The real question is when they are going to release the 3D version on blu-ray for all those 3DTVs. If there is anything that will convince home theater geeks with money to burn that they need to replace their perfectly good 2D setup with an expensive 3D setup, it will be Avatar in 3D. (everyone I know who is serious about 3D has said that Avatar is the best 3D film to date)
I've heard it'll be around the DVD/Blu-Ray re-release in november. The re-release is to have extras and the like (Fox wanted more money otherwise they could've stuck them in another disc to not compromise the high-bitrate used - it's a good 45GB or so on a blu-ray).
Of course, the reason it's good is the camera used. A 3D camera is more than just two cameras side by side - they actually need to be able to move relative to one another - sideways (inter-ocular distance - i.e., distance between lenses) and yaw (convergence - i.e., a ray projected from the cameras will intersect in the desired area). Without this (i.e. using fixed camers) can result in fatigue and vomit on your head from the guy behind you. And a less tiring experience as the your brain tries not to focus on the areas where depth-of-field is used ot blur areas (altering the convergence helps alleviate this).
End result is it is very hard to actually make a 3D movie - it's not just "we'll just offset two cameras and shoot", but now it's how much offset, and where is the convergence. 3D camcorders will take home video to a new dimension of unwatchability...
I like big budget games because they can have cool visuals, full spoken dialogue and so on.
This rises an interesting question: is voice synthesis nowadays good enough to handle most of the dialogue? Most voice actors are pretty bad, sometimes hilariously so, so I'd imagine that a computer reading a script - perhaps with some markup cues for emotional state and such - would do just as well, if not better.
This would cut development costs for dialogy-heavy games a lot, and as a bonus also make modding a lot easier.
Voice synthesis is quite good these days if you have a good voice database to begin with (it's one of Apple's long term R&D projects), but even with a high end database it is still intensive and very robotic. It's great if you have a robotic voice you want to simulate (and Apple's TTS has "starred" in many media - TV, movies and games), but it's nowhere near natural speech. (And Microsoft's implementation just plain sucks in XP - it's laughable at best unless you really need the chintzy robotic voice).
I've seen some games use TTS when the dialog's mostly just text on screen - it's not pretty and just slows things down when you can read faster.
Good voice actors aren't expensive, either. It's a budget item yes, but they aren't expensive. The poor quality voice acting usually comes from the management thinking that anyone can do it so they all gather employees into the booth and have them recite lines for a day. For some people it works great (they have good enunciation and projection to begin with), others... not so much. The big-name voice actors can easily do multiple characters with distinct voices and personalities, too.
what? From the age I was allowed to cross the street, I was told to LOOK both ways, never to just listen for a car...
Right... And no one is ever distracted, or lazy, or maybe even just blinded by glare, so they should just take their lumps and shut up about it. Or put another way, even though we could prevent innumerable accidental injuries and deaths by adding an aural warning, we should not do that just because stupid or inattentive people don't deserve it. Have I got that right?
You missed the most common reason - using a bloody cellphone! Yes, it appears the cellphone is also very distracting to pedestrians, who blithely step onto the road while yakking away. Or just end up on the street while texting. All the more for legislation against cellphone use except in emergencies, it seems. The basic act of walking safely is also heavily compromised while on a cellphone. And people complain when they can't use the phone and maneuver a 2-ton vehicle safely. Probably because most of the incidents while walking result in minor injuries and embarassment rather than actual potential for death.
Maybe Toyota should have a cell jammer in every Prius. Maybe then they'll actually look around. OTOH, maybe they'll just stare stupidly at the screen as their call drops.
It's a Linux system presented in all stores across the planet, on prime shelf space.
What does this do for Linux? About as much as TiVo did with it's "Linux system... on prime shelf space"... actually the real analogy here is probably iOS and Mach... I mean, it's so awesome and powerful right? Well, you have to root/jailbreak it first (assuming the device doesn't have an anti-tamper)... and that's getting harder with each new release.
And Android phones are going the TiVo way as well, requiring jailbreaks and the like to "get the most out of it". Android's open-source, but the phones themselves aren't open at all. They're just open because the manufacturers were rushing to get phones on shelves. Though, HTC devices have always been more "open" to being hacked (xda-developers was about a particular set of HTC devices back in the WinMo days). But we're seeing with Motorola and probably soon Samsung and the like will be locking down the phones to run "approved OS images only".
The Sony PSPhone if it's true will probably be horrifically locked down, and probably tied to the Playstation Network like the Go, and Sony's pretty good about locking things down tight. Motorola's already shown it with the Droid X, getting back to where things were in the WInMo days.
And yes, I've heard manufacturers ask to lock things down - they say things like they don't want another xda-developers popping up for their phone.
Actually, Microsoft can easily go after those who downloaded the game. It's so simple, they've done it before.
You cannot get on Xbox Live and play Halo Reach.
Why? Because Microsoft knows who's supposed to be playing Halo Reach (and whose Xbox Live profiles they've allowed), anyone else online obviously is pirating. (Reviewers can take it across multiple Xboxes easily enough, as the license would be for a particular LIve account, and not Xbox. So if that Live account isn't logged in, that game can't be played).
So pirates are pretty much stuck with campaign mode. Multiplayer is local only.
And while Microsoft might want to go after the original uploaders. The rest of them, they just ban the consoles (i.e., you have to buy a brand new Xbox360) from Live, and possible put in markers on the account (similar to the "Cheater" tags on Live). If you're playing it on your pirating Xbox360 that's not connected online and stuff, you're safe. But for the idiots that pirate and do Live, oops. (Microsoft has done this for MW2 and many other games).
I can tell you the die-hard Halo fans will probably not bother - no Live, no achievements, and no multiplayer (sure, there's local). The average college student probably won't bother either - banned consoles are not a fun way to get through the year. The pirate who wouldn't have paid anyways? No big deal.
The only real excuse is if you bought it retail because a store broke street date. In which case, Microsoft may ban you, but they'll probably unban you/send you a new console when you present the receipt as going after retailers breaking street dates can entail lots of money for breaking a contract - enough that an Xbox360 replacement is trivial. Not only do stores get fined big bucks (thousands of dollars - easily wiping out any profits), but Microsoft puts that retailer on notice that they can be put on a sh*tlist - retailers who no longer receive product the weeks before release, but at best, the day before or the day of. (And customers hate having to line up waiting for a shipment that may or may not arrive, so it's a quick way to lose lucrative pre-order business and retailers hate the stigma of "they don't ever get anything on release date"). It's why all those gamer sites blank out the receipts of everything except the line item showing the game.
In the end, it's no big deal for Microsoft. Those stupid enough to play while connected to Live get burned badly. Those smart enough to not to probably wouldn't have paid for it anyways given the limitations. ANd those who managed to get it early means Microsoft gets a few extra bucks from those breaking contracts.
It's probably less for PCs and more for embedded platforms (which increasingly do have SATA interfaces - a MIPS board on my desk right now has TWO SATA interfaces).
