Re:The device isn't usually the issue for me
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
·
· Score: 1
You want a device with a higher resolution than 320x480? The Tungsten T3 is the ONLY actual PDA-Sized device with a resolution that high. The sharp Linux "PDA's" have 640x480, but they're almost the size of a paperback.
No, the screen on the Tungsten T3 is SO nice to read text on, the processor (an Intel xScale 400mhz) is plenty fast enough to play back video at full framerate, and believe it or not, it gets about 12-14 hours as an mp3 player with the screen off.
Mobipocket supports the full hires+ in both landscape and portrait. It also has a free publisher for win32 called.. cleverly... Mobipocket Publisher, which can import.doc,.rtf,.txt, and.html, and export to both Mobipocket's compressed HTML as well as Microsoft's.lit format.
Mobipocket ALSO natively supports both Palm DOC format and their own compressed HTML format.. as well as having pretty damn good anti-aliased fonts.
Of course, if you're like me, you have your telephone through Comcast as well, because the only thing more evil than Comcast is Verizon.
Comcast allowed me to keep my cable modem at the lower cost because I still had a "bundled" package, and DirecTV with HBO and the TiVo $4.99 monthly fee was cheaper than Comcast Digital Cable (and no premium packages) and my regular TiVo subscription fee.
Dual-LNB installation didn't cost me a penny extra, and Best Buy was selling DirecTiVos for $89 with free installation.
(And the fact that DSL is only available in my town through Verizon made me stick with cable modem service anyhow)
It's something new in the world of MMORPGs
It's an ocean archipelago world of pirates, filled with piratey tasks that are all puzzles! There's swordfighting.. but it's a puzzle! There's drinking! But that's a puzzle too! There's bilging and sailing and navigation and gunnery and sea battles galore. Blending elements from classic puzzles like Tetris, Bejeweled, Chu Chu Rocket, Puzzle Fighter, Baku Baku, Dr. Mario, and Alchemy in a whole new way, with the promise of many more puzzles to come, it has endless addictive properties.
It's got a short learning curve.
Because the puzzles are similar, and each one is simple to learn (but difficult to master!), you can be a useful swabbie on a ship in moments. Some of the puzzles never seem to grow old as you practice creating big combos, or as the ship is in dire need of someone to man those sails!
There are no bloody pests.
The only opponents in the game are pirates. Some of them are computer controlled, but there are almost 3000 pirates on every day now, and the game is still in beta with no fatal bugs. Making your opponents skilled humans instead of people who can click really fast makes the game both challenging and rewarding.
It's got broad appeal
Because it's based on puzzles that almost anyone can learn to be decent at, it's got appeal to an enormous age range, not to mention the fact that the gender ratio seems to be almost equitable.
Playing forever won't necessarily make you good
One of the things that always bothered me about MMORPG's was that the 14 year old kid who played 12 hours a day all summer could easily outpace the 20-something year old who was holding down a job, even if the 20-something was a better gamer. In Puzzle Pirates, your pirate doesn't get "better" at the game unless you yourself improve in your puzzling abilities. The puzzles are ranked in two manners - experience and prestige. Experience DOES only go up as you puzzle multiple times over a long period of time, but on the other hand, having a large amount of experience does NOT mean that you can beat an excellent swashbuckler automatically. Prestige, on the other hand, is entirely based on your skill. You don't need to win very many times before you slide up the ranks, and if you're beating people many ranks higher than you, you leapfrog up the ranks. But the game isn't ABOUT numbers. Another note is that all the money you earn in the game, or Pieces of Eight (POE), can't buy you victory. It can buy you a new sword, but if you can't swordfight, that isn't worth a damn. It can buy you a new ship, but if you don't have a good crew to man it with you, that's not worth a damn either.
It's about teamwork
Everyone knows that the most interesting characters in an MMORPG are always other people. Y!PP forces you to be social. You cannot effectively sail a ship into combat by yourself, you need a crew to man the sails, the guns, and the bilge with you. Fortunately, most of the crews are friendly, and you can quickly learn the ship job puzzles with your new mates as you help THEM sail against vile foes! And of course, for helping them sail, you get rewarded with a cut of the booty!
There is no thin veil of a story.
The story is your story. The story is the life of your pirate on the high seas, and you write it as you go. Whether you buy your loyalty with POE, or with kindness, or inspire awe with your swordfighting skills, the story is in the friends you make, and the deeds you do. The story can be the time you beat Pennsuedo (one of the Flag Kings) in a swordfighting tournament, or how you yourself became king of a flag. The story can be how you recruited the best crew in the seas for battling the dreaded Black Ship, or how you trained the best drinking team around.
