The downside of course is that regular cards designed like that would leave a gigantic mess at every accident, and would almost always be totaled. Regular passenger cars need to be repairable because people can't afford to buy a new one every time they get into a fender bender.
On the other hand, few passenger cars have accidents at 200mph, so that's a big factor in their favor. Of course F1 cars are almost never hit by out of control semi trucks either...
Uh, there's a reason those old Camrys from the 80s were called "tin cans". When they were in an accident they tended to crumple up and kill everybody inside. The new ones are a lot heavier, but as a tradeoff you're far less likely to die in an accident, especially when you're hit by something else.
There will always be people who fly, it might just turn back into the 40s where only the wealthy could afford to fly. Good thing we've kept Amtrack healty, right? Right?:(
The thing about free goodies is that they're often pretty danged easy to copy these days. Maps can be scanned in and posted as a highish rez JPEG file. Manuals can be OCRed, although nobody bothers anymore since you can get all of that information (and more) off of GameFAQs. Most printed manuals are really halfassed anyway, and it's not unusual for the manual to just be a PDF on the disc anymore.
Oh man, I remember moving up from the Commodore 64 to the Mac LC. Because 90% of the C64 software we had was "Load 'n Go" stuff for $1 (literally!) there wasn't much worry about copy protection. I can't remember a single thing we had on that system that had copy protection. The Mac however did have some surprises. We actually sent our first copy of SimCity back to Maxis because we didn't realize that the Red Card with the weird symbols was important and that strange dialog box (I was like 10 at the time, gimme a break) at the start was also important. I thought it was broken because every time you started the game it would throw disasters at your city constantly. The tech support guys were apparently trained to treat anybody asking about the copy protection like a theif, and never bothered to tell us what we had to do either (hence the useless return). Luckily, I figured it out with the second copy (unpacking the box myself instead of letting my brother do it and finding the red card made a big difference).
Later on I played Chris Crawford's (I think that was his name) Patton Strikes Back. This one was interesting it that it let you run about halfway through the game, and then stopped and asked "are your papers in order"? It then directed you to a specific page in the manual and had you type in a specific word (third word on the second paragraph for instance). There was a slight problem though, the manual had apparently been revised a bit after the copy protection was put in place, so about 5-10% of the time, your game would be destroyed halfway through because it failed the copy check. That was after we got AOL and it was my first foray into piracy, as getting halfway through a tough game and then losing because the copy protection was buggy was a real outrage. This was the days before games released patches, so as far as I know unless you crack the thing there's always a chance of losing the war because of the copy protection.
Even when it's not explicitly denied by the contract (I don't remember seeing it in there, but that was almost 2 years ago now and that contract was huge and in tiny print) they don't tell you how to do it. Luckily google is your friend and I've been able to use my Blackberry pearl as both a teathered (USB) and bluetooth modem for my laptop. It's pretty handy on the road, although I am required by law to point out that EDGE is slow (120kbps typically, with moderately high latency).
Still, it's plenty usable. My Wife's iPhone on the other hand has absolutely no tethered modem support unless you jailbreak the thing and do some hacking.
It currently uses Google Maps, but it doesn't offer live routing because the accuracy of the "guess where you are based on your signal strength to the towers) system is nowhere near what you'd need to actually navigate. I'm not sure if the GPS enabled version will have turn by turn directions or not, but there is no technical reason they couldn't.
Video teleconferencing is your stumbling block? I can agree with not being able to swap SIM cards, but Video Teleconferencing is one of those features that people talk about a lot but almost never use in my experience.
The reason I got T-Mobile on my phone is because of their data plans. The reason I'm switching when my contract is up is the coverage. Supposedly they can roam through AT&T/Cingular towers, but in practice it doesn't work 90% of the time.
No, but the fact that he cleaned and hosed out the inside of his car and lost the front passenger seat right before the cops showed up was very very odd. His explanation that he was going to turn his tiny car into the worlds least comfortable one person camper didn't exactly help his case either.
The evidence was circumstantial, but it was pretty damming. If you could never convict someone for murder if you never found the body, then murder becomes a game of hide the body (which it already is to a degree). At some point you have to just weigh the other evidence (nobody has heard from her (not even the family), she hasn't touched any of her bank accounts, she made no preparations for travel, etc..., Hans highly suspicious behavior w.r.t. his car and activites) and use your best judgment. Justice is not perfect, and there is a chance (slim though it may be at this point), that Hans is innocent, but the odds are slim enough that the jury is willing to bet it is not locking up an innocent man.