But it can be useful on a MID - 64GB storage without having to waste space for a 1.8" hard drive or SSD. This will enable smaller handheld PCs (literally - Windows 7 or Linux on a device the size of an iPhone). Or for tablet PCs, you can fill the space the hard drive left with battery and get easily another 20-100% more battery life by having the SSD soldered in.
Sure it eliminates the ability to upgrade, and if the SSD dies, the device dies, but that's not unusual in a lot of things these days (e.g., cell phones - if your iPhone/Android flash dies, it's bricked). Though in the PC case, there's always USB boot.
The whole reason I bought a PS3 was because it was a closed platform, and because it was a closed platform, it was harder to hack the games. I like playing FPS games and they are absolutely ruined as soon as you have to deal with wallhacks and aimbots. Will this new hack open the door to programs like that?
Depends what was defeated. For example, on the Xbox360, you can pirate games with a hacked DVD drive, but you canot mod the games because you can't run unsigned code in the main OS. You can hack your Xbox360 to run Linux, but that pretty much eliminates any option in playing Xbox360 games. So you don't really worry about cheating in Xbox360 games, other than social cheating that the Xbox can't really defend itself again ("standbying", "rage quitting", etc). Or against proxy-bots (where a proxy aimbot intercepts Xbox Live network packets).
If the PS3 is hacked similarly - i.e., it can't run unsigned code, nothing bad will happen. If it can, oh well.
And this could be the thing that gets the PS3 selling well again - with few exceptions, it's trailed behind the Xbox360 (which has trailed behind Nintendo).
And yeah, Microsoft learned with the original Xbox that not listening to indie/homebrew devs leads to easy piracy as the groups will work together on a solution. It's what happened on the Wii this generation. The Xbox360 has the XNA stuff, which certainly limits what you can do, and the PS3 had OtheroS, which also had its limits, but it calmed the homebrew waters and had the pirates working alone. Now Sony removed OtherOS, and the homebrew crowd pretty much ends up working with the piracy crowd because their work is complementary.
And hey, it's a use for that 500GB drive you tossed in your PS3 - rather than use the dog-gone-sluggish Blu-Ray drive. (Hell, the Xbox360 had the feature to copy games to hard drive...).
I don't get why intel would buy a software company in the first place, much less one that makes not-so-great antivirus software. Seems to me they should have put that huge wad of cash into R&D.
Simple - to drive sales of their core product.
Intel has a TON of software. Each in some way is to drive sales of Intel processors. Sure you still have to pay for them, but that money's just peanuts. E.g., their compilers emit code optimized for their processors (of course, they also emit crap for non-Intel CPUs).
This AV thing might be for Intel to explore new ways of protecting computers. And of course, it'll only be availble on Intel CPUs. (I still remember what, 10 years ago AMD sent out "care packages" that illustrated why their CPUs were better, and they were touting NX bit).
It's just like Apple and the iTunes/App store. Apple isn't in the music, TV show, movie or software distribution business. Yet by doing so, it complements their core products (iPods, iPhones, iPads) helping them sell. Apple's "pro" apps and consumer levels apps are there to help move Macs.
It's all about complementary markets - they don't need it, and probably don't make much money off those products, but it helps generate core business sales.
Seriously, the media seems to have a massive hard on for Second Life because they think it is the way the Internet ought to go. In reality Second Life is a pretty sub standard MMO with very few players. Why the hell do the fluff stories about it make Slashdot front page news?
Uh... Second Life is mostly dead these days. Everyone's moved to Facebook. Even companies which were racing to setup SL storefronts are abandoning them in droves after it turns out ROI isn't there and it's just costing money. When the recession hit, they basically stopped supporting it. No one's cared about SL for years.
SL maybe was relevant 3 or 4 years ago. It's effectively "dead" now, replaced with the new hotness, Facebook. (These things come and go - remember when everyone was storming on about MySpace?). Facebook's on a slow decline, though, while Twitter seems up and up (for now). The only reason Facebook's not totally dead is people do need their farmville fix. Though even that has iPhone and Android apps these days. Maybe the post-Facebook world is that of gaming hubs like Xbox Live, PSN, OpenFeint and whatever Apple has.
The only reason this is news is it's an interesting way to pwn a machine by having the user willingly do things. It's like doing a raid in WoW, only that killing that monster ends up infecting your PC. Or talking to a supposed NPC loads your PC up with spyware. Effectively, game MMO clients are similar to where web browsers were several years ago, and they're a new line of attack since security is usually only concentrated only on the server side.
When I was a kid, I used to sit there smashing mosquitoes that bit me. Every time I smashed one fat with blood, I relished the idea that I had just killed a female mosquito who was about to lay thousands of eggs. And those mosquitoes would in turn breed and lay thousands of eggs and I had essentially just ended the lives of an infinite number of mosquitoes!
Please, just let me have this -- your environmental constraints and logical reasoning be damned!
Presumably, I'm told (many years ago) that if you pinch the skin around the mosquito (so it's at the peak of the ridge formed), the mosquito can't remove its stinger. The end result is that the mosquito keeps getting blood until eventually, its thorax explodes from too much blood.
Smacking is bloody one is satisfying, but I've never been able to pinch my skin fast enough to give that one a try. Would be interesting to see if they explode dramatically or something just tears rapidly and you have a mosquito without a thorax, and a bubble of blood on your skin.
Being able to do it on silicon should mean they can make them cheaply and quickly with existing fab gear. I could see these being a lot of fun for tinkerers.
Analog ICs have been around since they put two transistors on a base. There's nothing new about an analog computer, other than maybe putting all the pieces together onto a single piece of silicon, but analog ICs are plentiful. The lowly op-amp is a very common one, and there are often transistorized equivalents for many passive components (because making a transistor is many times easier than making a resistor/capacitor/inductor in silicon, and the transistor version has better stability and specifications than what's possible with building the passive components in silicon directly.
Heck, the 555 is a very common analog IC - it just has a flip-flop on its output as its sole digital component. And nevermind the DACs and ADCs and other mixed-signal ICs out there.
Of course, if they managed to do this using digital IC fab technology (analog ICs are very "big" when you compare to modern digital deep submicron technology), that'll be a huge breakthrough.
I wonder if IP addresses will end up just going up in price, forcing smaller sites out or onto virtual domains instead of people switching over to IPv6, even if IPv6 is just used as an edge protocol, where businesses still use v4 as their core layer 3 protocol.
BINGO! You can use the same explanation for peak oil, too. As oil and IP addresses get more scarce, the price goes up. People move to cheaper technologies (NAT, hybrids). Lather, rinse, repeat. Thus, the sudden "no more oil!" crisis just like the "no more IPs!" crisis won't really happen. It'll just be a slow runup. Now, eventually the price will be high enough that everyone moves to alternate technologies (IPv6, electric vehicles), but that's a market thing moreso than "we've run out".
Plus, the more people behind NATs, the harder it is to P2P, and the less bandwidth used by people. All wins for ISPs (especially cable companies who want people watching their TV and not streaming video), all losses for everyone else.