The possiblities are endless already, and the game hasn't even started yet.
If there were more MMORPG's like this, there would be no shortage of addicts, or part time players, people who play with their families, spouses, sisters, brothers, best friends from college, or new friends forged in sea battle. It's a piratey life for me, certainly.
When I was 12, my dad worked for a custom computer store.. They built people PC's. Hey, more than 10 years ago, this was a big thing.. I seem to remember people being a lot more scared of computer guts than they are now.
Anyways, I would go help out now and again.. and one time I was setting up a STATE of the ART 386. I had hooked everything up, and turned it on.. to the sound of an enormous *CRACK!*. You see, I had placed the hard drive on top of the power supply, as the desktop-style case had nowhere to conveniently lay the hard drive.
It was toast. Totally toast. Completely and horrifically dead. RIP, little hard drive. There was a lesson in there that won't be forgotten though..
Properly mount devices! err, or at least, place them on an anti-static bag. Or not on top of a static generator like the power supply.
Someone should write an option into Mozilla or it's ilk to NOT LOAD any image with a height and width of 1. That would stop the web bugging industry at least for a little while, don't you think?
(web bugs are EVIL)
My opinion is that if it's on the radio, you can have an mp3 of it. Think of it this way... you could record it off the radio onto a tape, then play it back into your computer and encode it into an mp3. That, technically, is all legal. Therefore, you're just skipping a few of those pain in the butt steps by downloading it as an mp3, right?
And if you're going to argue that the quality won't be the same, for those of us who have good speakers / headphones, 128kbit encoded mp3 sounds pretty crappy.. you'd probably get about the same quality if you recorded it off a radio with a powered antenna and so on.
Unless the Feds do something egregiously clever, there's no way they could just flip a switch and turn off an ISP. Oh, sure, they could take down its uplink... but unless someone was sleeping on the job, I'm sure the ISP could just wire around the dumb black box. Think about it.. one wire splice around the thing, and it can't shut off your internet anymore, now can it? Of course the whole snooping thing is a different bag of worms altogether...
Actually, gas prices in BOTH the US and Europe are artifically high. The only reason that gas prices aren't 95 cents a gallon like last summer in the US is because OPEC is purposefully withholding oil production to keep prices high. I agree that we should find other sources of propulsion, and I am a huge fan of public transportation, but there are just some places you really can't get to on public transportation even out here in the metrowest boston area... (massport sucks.)
Right, because obviously, with all its financial clout, M$ in its wettest dreams could EVER buy out Sony, one of the longest lived and most profitable consumer electronics corporations in the history of man.
I'd like to KNOW who voted my comment as redundant. How could it possibly be redundant? I said that I was the one who submitted the/. link to PDABuzz -- and nobody else did that! So how could it be at all redundant??
Ghost in the Shell - One of the best sci-fi animes out there.. c'mon, even Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs up.
If you liked Ghost in the Shell, try Armitage III.. another cool cyber-girl anime available on DVD
I know it's been mentioned before, but the Macross Plus 4-part series (on 2 DVD's) is awesome.. the animation is great, the music is great, the acting isn't half bad either. Do NOT mistake the miniseries for the movie, they chop out 2 and a half hours and the whole thing doesn't make sense anymore.
the Record of the Lodoss War is the definitive fantasy Anime.. I can't remember how many DVD's this one is, it's at least 2, maybe as many as 4. It was an 8 tape series.
For an amusing fantasy romp, any of the Slayers series' are great, and the movie is funny as well. Think of it more like what a good RPG run ends up like, rather than what a good RPG should be and you have the Slayers.
Tenchi Muyo is a LONG series, but it seems to be a favorite. I wouldn't bother buying them if you can find some place to rent them, they're really amusing but I can't see them having much replay value.
Ranma 1/2 is another LONG, but amusing series with a warped sense of reality..
The Rurouni Kenshin series (also known in the US as Samurai X) is 96 episodes long (I think) in its full, complete glory. The first 30-40 episodes are really great plot-wise.. good somewhat realistic swordfighting, great animation and plot if sometimes the voice acting fails a bit. The OAV's are really amazing, they tell the story of what happens before the series, and how Kenshin gets his scars.
