion, and doesn't work as well for an active economy. And that is Kurgman's point.
Actually, gold can be traded almost by the atom (just about as close as you can get a physical object anyways): Gold leaf
By "discussing its similarity to the gold standard" the summary means "he points out one way Bitcoin is flawed." Specifically, that people hoard it instead of spending it (creating an unstable monetary system). Fewer transactions actually means less value, since the whole point of a monetary system that lacks intrinsic value (gold at least had that) is that it gets spent. Since the amount of Bitcoins is limited, and as time goes on the early adopters get "richer" (since less is being mined), they have an incentive not to spend. But the system will only succeed if they do spend and create a thriving system.
This is a massive gaping flaw in Bitcoin that I haven't seen pointed out yet. It means that Bitcoin will nearly always be a deflationary system. It also requires people to keep investing computing time, while their return on investment only gets less and less over time, and early adopters have no reason to spend, creating fewer transactions to be verified. And this can't be fixed: the limit to the number of Bitcoins is builtin to the system and cannot be changed.
So to everyone going "not another Bitcoin story!": read it. It actually points out a way that Bitcoin is (possibly) flawed (unlike so many of the stories on /.) And from a real economist, too.
It's California. Logic doesn't apply there, especially to the politicians and laws.
I'm kind of serious: while I'm not sure if its true or not, I have heard that many of the potheads there voted against legalizing marijuana, because it would make it more expensive (taxes)/ too mainstream/ whatever. May not be true, but it wouldn't shock me. At all. This is also the state that is home to Hollywood, and a state that wanted to drain the Great Lakes to provide water for them.
Why would they, though? Apple doesn't charge high prices (and low volume? Apple does decidedly none-low volume runs for most of their products) because they are targeting high-end markets with superior performing equipment. No, they generally target middle-range consumers looking for stuff that works and is easy to use. High end consumers and low end consumers go elsewhere. They can do this because of a whole host of reasons, but it has little to do with a superior product. Generally speaking, if they can make a consumer grade product they will because they make up in quantity what they loose in margins, and the high end market will pay extra (a lot extra) for their top-of-the-line low volume stuff. There simply wouldn't be a good reason not to make it for all markets, especially if (as they say) the process is cheaper than conventional methods.
So while your concern has some merit (a lot more than I thought it did, sorry about that) it just doesn't seem like they would follow that route. Very few other true hardware manufacturers do (what Apple really sells software that happens to be bundled with hardware). AMD, Intel, RAM manufacturers, even SSD makers generally make products for widely varying target markets. Also happens to work better that way for performance-related hardware (see: Product Binning ) such as memory. So I think we will see this technology, it just might take a while for it to work at the kinks and get up to mass-production status.
Yeah, except you wouldn't find VW parts, you would find model T parts. A billion years (give or take a few hundred million) of evolution is a really, really long time even by evolutionary standards. Unless such migration happened recently (i.e. in the order of millions of years, making it impossible for our life to have evolved from Martian bacteria), life on Mars won't look remotely similar to life on Earth, even if one came from the other. Remains might not be quite enough to tell, true.
Also, considering Martian atmospheric and orbital conditions, it would be more like finding a VW bug in the middle of the Sahara desert or an African jungle. (The Sahara example is deliberate, since conditions there are radically different than what they were in the past, which is possible for Mars as well).
Patent fees? Why would Tessera charge itself patent fees? I think you have been staring at software patents too long.
They may or may not license this to other companies, and once they start building them they will have to have low enough prices to be competitive with existing DRAM technology. The world of hardware is not quite like the software world where companies routinely submarine others in areas they often don't even make product. In hardware, you can patent an excellent technology, but you either have to build it yourself or license it for affordable rates to actually make money off it. Unlike software where you can look at someone else's product, patent it, then sue their asses off and get a settlement. AFAIK that has never worked in hardware (it probably has, but it is certainly much, much rarer.)
The main issue would be if, as some people have speculated, bacteria can be carried away from Earth by ejecta, so it would be possible to find one on Mars identical to Earth. You could only confirm that if you find it and know you didn't bring it on the rover itself. It also might not survive on Mars (then again, some bacteria are pretty tough), but remains or other signs of its existence might, and that is one of the things we are looking for (not existing life, since Mars is fairly unlikely to have that, but former life, which it very well might.)