Cable companies like it when people download. Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, etc. Stream away! There's tons of downstream capacity. What cable companies hate most, though is upstream bandwidth. People uploading at full speed slow everyone down because all those ACKs don't go back fast enough. That's the primary problem with cable providers - not enough upstream bandwidth. If all P2P people did was download, they wouldn't care. But when just a few of them decide to upload, it can bring the whole system to a crawl despite there easily being 10+Mbps per person downstream capacity.
1. The usual "please rob me since I am not at home" rant.
Ah, but the Facebook one is better! Now not only can you see if someone isn't at home, you can stalk their friends as well to see if they really aren't at home, or if they're just pretending to be not at home. Plus, you can see if the house is going to be empty by seeing if any family members are also on the friend list and seeing where they are. Plus, a peruse through the photos can tell you whether or not the family pet is harmless, a potential concern, or to be avoided. Plus, you can go see who's got the best stuff to be fenced, and probably a good idea where it's located and the possibly layout.
Please Rob Me / Foursquare lacks all these pre-research materials. The Facebook one lets potential robbers see what they can score, and what they're up against. Foursquare has nothing special compared to what Facebook has.
Facebook's one-upped Foursquare by making such pre-robbery research easier to do. Sure it doesn't eliminate the need to scope out the place, but a robber can now skip those places where there's nothing but junk and go straight to the big scores. What's not to love about Facebook doing it?
As a PC user I look occasionally at why to use a Mac but the one button mouse and high prices keep turning me to the competition. However, bundle an iPad, with a stylus that uses a button for right clicking, in a Mac deal so a user has the alternative of handwriting and touch input via Bluetooth or LAN as well as a portable subcomputer away from the desk, and Mac sales may go nuts. Heck, somebody make an iPad or lightweight tablet do this for a PC.
That one-button mouse pretty much ensures that apps are designed to not hide stuff in right-click menus. Your second sentence pretty much illustrates why Windows 7 tablets are annoying to use - a substantial amount of crap is hidden in a right-click menu. Hell, Windows 7 itself hides a lot of functionality - right click, shift-right-click, and possibly alt-right-click can pop up different menu items. (I believe shift-right-click holds a hidden "Open command prompt here" command). So now you really need a fourth mouse button to handle the alternate right-clicks.
It's also why Apple re-did the UI framework for the iPhone and iPad - touch has a different set of semantics than using a mouse - you don't have access to things like "hover" (mouse over), drags are a lot harder to do, and you especially lose the "right click". People have tried to come up with solutions - some involving a modifier key held down and a tap, others is a tap-and-hold, multi-button stylii, but it's compensating for the fact that people have hidden functionality inside right-clicking.
Finally, the single-button mouse encourages devs to actually pay attention to UI design because hiding functionality inside right-clicking is discouraged. At the very minimum the contents of the right-click menu should be accessible elsewhere (usually in the main menu). This does make OS X more touch-friendly, but there's still the missing semantics that make it less than idea as a touchscreen OS (lack of hover means tooltips aren't shown, so cryptic toolbar icons have to be modified somehow).
Also, when something fizzles, lately it becomes suddenly "just a hobby from the start" (vide Apple TV)
Funny enough, it's fizzled so badly enough that most other companies would've killed it long ago as well. Fact is, Apple's still keeping it around for whatever reason, investing money into it. I'm sure the other products the fizzled don't get extended lifetimes as much as AppleTV does. Even considering it's supposed to be replaced, Apple's still pouring money into it.
I'm guessing there's a reason for that investment. So calling it a hobby would be right - Apple's pretty sure they need AppleTV, but they're not sure what. Otherwise, it would've been killed. (And considering all the hacks, they certainly aren't cracking down on it...)
Typical problem of universities (I've also studied at a university myself): they teach how/why stuff works from a highly theoretical pov, not how it is used in practice. This gives a great basis for deeper understanding but most practical things are not learned in university but in real life.
Practical stuff is learned on the job because one employer's method is different from another employer's method.
Perhaps a good example would be a simple job of "programmer". If you want a code monkey to crank out code based on your designs and existing codebase, someone from college/university wouldn't fit. You'd want someone from a trade school who's basically trained in whatever lanugage you want to do it.
The college/university student will handle codemonkey, but will take longer as they'll have to learn the language first (very rarely do they come out with more than one of C/C++, Java or.NET, while your trade school graduate can come out with a combination of C/C++, Java,.NET, PHP, Perl, Python, etc.).
Perhaps a car analogy is more appropriate. If you want a mechanic to work on your car, you hire someone who's gone to a trade school and become a certified mechanic. However, if you want a new type of car, you have to hire automotive engineers who can design a car and understand all the physics and the like of cars to make a safe, fuel-efficient etc car. That automotive engineer probably can't rebuild an engine, but he'll know all the parts and what they do. Just like the mechanic can rebuild the engine, but won't have insight into why things are done the way they are (e.g., why the engine has so many sensors and is completely computer-controlled).
It's a myth because while Android is open-source, it the ROMs aren't "open". Yes you can build an Android image from the source code, but it isn't the same as what your phone runs - with all the extra stuff like "With Google" (Android Marketplace, Goggles, Maps, Mail, etc.) and the UI cutomizations. The stuff you get with the open-source don't include that. It's why Google went after the modders to not distribute ROMs with their stuff on it.
And if you really want to get down to it, Windows MObile had custom ROMs (xda-developers was original doing WinMo stuff). You can also argue that the pre-jailbroken IPSW's for iPhone are also "custom ROMs" because you load them in using the ROM update utility of iTunes.
And while early Android phones were easily moddable to load in custom ROMs, later ROM revisions often removed the ability to root the phone, and also the ability to replace the ROM. People complain the Droid X won't allow custom ROMs as if that's a bad thing, but it's just a return to the norm.
Android being open-source means squat to generating an OS image and running it on your phone. Sure there are phones that let you do it (Android Dev Phones, for example) but consumer phones aren't supposed to have that ability. Right now we've been lucky.
All Android being open-source means is that anyone who wants to make a phone has an OS they can use royalty free. It still requires a LOT of work to make it production ready, and if you want "with Google" stuff, you have to join the OHA (not easy) and license the code for that, as well. What's interesting in Android is the stuff that isn't in the repository - it's really pretty much the status quo as those who are in the field know what pieces are missing and can write them, while Joe Garage Hacker thinks he can whip out a phone but doesn't realize a lot of important (and valuable) pieces are missing.
Now, that said, the DoD can easily design an Android phone that meets their specs and have one of the many ODMs actually do the Android porting to put Android on it. The iPhone, not so much.
Also forgot to mention, it isn't in the market. It has to be manually installed, with that little box checked to allow non-market apps to be installed.
Given the number of jailbroken iPhones with OpenSSH installed, that's not a limitation at all. Turns out people are sheep, and if you give them instructions on how to install your SuperNewCoolAndroidApp.apk file, they'll do it. They'll blithely check that box, click OK on the permissions dialog, etc. Make it into a YouTube video and they'll just do it like a monkey.