I think you have most of the rest of the excellent ones already in the summary at the top. Happy viewing...!
I agree wholeheartedly that they should split MS into at LEAST three companies, but does anyone else think that IE wouldn't make a valid company? How can Internet Explorer function as a thoroughly autonomous company if they want to keep their browser free? I mean, I'm all for competition, but that would put IE under the water and Netscape would once again rule the browser world. It's almost unanimous that IE5 for the Mac is the best browser out there for proper rendering of pages and full support for HTML 4.0 and CSS. Sure, sure, Mozilla is "coming" but considering how late it is already, who knows when they'll finish it.. And Netscape 6.0.. was either interminably slow or it crashed... (not to mention the lack of a way to UNINSTALL the beast from Win9x)
How about instead of splitting M$ into IE, Applications, and Operating Systems, we split it into Applications, Win9x, and WinNT. By splitting the server and desktop operating systems into separate companies, I think this would best break up the M$ Monopoly..
Let me know what you think.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Alexander Reid zander@wpi.edu WPI ACM Sin Lab Facilities Chair "Working hard to drag you down with us" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As you can see, the previous poster is a close-minded idiot. Just because Jay works for M$, doesn't mean that he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Not EVERY employee is a brainwashed goon of any company.
You shouldn't write him off.. he might have something valuable to say!
I am not surprised by this, however, as the Linux community fails to acknowledge that some times, for some things, other operating systems are BETTER (YES! BETTER!) than Linux at certain tasks. BeOS is better than Linux for graphic design and sound, because that is what it was built for. Windows is INFINITELY easier for an end user (read, non-geek) to use than Linux.
Try to see the strengths and weaknesses, and even if you don't use a particular operating system, acknowledge that someone MIGHT actually LIKE using it.
As for the M$ case, my opinion is that M$ just made it EASY and CONVENIENT to use their internet browser. They did not preclude the use of other browsers. The idea that M$ might have to include a copy of Netscape with Windows is ridiculous - think of it, does AOL have to provide its users with a copy of Earthlink, or Mindspring, or some other internet access client? NO! In fact, I'll bet you can name FEW companies REQUIRED to include competitor's products with theirs.. because it's simply ridiculous.
Now, TRUE! M$ does make a lot of money. And they do make a broad spectrum of software.. but think about it.. I know several Linux developers who will ADMIT that M$'s visual debugger (as found in VC++, etc) is the "best" direct quote, around.
But anyhow. I'm done ranting. You can go about your business.
(and in case you're thinking about writing me off as a Windows User.. well, I do use Windows. But I have a Linux box too.. so that makes it ok. Heh.)
I am a CS Student at WPI and as a requirement for EVERY CS class I've taken but one, the program's are all targeted for Unix / Linux. My Operating Systems professor spent a long time talking about linux in the course, which I found fascinating!
So Sony has it's own league just for it's robo-pups.. I find it curious that they would use it as pr that their dogs can play soccer on a team against other dogs. I mean.. do they want people to buy these so that they can train them to play soccer against the neighbor's real dog?
Chances are, the real dog would just bite off the AIBO's tail or something like that.
I know, I know.. it's off topic. But it's not WAYY off topic. =c)
- "Hey, aren't you due back at the laboratory to get your BOLTS TIGHTENED??"
A new kind of cat burglary
on
Beaming Money
·
· Score: 2
So we could have petty thieves who, instead of cutting purse straps, simply intercept a wide angle IR beam with their own device.. or even MORE simply, stickyfinger the device.. *be it palm, ce, whatever* and beam all the cash in the guy's bank account into his own bank account
So let's see... lose the $3 in your wallet and spend a week waiting for all your credit cards to get replaced... or be drained of every penny you have?
I think digital money is a good thing.. but this is a slightly more sketchy idea.
I find it terribly curious that NASA needs that top 10% of its budget to do anything remotely productive with itself.. I mean, what is NASA going to do if it doesn't fly major interplanetary missions? Sit there and develop new rockets that it doesn't have the money to launch?
I've noticed some comments that the government is using the money against the national debt.. let me tell you, that kind of money is going to make no difference in the huge almost bottomless well that is our national debt. Of course, the world owes US so much money that nobody really cares either way..
And of course, what good is a debt-free nation going to do on a burned out used up asteroid that will be Earth if we don't do something about it, or get the hell off it.
I am thoroughly impressed by the government's shortsightedness.. but I suppose I should expect it. Not only was it idiocy to even PROPOSE such a budget cut, it's stark, raving mad to actually approve it.