Yo dawg, I heard you like smartphones...
1. Hack one CA
2. Post on pastebin claiming to have hacked more
3. Watch as they scramble in panic
4. ??????
5. Profit?
It seems quite possible that the hacker is just being a total jerk, if they wanted to actually use certs from a company (like they did Diginotar) they wouldn't announce the hack until it was discovered. So most likely they didn't actually pull off the hack.
Unless 4 is "be a rival CA", in which case you do profit. Or if you hacked a different CA and want people to use that company. Which adds a whole layer of conspiracy possibilities on an already conspiracy-laden hack.
Yeah, the problem is, there is nothing that we can really do, morally speaking. You can't really tell people they can't have kids (unless you want to live in a dictatorship), exams for parentship would definitely fall under eugenics, and pretty much any other system would be morally questionable (at best). In many first and second world nations, the population isn't growing (or is shrinking), but the result is that those countries will inevitably be crushed by demographics (immigrants, massive hordes of Mongolians... whatever). There isn't a very good way to prevent population growth, aside from war, force, famine, or disease, and all of those are things we seek to eradicate, and justifiably so.
Of course, we can't eradicate all those things (disease especially). In some ways, the harder we try, the worse things get (witness the birth of anti-biotic strains of tuberculosis that take years of expensive treatments with multiple anti-biotics to cure, while the original could be cured in a month or so with one fairly cheap antibiotic), and the fewer viruses that people are exposed to the less developed their immune system often becomes, which can turn an otherwise minor bug into a nasty pandemic. My bet would be a virus (bird flu seems most likely) that wipes out billions in 20-30 years, if nuclear war doesn't happen first (I'm looking at you, Iran). Not a good thing, certainly, but nature will have its way one way or the other.
Somehow I doubt this guy will be any better than what Sony had, and clearly Sony's policies and admin were broken before. I think they hired Reitinger more to look like they were doing something than anything else.
No offense, but it always makes me laugh whenever anyone uses maths to extrapolate over what will happen in 300+ years. Because the logic behind it is horribly flawed. For instance, if a pair of rabbits produce 8 offspring, then in 12 generations (and rabbits breed about every month, for 9 months a year, and are sexually viable after 6-7 months, so at a conservative estimate 6 years) there would be 16 million rabbits from that one pair alone, and in twice that time (24 generations) there would be 281 trillion rabbits (that's just 12 short years). Math, it is wonderful. Also, horribly, horribly misleading.
Although I kind of agree. Either something bad is going to happen within 50 years, or something good, which reduces the population or makes it more sustainable (example of the latter would be cheap space travel, the former would be something like nuclear war).
Yeah I had a friend that had a 35mW green laser (from Wicked Lasers, IIRC). It was mildly dangerous, but only if you looked at the beam directly (apparently, it could blind, but so long as you were careful the effects wouldn't be permanent). That is the brightest I would ever want a hand-held laser to be. The reflections were almost painfully bright, but not enough to blind, and the beam was very clearly visible. Also, it could light dark objects on fire with some time, making it just about perfect. Oh and it was waterproof. That would be about what I would recommend unless you have a valid reason to get a more powerful one.
Also, as coherent light they can be focused better (much much better) than normal beams. Actually the problem will be making them unfocused enough to see the whole road.
One word: recycling. Most resources are recyclable, but simply end up in trash heaps because (for now) the energy and sorting costs of recycling makes it inefficient. That will change when easily mineable deposits shrink. That combined with (hopefully) space-based mining means we should be able to continue expanding for quite some time yet. The reality is, every time someone thinks the world is getting overpopulated (and this is not new, people have been saying that for at least a hundred years) they are proved wrong. Doesn't mean they always will be, true, but they keep crying "wolf" and they keep being wrong.
Now, as for oil and non-renewables: we'll have to find something else, but that is true no matter how large the population grows or doesn't. Growth just means we'll have to do it sooner.