There is no good security solution for users. Maybe if Android popped up a dialog saying "This app is wanting to do something that may cost money ("Dial +xx-xxx-xxx-xxxx" or "SMS +xx-xxx-xxx-xxxx" etc) - allow?". But even then it's iffy.
Perhaps maybe a default security settings box where things that cost money are unchecked and denied explicitly (I never liked Android's "all or nothing" - why not grant "safe" settings and deny "dangerous" ones (call/sms/use network) by default).
Except for the Archos tablet which was on the market for a whole year prior to the ipad complete with multi-touch. They had older similar form factor tablets that were slightly less capble too. Archos failed to market it properly however as most people didn't even know it was on the market until they were looking for ipads and found it. It's better in every way save for battery life which will require an arm based tablet to compete with since the Archos was built on the Atom.
The Archos 9 PC Tablet was announced early 2009, but it only really started shipping very late 2009 (December - those few who preordered could get one). It only came out in quantity around February-March. The reviews had it as an OK machine - it wasn't terribly fast, and it was kinda big (bulky).
And it's better spec-wise yes, but people don't care about features - they care about it working. It has OK specs - 60GB hard disk (though it would be a poky 1.8" drive), webcam, atom processor, but Win7 doesn't run terribly well on it (the hard disk is painfully slow). The slightly cheaper iPad ($500 vs the A9's $550) at least was snappy feeling. In the end, the A9 felt more like a netbook than anything, plus the formfactor of the iPad was far more appealing.
The timing really couldn't be worse - if it was a year earlier, it might've done decently well running XP, but now it was tossed up against a sexier device. And it didn't help that Archos has poor hardware quality - you'd go through 2-5 devices in order to get one without a dead pixel.
Aside from the slippery surface type accidents, I have a hard time seeing how ABS would help prevent anything. Definitely assists the drivers in handling emergency situations, but parent is right that ABS can't really be proactive in stopping accidents.
Wow, that many people don't know what ABS is for?
Why do you pump brakes in non-ABS cars in an emergency? It's not just because you stop shorter because the tires aren't slipping on the road (remember in physics? Coefficient of static friction is higher than dynamic friction, and tires work by static friction). But also because you can steer and maneuver while braking.
Remember those emergency stopping tests where you suddenly had to apply the brakes *and* avoid the obstacle? Pumping the brakes works, but in an emergency, that's something one has to be consciously do (while avoiding obstacles is mostly a reflex action). ABS simplifies the procedure down to "Stomp on brakes, steer away from trouble". Which your average cellphone-using-texting-distracted driver will probably be able to do instinctively
Take common obstacles like kids running onto the raod. You can't stop in time, so you must steer around the kid or hit them. A car with locked-up wheels is out of control and will hit the kid. If you're able to consciously pump the brakes, you can steer out of the way. ABS does the same - it pumps the brakes for you so you still have the ability to steer. And most people will feel hitting a parked car is a far better outcome than hitting the kid.
Ideally, you'd stop before the obstacle. But if you can't, you still have enough control to steer. Sure ABS probably can't compare to an expert driver at stopping distance when pumping, but it's far better for the vast majority of drivers out there, and it handles the common case where most drivers will just stomp on the brakes and lock the wheels up.
On a somewhat related note, I have noticed that the fake lottery scammers and 419'ers seem to have migrated from email to actual physical postal mail. It's not a lot (over the last year I've received maybe 4-5 of them) but it makes me wonder whether these scams are actually lucrative enough to cover the cost of postage (often from overseas). The other possibility is that these scammers have figured out a way to hack the postage metering system so they're sending their mail for free (minus the cost of paper).
Probably more lucrative. As in, the hit rate is much higher for postal mail than email, because face it - those 419 emails are so common no one believes them when they easily get as many as 1 a day or so. Plus since most spam filters already discard them (they all look the same), the chance of snagging a mark is low.
However, because people don't usually get much postal mail, it's a bit more "unique" and people probably aren't on their guard as much. Plus, you can put it on expensive-feeling paper with official-looking letterheads, and peopl can be easily convinced. Put it in an official looking envelope and you've pretty much scored. Sure it costs a few bucks, but the payback can be huge.
Anyone happen to notice that the amounts claimed have been steadily decreasing, though? It used to be crazy large amounts like hundreds of millions, then it's decreased to millions and less - hundred thousand-ish now? Looks like the recession's hit us all!
And I remember getting a letter from Domains of Canada, claiming to be the registrar for my domain. I'm not stupid, however, as I never actually registered my domain within Canada, and I know it expires yearly around March (I got the letter sometime in July).
The whole idea is to make the subscription purchasable from within the game.
If you play enough EVE, and make enough ISK, you can pay for your subscription entirely with ISK. Because somebody out there has more dollars than ISK.
They'll buy a game time card with real dollars. Then convert that game time card into a PLEX. And then sell that PLEX for in-game ISK.
Actually, the original reason for a PLEX is to cut down gold farmers who sell ISK for real money without really generating anything. Like how people play WoW for hours to get gold which they then eBay and the like for real money.
CCP felt that the best way to deal with this was to have "subscriptions" be the ingame-to-real-world conversion. People buy subscription cards, and sell them for ISK. People with ISK, rather than selling them for real money, sell them for PLEXes, thus eliminating the risky ISK-to-currency conversions (in case the transfer goes awry).
It benefits CCP because people with PLEXes will probably hang around and play, and it offers those with more money than sense to quickly buy ISK without having to do shady transactions with gold farmers.
But basically, it's to eliminate gold farming by making it unprofitable because people would rather do the more legit PLEX transfer. All the gold farmer's accomplished then is getting free subs rather than cold hard cash.
You can browse the source right here. All of that code should be Apache 2.0 license. I think the issue at stake is that they took a module of code that connects to Google's Market place for Android and they're not supposed to be doing that unless they are a member of the Open Handset Alliance. It's not like Google's launching a lawsuit against them but I'd imagine Google doesn't really appreciate that. Hosting that sort of thing can't be cheap (look at how much Apple claims it loses distributing apps) and maybe that's why your membership is needed -- to support that and keep it going.
Android is just an OS. It is open-source, and it provides basic apps only. All the Google stuff (GMail, Goggles, Android Marketplace, Maps, etc) are closed-source apps that Google licenses out to OHA members. If you look at the Android phones on the market right now, you'll find they all say something like "With Google" on the back indicating that they've licensed Google's apps to enhance the Android experience. (And this includes stuff like DRM for marketplace apps and the like - Google's not happy with people "rooting" their phones either. And it's also why you can't download Marketplace apps onto your PC unlike say, iTunes, which you can use to capitalize on those "temporarily free" app discounts.)
Because if you look at the source code of Android, it's pretty barren. There's a reason for that is that it's just a basic OS. The stuff people want - Goggles, Maps, etc, aren't actually part of Android, but they are Android apps. And Google has cracked down on their distribution as well (remember the custom ROMs thing)?