I hope that this issue creates enough turmoil in the techie pool (because you know that we care and it's hard to say outside of us who doesn't) to get this budget cut reversed. Hell.. I'll pay MORE taxes to get to another planet in my lifetime..
Ok, so say we do have programmable toasters and bread knives and refridgerators and so on and so forth?
How long will it be before we're incapable of doing any simple task on our own? Sure, you can use a bread machine to make bread, but what if for some reason, your bread machine crashes?
On the note of the idea of a programmable toaster.. do you think you could program it to hop into the tub with your spouse if you wanted to bump him/her off??
Slashdot Mirror
You want a device with a higher resolution than 320x480? The Tungsten T3 is the ONLY actual PDA-Sized device with a resolution that high. The sharp Linux "PDA's" have 640x480, but they're almost the size of a paperback.
No, the screen on the Tungsten T3 is SO nice to read text on, the processor (an Intel xScale 400mhz) is plenty fast enough to play back video at full framerate, and believe it or not, it gets about 12-14 hours as an mp3 player with the screen off.
I lubs my T3.
Trillian has posted updates for both it's 0.74 ( free) and PRO clients to fix this problem.
The links for the patches are available here
Nice turnaround time on this.
Mobipocket supports the full hires+ in both landscape and portrait. It also has a free publisher for win32 called.. cleverly... Mobipocket Publisher, which can import .doc, .rtf, .txt, and .html, and export to both Mobipocket's compressed HTML as well as Microsoft's .lit format.
Mobipocket ALSO natively supports both Palm DOC format and their own compressed HTML format.. as well as having pretty damn good anti-aliased fonts.
Comcast allowed me to keep my cable modem at the lower cost because I still had a "bundled" package, and DirecTV with HBO and the TiVo $4.99 monthly fee was cheaper than Comcast Digital Cable (and no premium packages) and my regular TiVo subscription fee. Dual-LNB installation didn't cost me a penny extra, and Best Buy was selling DirecTiVos for $89 with free installation.
(And the fact that DSL is only available in my town through Verizon made me stick with cable modem service anyhow)
It's something new in the world of MMORPGs
It's an ocean archipelago world of pirates, filled with piratey tasks that are all puzzles! There's swordfighting.. but it's a puzzle! There's drinking! But that's a puzzle too! There's bilging and sailing and navigation and gunnery and sea battles galore. Blending elements from classic puzzles like Tetris, Bejeweled, Chu Chu Rocket, Puzzle Fighter, Baku Baku, Dr. Mario, and Alchemy in a whole new way, with the promise of many more puzzles to come, it has endless addictive properties.
It's got a short learning curve.
Because the puzzles are similar, and each one is simple to learn (but difficult to master!), you can be a useful swabbie on a ship in moments. Some of the puzzles never seem to grow old as you practice creating big combos, or as the ship is in dire need of someone to man those sails!
There are no bloody pests.
The only opponents in the game are pirates. Some of them are computer controlled, but there are almost 3000 pirates on every day now, and the game is still in beta with no fatal bugs. Making your opponents skilled humans instead of people who can click really fast makes the game both challenging and rewarding.
It's got broad appeal
Because it's based on puzzles that almost anyone can learn to be decent at, it's got appeal to an enormous age range, not to mention the fact that the gender ratio seems to be almost equitable.
Playing forever won't necessarily make you good
One of the things that always bothered me about MMORPG's was that the 14 year old kid who played 12 hours a day all summer could easily outpace the 20-something year old who was holding down a job, even if the 20-something was a better gamer. In Puzzle Pirates, your pirate doesn't get "better" at the game unless you yourself improve in your puzzling abilities. The puzzles are ranked in two manners - experience and prestige. Experience DOES only go up as you puzzle multiple times over a long period of time, but on the other hand, having a large amount of experience does NOT mean that you can beat an excellent swashbuckler automatically. Prestige, on the other hand, is entirely based on your skill. You don't need to win very many times before you slide up the ranks, and if you're beating people many ranks higher than you, you leapfrog up the ranks. But the game isn't ABOUT numbers. Another note is that all the money you earn in the game, or Pieces of Eight (POE), can't buy you victory. It can buy you a new sword, but if you can't swordfight, that isn't worth a damn. It can buy you a new ship, but if you don't have a good crew to man it with you, that's not worth a damn either.