Note I am not mentioning food: eventually, we will probably have to switch to a hydroponics or similar solution, but that is a very long way away yet. There is a lot of arable land unused. The main reason people go hungry today is mostly local economics and government. We could feed everyone in the world easily: it's just a matter of transporting food to local areas that need it, and getting rid of the warlords/ governments that restrict it. Hell, in the US we pay farmers to either not grow crops or to grow crops for ethanol (a total and complete waste in oh so many ways.) On a related note, Monsanto should die a swift death... but that is somewhat tangential.
The linked source even says that Microsoft agreed to help train handicapped workers to telecommute so they could get employment. MS: being evil by helping all those damned cripples. The whole summary is a massive sensationalist attempt to create a "scandal" where none really exists, or rather where no proof of one really exists (maybe MS helped Tunisia, maybe they didn't.) Otherwise, this is just a pretty standard trade deal for IT software. Not illegal, probably not even immoral at all. Maybe there is more to it, but I don't think so. Computer training is not hard to find, these days, what MS was really selling was the licenses (which don't help Tunisia with it's crackdown at all) and what MS got was Tunisia using less pirated software. Oh, and note the part where all this happened before the trouble, and it was a five-year in the making deal.
A boat?
So, how long till a special edition Star Wars re-release has sandcrawlers that look like that?
No, that wouldn't really work. Most of the energy to propel a plane is used up by wind resistance (deliberately). The plane needs to actually force the air downwards with the wings to fly, so no matter how low a drag the rest of the system has most of the energy isn't going to be retained. Most jumbojets run at pretty close to max power for the whole flight, because they need to due to energy loss. A subway, on the other hand, runs through mostly inertia (similar to how most cars work.) Most of the energy is used getting up to speed, very little staying there and most of this can be recouped. This is also why hybrid cars are more fuel efficient than regular vehicles. Their theoretical highway mileage would in fact be the same if non-hybrids didn't need such a large engine for acceleration.
Not to say your idea is terrible, it just wouldn't have much impact. Also, storing energy from a plane would be technically extremely difficult, although the US Navy's new electromagnetic launch system might be able to do it.
To be fair to the OP, only about 3 of those MS studies produce something I would call AAA titles. Those three are Lionhead (fable etc), 343 (Halo), and Turn 10 (Forza Motorsports). The others make games like Kinect Adventures or South Park Let's Go Tower Defense Play! (I wish I made that last one up). Most of the Sony ones, on the other hand, produce games like Gran Turismo, SOCOM, Killzone, Shadow of the Colossus, God of War... I could go on, but you get the idea. Not all of them, mind, but many many more than Microsoft's. Microsoft's first-party studios are lacking in good quality IP and games. Nintendo is so focused on casual gaming I won't even mention them.
Yeah, I remember getting a nasty shock a few days ago when I didn't do that (I normally am very obsessive about it), and I noticed my name appearing in other pages. Seriously, Facebook, stop stalking me. Well, that is why browser extensions were made (Ghostery, I hope you work as advertised.)
I know, it kind of astonishes me how the costs have come down. When i built my "current" PC (can I still call it the same PC after replacing video card, monitor, CPU motherboard, and adding RAM?) it cost me about $1,700, and that was about standard for a good but not top end gaming PC. $800 was for budget machines. Now, top end (not very top, but still) is about $800 and the $1.7k budget is for people who want the near-ultimate stuff. Astonishes me, since usually lowering prices only apply if you want crappy or dated technology (look at digital cameras. All the ones in the $100-150 range are pretty much crap). Now you can get genuinely good stuff for quite cheap. I actually think AMD might have caused that. Their processor line forced Intel to not only innovate, but lower prices to compete. Same with the ATI-AMD merger. Even hardcore gamers shouldn't really spend more than a thousand now a days.
I should add that the low prices of the internals makes monitors seem very expensive by comparison (about a third of the value of my PC is probably in the 24" monitor alone), making this whole $200 PC somewhat moot. Oh, and I got lucky on power supply: bought a pretty cheap one, and it hasn't failed me yet (been almost five years yet and it's been abused all to hell from being shipped around.)
Holy crap. 2 links to pics and neither were goatse? What is the Internet coming to?