You can get the source yourself and do whatever the hell you want with it. Carriers and phone vendors are demonstrating that they can even lock down Android so "open" doesn't mean f-ckall to the end consumer.
Android is open-source, but it isn't open. It just happens to use a Linux kernel. It just happens that the OS source code is under Apache. All that does is let hardware manufacturers use Android in various ways (e.g., B&N Nook runs Android) as a royalty-free OS. All they must do is release the kernel source code. Now, most early Android devices didn't really employ any lockdown features, but that's changing as manufacturers demonstrate that to them, it's another phone OS, and carriers are wanting locked-down phones. In the end, the only thing an Android phone is more "open" than say, an iPhone is that apps don't have to be approved by anyone.
Membership in the OHA is hard. Not anyone can join and it costs a pretty penny. To get in, you must work with an OHA member in some fashion so they can recommend you membership, then you must pass other tests to get in. Which means as a newcomer, you're not likely to get in unless you've done previous work with OHA members in the past.
Sadly this is one of the biggest problems with out country today. The biggest bane to Capitalism is a monopoly. And unfortunately almost every major product we buy be it power, automobiles, computers, food, media, etc. has a group of three or four huge companies that completely control that market. They get together and price fix, control the market, and even control the laws and regulations that are supposed to keep them in check. These types of collusion are no good except for the people at the top of these companies and their stock holders.
Actually, monopolies are the goal of capitalism. It's the ideal end-game - to own the entire market. If you can't own it, then you'll either acquire your competition, or collude to ensure that everyone can go home with big fat paycheques and bonuses and lots of cash. And that's the goal of a capitalistic society - to earn as much money as possible.
What threatens a monopoly the most is the young startup who dares to disturb whatever nice arrangement you have making money. Which a monopoly or a collusion would go and prevent by either outright purchasing the new competition, or make it impossible for it to survive, by dumping.
Monopolies are allowed and legal, however, governments tend to institute measures to ensure that monopolies don't abuse their power (leveraging a monopoly in one area to gain it on another, dumping to drive competition out of business, etc).
Could something like this have the same effect on electronics as an EMP?
Imagine the chaos if all the microprocessors on the planet burned out at once. Or just in one hemisphere.
On the surface, not so much - the magnetosphere funnels those charged particles to the magnetic poles, where they interact with the atmosphere and create the stunning light shows we call auroras. That said, they can induce currents to flow, especially in long lines (think power lines) which can cause circuit breakers to trip, cutting off the grid and causing power outages.
In space, they cause lots of havoc with satellites - ranging from simple loss of communication (moving charged particles generate EM radiation, after all - same ones that cause power outages mentioned above), to complete destruction if it burns out some control circuits. So not only are the electronics rad-hard, but there are shut down protocols to temporarily turn satellites "off" to prevent damage. A dead satellite is a huge cloud of space junk waiting to happen, after all, especially if you can't deorbit it.
Of course, the magnetosphere is supposed to be weakening in time for a supposed pole reversal, in which case life will get pretty interesting.
This CME didn't result in any damage to satellites, though. Not sure if there weren't other effects (power outages, notable) caused, though.
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I've heard it'll be around the DVD/Blu-Ray re-release in november. The re-release is to have extras and the like (Fox wanted more money otherwise they could've stuck them in another disc to not compromise the high-bitrate used - it's a good 45GB or so on a blu-ray).
Of course, the reason it's good is the camera used. A 3D camera is more than just two cameras side by side - they actually need to be able to move relative to one another - sideways (inter-ocular distance - i.e., distance between lenses) and yaw (convergence - i.e., a ray projected from the cameras will intersect in the desired area). Without this (i.e. using fixed camers) can result in fatigue and vomit on your head from the guy behind you. And a less tiring experience as the your brain tries not to focus on the areas where depth-of-field is used ot blur areas (altering the convergence helps alleviate this).
End result is it is very hard to actually make a 3D movie - it's not just "we'll just offset two cameras and shoot", but now it's how much offset, and where is the convergence. 3D camcorders will take home video to a new dimension of unwatchability...
Voice synthesis is quite good these days if you have a good voice database to begin with (it's one of Apple's long term R&D projects), but even with a high end database it is still intensive and very robotic. It's great if you have a robotic voice you want to simulate (and Apple's TTS has "starred" in many media - TV, movies and games), but it's nowhere near natural speech. (And Microsoft's implementation just plain sucks in XP - it's laughable at best unless you really need the chintzy robotic voice).
I've seen some games use TTS when the dialog's mostly just text on screen - it's not pretty and just slows things down when you can read faster.
Good voice actors aren't expensive, either. It's a budget item yes, but they aren't expensive. The poor quality voice acting usually comes from the management thinking that anyone can do it so they all gather employees into the booth and have them recite lines for a day. For some people it works great (they have good enunciation and projection to begin with), others... not so much. The big-name voice actors can easily do multiple characters with distinct voices and personalities, too.
You missed the most common reason - using a bloody cellphone! Yes, it appears the cellphone is also very distracting to pedestrians, who blithely step onto the road while yakking away. Or just end up on the street while texting. All the more for legislation against cellphone use except in emergencies, it seems. The basic act of walking safely is also heavily compromised while on a cellphone. And people complain when they can't use the phone and maneuver a 2-ton vehicle safely. Probably because most of the incidents while walking result in minor injuries and embarassment rather than actual potential for death.
Maybe Toyota should have a cell jammer in every Prius. Maybe then they'll actually look around. OTOH, maybe they'll just stare stupidly at the screen as their call drops.
And Android phones are going the TiVo way as well, requiring jailbreaks and the like to "get the most out of it". Android's open-source, but the phones themselves aren't open at all. They're just open because the manufacturers were rushing to get phones on shelves. Though, HTC devices have always been more "open" to being hacked (xda-developers was about a particular set of HTC devices back in the WinMo days). But we're seeing with Motorola and probably soon Samsung and the like will be locking down the phones to run "approved OS images only".
The Sony PSPhone if it's true will probably be horrifically locked down, and probably tied to the Playstation Network like the Go, and Sony's pretty good about locking things down tight. Motorola's already shown it with the Droid X, getting back to where things were in the WInMo days.
And yes, I've heard manufacturers ask to lock things down - they say things like they don't want another xda-developers popping up for their phone.
Actually, Microsoft can easily go after those who downloaded the game. It's so simple, they've done it before.
You cannot get on Xbox Live and play Halo Reach.
Why? Because Microsoft knows who's supposed to be playing Halo Reach (and whose Xbox Live profiles they've allowed), anyone else online obviously is pirating. (Reviewers can take it across multiple Xboxes easily enough, as the license would be for a particular LIve account, and not Xbox. So if that Live account isn't logged in, that game can't be played).
So pirates are pretty much stuck with campaign mode. Multiplayer is local only.