It's about teamwork
Everyone knows that the most interesting characters in an MMORPG are always other people. Y!PP forces you to be social. You cannot effectively sail a ship into combat by yourself, you need a crew to man the sails, the guns, and the bilge with you. Fortunately, most of the crews are friendly, and you can quickly learn the ship job puzzles with your new mates as you help THEM sail against vile foes! And of course, for helping them sail, you get rewarded with a cut of the booty!
There is no thin veil of a story.
The story is your story. The story is the life of your pirate on the high seas, and you write it as you go. Whether you buy your loyalty with POE, or with kindness, or inspire awe with your swordfighting skills, the story is in the friends you make, and the deeds you do. The story can be the time you beat Pennsuedo (one of the Flag Kings) in a swordfighting tournament, or how you yourself became king of a flag. The story can be how you recruited the best crew in the seas for battling the dreaded Black Ship, or how you trained the best drinking team around.
The possiblities are endless already, and the game hasn't even started yet.
If there were more MMORPG's like this, there would be no shortage of addicts, or part time players, people who play with their families, spouses, sisters, brothers, best friends from college, or new friends forged in sea battle. It's a piratey life for me, certainly.
Anyways, I would go help out now and again.. and one time I was setting up a STATE of the ART 386. I had hooked everything up, and turned it on.. to the sound of an enormous *CRACK!*. You see, I had placed the hard drive on top of the power supply, as the desktop-style case had nowhere to conveniently lay the hard drive.
It was toast. Totally toast. Completely and horrifically dead. RIP, little hard drive. There was a lesson in there that won't be forgotten though..
Properly mount devices!
err, or at least, place them on an anti-static bag. Or not on top of a static generator like the power supply.
Someone should write an option into Mozilla or it's ilk to NOT LOAD any image with a height and width of 1. That would stop the web bugging industry at least for a little while, don't you think?
(web bugs are EVIL)
Evil never dies -- It just comes back in reruns
And if you're going to argue that the quality won't be the same, for those of us who have good speakers / headphones, 128kbit encoded mp3 sounds pretty crappy.. you'd probably get about the same quality if you recorded it off a radio with a powered antenna and so on.
Obviously you missed the sarcasm, which, I felt was so important to the comment that I blatently STATED that it was sarcasm. *bap*
Unless the Feds do something egregiously clever, there's no way they could just flip a switch and turn off an ISP. Oh, sure, they could take down its uplink... but unless someone was sleeping on the job, I'm sure the ISP could just wire around the dumb black box. Think about it.. one wire splice around the thing, and it can't shut off your internet anymore, now can it?
Of course the whole snooping thing is a different bag of worms altogether...
Actually, gas prices in BOTH the US and Europe are artifically high. The only reason that gas prices aren't 95 cents a gallon like last summer in the US is because OPEC is purposefully withholding oil production to keep prices high.
I agree that we should find other sources of propulsion, and I am a huge fan of public transportation, but there are just some places you really can't get to on public transportation even out here in the metrowest boston area... (massport sucks.)
Right, because obviously, with all its financial clout, M$ in its wettest dreams could EVER buy out Sony, one of the longest lived and most profitable consumer electronics corporations in the history of man.
WWAaargh..!
Because, nobody ever expects the ...
If you liked Ghost in the Shell, try Armitage III.. another cool cyber-girl anime available on DVD
I know it's been mentioned before, but the Macross Plus 4-part series (on 2 DVD's) is awesome.. the animation is great, the music is great, the acting isn't half bad either. Do NOT mistake the miniseries for the movie, they chop out 2 and a half hours and the whole thing doesn't make sense anymore.
the Record of the Lodoss War is the definitive fantasy Anime.. I can't remember how many DVD's this one is, it's at least 2, maybe as many as 4. It was an 8 tape series.
For an amusing fantasy romp, any of the Slayers series' are great, and the movie is funny as well. Think of it more like what a good RPG run ends up like, rather than what a good RPG should be and you have the Slayers.
Tenchi Muyo is a LONG series, but it seems to be a favorite. I wouldn't bother buying them if you can find some place to rent them, they're really amusing but I can't see them having much replay value.
Ranma 1/2 is another LONG, but amusing series with a warped sense of reality..
The Rurouni Kenshin series (also known in the US as Samurai X) is 96 episodes long (I think) in its full, complete glory. The first 30-40 episodes are really great plot-wise.. good somewhat realistic swordfighting, great animation and plot if sometimes the voice acting fails a bit. The OAV's are really amazing, they tell the story of what happens before the series, and how Kenshin gets his scars.