And while Microsoft might want to go after the original uploaders. The rest of them, they just ban the consoles (i.e., you have to buy a brand new Xbox360) from Live, and possible put in markers on the account (similar to the "Cheater" tags on Live). If you're playing it on your pirating Xbox360 that's not connected online and stuff, you're safe. But for the idiots that pirate and do Live, oops. (Microsoft has done this for MW2 and many other games).
I can tell you the die-hard Halo fans will probably not bother - no Live, no achievements, and no multiplayer (sure, there's local). The average college student probably won't bother either - banned consoles are not a fun way to get through the year. The pirate who wouldn't have paid anyways? No big deal.
The only real excuse is if you bought it retail because a store broke street date. In which case, Microsoft may ban you, but they'll probably unban you/send you a new console when you present the receipt as going after retailers breaking street dates can entail lots of money for breaking a contract - enough that an Xbox360 replacement is trivial. Not only do stores get fined big bucks (thousands of dollars - easily wiping out any profits), but Microsoft puts that retailer on notice that they can be put on a sh*tlist - retailers who no longer receive product the weeks before release, but at best, the day before or the day of. (And customers hate having to line up waiting for a shipment that may or may not arrive, so it's a quick way to lose lucrative pre-order business and retailers hate the stigma of "they don't ever get anything on release date"). It's why all those gamer sites blank out the receipts of everything except the line item showing the game.
In the end, it's no big deal for Microsoft. Those stupid enough to play while connected to Live get burned badly. Those smart enough to not to probably wouldn't have paid for it anyways given the limitations. ANd those who managed to get it early means Microsoft gets a few extra bucks from those breaking contracts.
It's probably less for PCs and more for embedded platforms (which increasingly do have SATA interfaces - a MIPS board on my desk right now has TWO SATA interfaces).
But it can be useful on a MID - 64GB storage without having to waste space for a 1.8" hard drive or SSD. This will enable smaller handheld PCs (literally - Windows 7 or Linux on a device the size of an iPhone). Or for tablet PCs, you can fill the space the hard drive left with battery and get easily another 20-100% more battery life by having the SSD soldered in.
Sure it eliminates the ability to upgrade, and if the SSD dies, the device dies, but that's not unusual in a lot of things these days (e.g., cell phones - if your iPhone/Android flash dies, it's bricked). Though in the PC case, there's always USB boot.
Depends what was defeated. For example, on the Xbox360, you can pirate games with a hacked DVD drive, but you canot mod the games because you can't run unsigned code in the main OS. You can hack your Xbox360 to run Linux, but that pretty much eliminates any option in playing Xbox360 games. So you don't really worry about cheating in Xbox360 games, other than social cheating that the Xbox can't really defend itself again ("standbying", "rage quitting", etc). Or against proxy-bots (where a proxy aimbot intercepts Xbox Live network packets).
If the PS3 is hacked similarly - i.e., it can't run unsigned code, nothing bad will happen. If it can, oh well.
And this could be the thing that gets the PS3 selling well again - with few exceptions, it's trailed behind the Xbox360 (which has trailed behind Nintendo).
And yeah, Microsoft learned with the original Xbox that not listening to indie/homebrew devs leads to easy piracy as the groups will work together on a solution. It's what happened on the Wii this generation. The Xbox360 has the XNA stuff, which certainly limits what you can do, and the PS3 had OtheroS, which also had its limits, but it calmed the homebrew waters and had the pirates working alone. Now Sony removed OtherOS, and the homebrew crowd pretty much ends up working with the piracy crowd because their work is complementary.
And hey, it's a use for that 500GB drive you tossed in your PS3 - rather than use the dog-gone-sluggish Blu-Ray drive. (Hell, the Xbox360 had the feature to copy games to hard drive...).
Simple - to drive sales of their core product.
Intel has a TON of software. Each in some way is to drive sales of Intel processors. Sure you still have to pay for them, but that money's just peanuts. E.g., their compilers emit code optimized for their processors (of course, they also emit crap for non-Intel CPUs).
This AV thing might be for Intel to explore new ways of protecting computers. And of course, it'll only be availble on Intel CPUs. (I still remember what, 10 years ago AMD sent out "care packages" that illustrated why their CPUs were better, and they were touting NX bit).
It's just like Apple and the iTunes/App store. Apple isn't in the music, TV show, movie or software distribution business. Yet by doing so, it complements their core products (iPods, iPhones, iPads) helping them sell. Apple's "pro" apps and consumer levels apps are there to help move Macs.
It's all about complementary markets - they don't need it, and probably don't make much money off those products, but it helps generate core business sales.
Uh... Second Life is mostly dead these days. Everyone's moved to Facebook. Even companies which were racing to setup SL storefronts are abandoning them in droves after it turns out ROI isn't there and it's just costing money. When the recession hit, they basically stopped supporting it. No one's cared about SL for years.
SL maybe was relevant 3 or 4 years ago. It's effectively "dead" now, replaced with the new hotness, Facebook. (These things come and go - remember when everyone was storming on about MySpace?). Facebook's on a slow decline, though, while Twitter seems up and up (for now). The only reason Facebook's not totally dead is people do need their farmville fix. Though even that has iPhone and Android apps these days. Maybe the post-Facebook world is that of gaming hubs like Xbox Live, PSN, OpenFeint and whatever Apple has.
The only reason this is news is it's an interesting way to pwn a machine by having the user willingly do things. It's like doing a raid in WoW, only that killing that monster ends up infecting your PC. Or talking to a supposed NPC loads your PC up with spyware. Effectively, game MMO clients are similar to where web browsers were several years ago, and they're a new line of attack since security is usually only concentrated only on the server side.
Presumably, I'm told (many years ago) that if you pinch the skin around the mosquito (so it's at the peak of the ridge formed), the mosquito can't remove its stinger. The end result is that the mosquito keeps getting blood until eventually, its thorax explodes from too much blood.
Smacking is bloody one is satisfying, but I've never been able to pinch my skin fast enough to give that one a try. Would be interesting to see if they explode dramatically or something just tears rapidly and you have a mosquito without a thorax, and a bubble of blood on your skin.
Has anyone been able to try this?
Analog ICs have been around since they put two transistors on a base. There's nothing new about an analog computer, other than maybe putting all the pieces together onto a single piece of silicon, but analog ICs are plentiful. The lowly op-amp is a very common one, and there are often transistorized equivalents for many passive components (because making a transistor is many times easier than making a resistor/capacitor/inductor in silicon, and the transistor version has better stability and specifications than what's possible with building the passive components in silicon directly.
Heck, the 555 is a very common analog IC - it just has a flip-flop on its output as its sole digital component. And nevermind the DACs and ADCs and other mixed-signal ICs out there.
Of course, if they managed to do this using digital IC fab technology (analog ICs are very "big" when you compare to modern digital deep submicron technology), that'll be a huge breakthrough.
BINGO! You can use the same explanation for peak oil, too. As oil and IP addresses get more scarce, the price goes up. People move to cheaper technologies (NAT, hybrids). Lather, rinse, repeat. Thus, the sudden "no more oil!" crisis just like the "no more IPs!" crisis won't really happen. It'll just be a slow runup. Now, eventually the price will be high enough that everyone moves to alternate technologies (IPv6, electric vehicles), but that's a market thing moreso than "we've run out".
Cable companies like it when people download. Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, etc. Stream away! There's tons of downstream capacity. What cable companies hate most, though is upstream bandwidth. People uploading at full speed slow everyone down because all those ACKs don't go back fast enough. That's the primary problem with cable providers - not enough upstream bandwidth. If all P2P people did was download, they wouldn't care. But when just a few of them decide to upload, it can bring the whole system to a crawl despite there easily being 10+Mbps per person downstream capacity.
Ah, but the Facebook one is better! Now not only can you see if someone isn't at home, you can stalk their friends as well to see if they really aren't at home, or if they're just pretending to be not at home. Plus, you can see if the house is going to be empty by seeing if any family members are also on the friend list and seeing where they are. Plus, a peruse through the photos can tell you whether or not the family pet is harmless, a potential concern, or to be avoided. Plus, you can go see who's got the best stuff to be fenced, and probably a good idea where it's located and the possibly layout.
Please Rob Me / Foursquare lacks all these pre-research materials. The Facebook one lets potential robbers see what they can score, and what they're up against. Foursquare has nothing special compared to what Facebook has.
Facebook's one-upped Foursquare by making such pre-robbery research easier to do. Sure it doesn't eliminate the need to scope out the place, but a robber can now skip those places where there's nothing but junk and go straight to the big scores. What's not to love about Facebook doing it?
That one-button mouse pretty much ensures that apps are designed to not hide stuff in right-click menus. Your second sentence pretty much illustrates why Windows 7 tablets are annoying to use - a substantial amount of crap is hidden in a right-click menu. Hell, Windows 7 itself hides a lot of functionality - right click, shift-right-click, and possibly alt-right-click can pop up different menu items. (I believe shift-right-click holds a hidden "Open command prompt here" command). So now you really need a fourth mouse button to handle the alternate right-clicks.
It's also why Apple re-did the UI framework for the iPhone and iPad - touch has a different set of semantics than using a mouse - you don't have access to things like "hover" (mouse over), drags are a lot harder to do, and you especially lose the "right click". People have tried to come up with solutions - some involving a modifier key held down and a tap, others is a tap-and-hold, multi-button stylii, but it's compensating for the fact that people have hidden functionality inside right-clicking.
Finally, the single-button mouse encourages devs to actually pay attention to UI design because hiding functionality inside right-clicking is discouraged. At the very minimum the contents of the right-click menu should be accessible elsewhere (usually in the main menu). This does make OS X more touch-friendly, but there's still the missing semantics that make it less than idea as a touchscreen OS (lack of hover means tooltips aren't shown, so cryptic toolbar icons have to be modified somehow).
Funny enough, it's fizzled so badly enough that most other companies would've killed it long ago as well. Fact is, Apple's still keeping it around for whatever reason, investing money into it. I'm sure the other products the fizzled don't get extended lifetimes as much as AppleTV does. Even considering it's supposed to be replaced, Apple's still pouring money into it.
I'm guessing there's a reason for that investment. So calling it a hobby would be right - Apple's pretty sure they need AppleTV, but they're not sure what. Otherwise, it would've been killed. (And considering all the hacks, they certainly aren't cracking down on it...)
Practical stuff is learned on the job because one employer's method is different from another employer's method.
Perhaps a good example would be a simple job of "programmer". If you want a code monkey to crank out code based on your designs and existing codebase, someone from college/university wouldn't fit. You'd want someone from a trade school who's basically trained in whatever lanugage you want to do it.
The college/university student will handle codemonkey, but will take longer as they'll have to learn the language first (very rarely do they come out with more than one of C/C++, Java or .NET, while your trade school graduate can come out with a combination of C/C++, Java, .NET, PHP, Perl, Python, etc.).
Perhaps a car analogy is more appropriate. If you want a mechanic to work on your car, you hire someone who's gone to a trade school and become a certified mechanic. However, if you want a new type of car, you have to hire automotive engineers who can design a car and understand all the physics and the like of cars to make a safe, fuel-efficient etc car. That automotive engineer probably can't rebuild an engine, but he'll know all the parts and what they do. Just like the mechanic can rebuild the engine, but won't have insight into why things are done the way they are (e.g., why the engine has so many sensors and is completely computer-controlled).
Why do people keep reiterating this myth?
It's a myth because while Android is open-source, it the ROMs aren't "open". Yes you can build an Android image from the source code, but it isn't the same as what your phone runs - with all the extra stuff like "With Google" (Android Marketplace, Goggles, Maps, Mail, etc.) and the UI cutomizations. The stuff you get with the open-source don't include that. It's why Google went after the modders to not distribute ROMs with their stuff on it.
And if you really want to get down to it, Windows MObile had custom ROMs (xda-developers was original doing WinMo stuff). You can also argue that the pre-jailbroken IPSW's for iPhone are also "custom ROMs" because you load them in using the ROM update utility of iTunes.
And while early Android phones were easily moddable to load in custom ROMs, later ROM revisions often removed the ability to root the phone, and also the ability to replace the ROM. People complain the Droid X won't allow custom ROMs as if that's a bad thing, but it's just a return to the norm.
Android being open-source means squat to generating an OS image and running it on your phone. Sure there are phones that let you do it (Android Dev Phones, for example) but consumer phones aren't supposed to have that ability. Right now we've been lucky.
All Android being open-source means is that anyone who wants to make a phone has an OS they can use royalty free. It still requires a LOT of work to make it production ready, and if you want "with Google" stuff, you have to join the OHA (not easy) and license the code for that, as well. What's interesting in Android is the stuff that isn't in the repository - it's really pretty much the status quo as those who are in the field know what pieces are missing and can write them, while Joe Garage Hacker thinks he can whip out a phone but doesn't realize a lot of important (and valuable) pieces are missing.
Now, that said, the DoD can easily design an Android phone that meets their specs and have one of the many ODMs actually do the Android porting to put Android on it. The iPhone, not so much.
Given the number of jailbroken iPhones with OpenSSH installed, that's not a limitation at all. Turns out people are sheep, and if you give them instructions on how to install your SuperNewCoolAndroidApp.apk file, they'll do it. They'll blithely check that box, click OK on the permissions dialog, etc. Make it into a YouTube video and they'll just do it like a monkey.
There is no good security solution for users. Maybe if Android popped up a dialog saying "This app is wanting to do something that may cost money ("Dial +xx-xxx-xxx-xxxx" or "SMS +xx-xxx-xxx-xxxx" etc) - allow?". But even then it's iffy.
Perhaps maybe a default security settings box where things that cost money are unchecked and denied explicitly (I never liked Android's "all or nothing" - why not grant "safe" settings and deny "dangerous" ones (call/sms/use network) by default).
The Archos 9 PC Tablet was announced early 2009, but it only really started shipping very late 2009 (December - those few who preordered could get one). It only came out in quantity around February-March. The reviews had it as an OK machine - it wasn't terribly fast, and it was kinda big (bulky).