I think you have most of the rest of the excellent ones already in the summary at the top. Happy viewing...!
Sounds like just the thing for mp3 players.. hoohah!
How can Internet Explorer function as a thoroughly autonomous company if they want to keep their browser free? I mean, I'm all for competition, but that would put IE under the water and Netscape would once again rule the browser world. It's almost unanimous that IE5 for the Mac is the best browser out there for proper rendering of pages and full support for HTML 4.0 and CSS. Sure, sure, Mozilla is "coming" but considering how late it is already, who knows when they'll finish it.. And Netscape 6.0.. was either interminably slow or it crashed... (not to mention the lack of a way to UNINSTALL the beast from Win9x)
How about instead of splitting M$ into IE, Applications, and Operating Systems, we split it into Applications, Win9x, and WinNT. By splitting the server and desktop operating systems into separate companies, I think this would best break up the M$ Monopoly..
Let me know what you think.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Alexander Reid zander@wpi.edu
WPI ACM Sin Lab Facilities Chair
"Working hard to drag you down with us"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As you can see, the previous poster is a close-minded idiot. Just because Jay works for M$, doesn't mean that he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
Not EVERY employee is a brainwashed goon of any company.
You shouldn't write him off.. he might have something valuable to say!
I am not surprised by this, however, as the Linux community fails to acknowledge that some times, for some things, other operating systems are BETTER (YES! BETTER!) than Linux at certain tasks. BeOS is better than Linux for graphic design and sound, because that is what it was built for. Windows is INFINITELY easier for an end user (read, non-geek) to use than Linux.
Try to see the strengths and weaknesses, and even if you don't use a particular operating system, acknowledge that someone MIGHT actually LIKE using it.
As for the M$ case, my opinion is that M$ just made it EASY and CONVENIENT to use their internet browser. They did not preclude the use of other browsers. The idea that M$ might have to include a copy of Netscape with Windows is ridiculous - think of it, does AOL have to provide its users with a copy of Earthlink, or Mindspring, or some other internet access client? NO! In fact, I'll bet you can name FEW companies REQUIRED to include competitor's products with theirs.. because it's simply ridiculous.
Now, TRUE! M$ does make a lot of money. And they do make a broad spectrum of software.. but think about it.. I know several Linux developers who will ADMIT that M$'s visual debugger (as found in VC++, etc) is the "best" direct quote, around.
But anyhow. I'm done ranting. You can go about your business.
(and in case you're thinking about writing me off as a Windows User.. well, I do use Windows. But I have a Linux box too.. so that makes it ok. Heh.)
I am a CS Student at WPI and as a requirement for EVERY CS class I've taken but one, the program's are all targeted for Unix / Linux. My Operating Systems professor spent a long time talking about linux in the course, which I found fascinating!
Chances are, the real dog would just bite off the AIBO's tail or something like that.
I know, I know.. it's off topic. But it's not WAYY off topic. =c)
- "Hey, aren't you due back at the laboratory to get your BOLTS TIGHTENED??"
So let's see... lose the $3 in your wallet and spend a week waiting for all your credit cards to get replaced... or be drained of every penny you have?
I think digital money is a good thing.. but this is a slightly more sketchy idea.
I've noticed some comments that the government is using the money against the national debt.. let me tell you, that kind of money is going to make no difference in the huge almost bottomless well that is our national debt. Of course, the world owes US so much money that nobody really cares either way..
And of course, what good is a debt-free nation going to do on a burned out used up asteroid that will be Earth if we don't do something about it, or get the hell off it.
I am thoroughly impressed by the government's shortsightedness.. but I suppose I should expect it. Not only was it idiocy to even PROPOSE such a budget cut, it's stark, raving mad to actually approve it.
I hope that this issue creates enough turmoil in the techie pool (because you know that we care and it's hard to say outside of us who doesn't) to get this budget cut reversed. Hell.. I'll pay MORE taxes to get to another planet in my lifetime..
Ok, so say we do have programmable toasters and bread knives and refridgerators and so on and so forth?
How long will it be before we're incapable of doing any simple task on our own? Sure, you can use a bread machine to make bread, but what if for some reason, your bread machine crashes?
On the note of the idea of a programmable toaster.. do you think you could program it to hop into the tub with your spouse if you wanted to bump him/her off??