And it's better spec-wise yes, but people don't care about features - they care about it working. It has OK specs - 60GB hard disk (though it would be a poky 1.8" drive), webcam, atom processor, but Win7 doesn't run terribly well on it (the hard disk is painfully slow). The slightly cheaper iPad ($500 vs the A9's $550) at least was snappy feeling. In the end, the A9 felt more like a netbook than anything, plus the formfactor of the iPad was far more appealing.
The timing really couldn't be worse - if it was a year earlier, it might've done decently well running XP, but now it was tossed up against a sexier device. And it didn't help that Archos has poor hardware quality - you'd go through 2-5 devices in order to get one without a dead pixel.
Wow, that many people don't know what ABS is for?
Why do you pump brakes in non-ABS cars in an emergency? It's not just because you stop shorter because the tires aren't slipping on the road (remember in physics? Coefficient of static friction is higher than dynamic friction, and tires work by static friction). But also because you can steer and maneuver while braking.
Remember those emergency stopping tests where you suddenly had to apply the brakes *and* avoid the obstacle? Pumping the brakes works, but in an emergency, that's something one has to be consciously do (while avoiding obstacles is mostly a reflex action). ABS simplifies the procedure down to "Stomp on brakes, steer away from trouble". Which your average cellphone-using-texting-distracted driver will probably be able to do instinctively
Take common obstacles like kids running onto the raod. You can't stop in time, so you must steer around the kid or hit them. A car with locked-up wheels is out of control and will hit the kid. If you're able to consciously pump the brakes, you can steer out of the way. ABS does the same - it pumps the brakes for you so you still have the ability to steer. And most people will feel hitting a parked car is a far better outcome than hitting the kid.
Ideally, you'd stop before the obstacle. But if you can't, you still have enough control to steer. Sure ABS probably can't compare to an expert driver at stopping distance when pumping, but it's far better for the vast majority of drivers out there, and it handles the common case where most drivers will just stomp on the brakes and lock the wheels up.
Probably more lucrative. As in, the hit rate is much higher for postal mail than email, because face it - those 419 emails are so common no one believes them when they easily get as many as 1 a day or so. Plus since most spam filters already discard them (they all look the same), the chance of snagging a mark is low.
However, because people don't usually get much postal mail, it's a bit more "unique" and people probably aren't on their guard as much. Plus, you can put it on expensive-feeling paper with official-looking letterheads, and peopl can be easily convinced. Put it in an official looking envelope and you've pretty much scored. Sure it costs a few bucks, but the payback can be huge.
Anyone happen to notice that the amounts claimed have been steadily decreasing, though? It used to be crazy large amounts like hundreds of millions, then it's decreased to millions and less - hundred thousand-ish now? Looks like the recession's hit us all!
And I remember getting a letter from Domains of Canada, claiming to be the registrar for my domain. I'm not stupid, however, as I never actually registered my domain within Canada, and I know it expires yearly around March (I got the letter sometime in July).
Actually, the original reason for a PLEX is to cut down gold farmers who sell ISK for real money without really generating anything. Like how people play WoW for hours to get gold which they then eBay and the like for real money.
CCP felt that the best way to deal with this was to have "subscriptions" be the ingame-to-real-world conversion. People buy subscription cards, and sell them for ISK. People with ISK, rather than selling them for real money, sell them for PLEXes, thus eliminating the risky ISK-to-currency conversions (in case the transfer goes awry).
It benefits CCP because people with PLEXes will probably hang around and play, and it offers those with more money than sense to quickly buy ISK without having to do shady transactions with gold farmers.
But basically, it's to eliminate gold farming by making it unprofitable because people would rather do the more legit PLEX transfer. All the gold farmer's accomplished then is getting free subs rather than cold hard cash.
Android is just an OS. It is open-source, and it provides basic apps only. All the Google stuff (GMail, Goggles, Android Marketplace, Maps, etc) are closed-source apps that Google licenses out to OHA members. If you look at the Android phones on the market right now, you'll find they all say something like "With Google" on the back indicating that they've licensed Google's apps to enhance the Android experience. (And this includes stuff like DRM for marketplace apps and the like - Google's not happy with people "rooting" their phones either. And it's also why you can't download Marketplace apps onto your PC unlike say, iTunes, which you can use to capitalize on those "temporarily free" app discounts.)
Because if you look at the source code of Android, it's pretty barren. There's a reason for that is that it's just a basic OS. The stuff people want - Goggles, Maps, etc, aren't actually part of Android, but they are Android apps. And Google has cracked down on their distribution as well (remember the custom ROMs thing)?
Android is open-source, but it isn't open. It just happens to use a Linux kernel. It just happens that the OS source code is under Apache. All that does is let hardware manufacturers use Android in various ways (e.g., B&N Nook runs Android) as a royalty-free OS. All they must do is release the kernel source code. Now, most early Android devices didn't really employ any lockdown features, but that's changing as manufacturers demonstrate that to them, it's another phone OS, and carriers are wanting locked-down phones. In the end, the only thing an Android phone is more "open" than say, an iPhone is that apps don't have to be approved by anyone.
Membership in the OHA is hard. Not anyone can join and it costs a pretty penny. To get in, you must work with an OHA member in some fashion so they can recommend you membership, then you must pass other tests to get in. Which means as a newcomer, you're not likely to get in unless you've done previous work with OHA members in the past.
Actually, monopolies are the goal of capitalism. It's the ideal end-game - to own the entire market. If you can't own it, then you'll either acquire your competition, or collude to ensure that everyone can go home with big fat paycheques and bonuses and lots of cash. And that's the goal of a capitalistic society - to earn as much money as possible.
What threatens a monopoly the most is the young startup who dares to disturb whatever nice arrangement you have making money. Which a monopoly or a collusion would go and prevent by either outright purchasing the new competition, or make it impossible for it to survive, by dumping.
Monopolies are allowed and legal, however, governments tend to institute measures to ensure that monopolies don't abuse their power (leveraging a monopoly in one area to gain it on another, dumping to drive competition out of business, etc).
On the surface, not so much - the magnetosphere funnels those charged particles to the magnetic poles, where they interact with the atmosphere and create the stunning light shows we call auroras. That said, they can induce currents to flow, especially in long lines (think power lines) which can cause circuit breakers to trip, cutting off the grid and causing power outages.
In space, they cause lots of havoc with satellites - ranging from simple loss of communication (moving charged particles generate EM radiation, after all - same ones that cause power outages mentioned above), to complete destruction if it burns out some control circuits. So not only are the electronics rad-hard, but there are shut down protocols to temporarily turn satellites "off" to prevent damage. A dead satellite is a huge cloud of space junk waiting to happen, after all, especially if you can't deorbit it.
Of course, the magnetosphere is supposed to be weakening in time for a supposed pole reversal, in which case life will get pretty interesting.
This CME didn't result in any damage to satellites, though. Not sure if there weren't other effects (power outages, notable) caused, though.