I'm not saying such websites don't exist, but I suspect McAffee is flagging stuff like cross-domain cookies (frequently used in trackers) and other such stuff that's not going to take over your browser/rape your mother.
I suspect they flag a lot of questionable stuff as "dangerous" when it really isn't all that bad. This is McAffee after all. They're going to use these statistics to try to sell people on their internet shield or whatever they call it. Plus, a random sampling of.com sites would hit a whole lot of domain squatters, who's pages are almost always questionable.
I think you're thinking of Captain Power, which would be almost nothing at all like the concept in the TFA.
Frankly, the whole idea is dumb and will never work for several reasons
The game is going to suck. MMOs are hard to make, and tie-in games almost always suck. Trying to do both is a recipe for failure
Even a game with a small playerbase is going to swamp an
"alien invasion" site and bring the game to its knees. This happens in all MMOs when the developers decide to make some special event that only happens in one place. That event crushes the servers that were designed for maybe 50% over regular play levels.
Given TV production lead times, unless the events are as
lame as "a character mentions it in passing" then the TV show will always be a
month or so behind the game events, an eternity in the gaming world.
The script will be spastic if you're constantly asking
the writers to redo stuff based on the outcome of a game. Plans they had for
the event can't be made until after it happens, since they don't know which way
it will go
At best, I see this feature being scaled back such that it doesn't affect the storyline of the show, but does get mentioned every now and again. "Whew, good thing we were able to secure sector 6, now back to our story". Or "Oh, no, sector 6 has fallen, truly a bad day for humanity. Well, we need to forge on with our plans..."
According to TFA, an install of this fixture capable of lighting a 10x10 room (on a bright day) costs on the order of $5,000. I know the plan is to make the money back in energy savings over the long run, but compared to the relatively small and cheap Fluorescent light you need to light a 10x10 room, it's going to take a very long time to make your money back, even if the cost of energy goes up by a factor of 10 tomorrow, especially if you only turn the light on when you are actually in the room.
America already has a case study where handing thug types (gangs) a reliable revenue stream increases violence considerably. It was called prohibition, and obviously politicians have not learned from the past because they're making the same mistakes all over again with the so called War on Drugs.
I've not seen a car where the Manual has a price premium over the Auto, but the difference is usually on the order of $650 or so, not exactly a bank breaker. The caveat is that is the sticker price, since the dealer (at least in the states) tends to only have a handful of manuals (if any) on the lot, there is a much greater chance he'll have to order the car. If he does that it's a lot harder to get a good deal on it at the bargaining table. Also, it can be very difficult to find a used manual for some cars, especially if you want to avoid one that's been "riced". If you are looking for a truck or a sports car you can generally find a manual, but for a boring old 4 door sedan your odds diminish quickly.
Maya's interface has never been heralded as intuitive though. It's very powerful but it's probably not the best showcase for how pie menus can improve a UI.
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The downside of course is that regular cards designed like that would leave a gigantic mess at every accident, and would almost always be totaled. Regular passenger cars need to be repairable because people can't afford to buy a new one every time they get into a fender bender.
On the other hand, few passenger cars have accidents at 200mph, so that's a big factor in their favor. Of course F1 cars are almost never hit by out of control semi trucks either...
Uh, there's a reason those old Camrys from the 80s were called "tin cans". When they were in an accident they tended to crumple up and kill everybody inside. The new ones are a lot heavier, but as a tradeoff you're far less likely to die in an accident, especially when you're hit by something else.
There will always be people who fly, it might just turn back into the 40s where only the wealthy could afford to fly. Good thing we've kept Amtrack healty, right? Right? :(
The thing about free goodies is that they're often pretty danged easy to copy these days. Maps can be scanned in and posted as a highish rez JPEG file. Manuals can be OCRed, although nobody bothers anymore since you can get all of that information (and more) off of GameFAQs. Most printed manuals are really halfassed anyway, and it's not unusual for the manual to just be a PDF on the disc anymore.
Oh man, I remember moving up from the Commodore 64 to the Mac LC. Because 90% of the C64 software we had was "Load 'n Go" stuff for $1 (literally!) there wasn't much worry about copy protection. I can't remember a single thing we had on that system that had copy protection. The Mac however did have some surprises. We actually sent our first copy of SimCity back to Maxis because we didn't realize that the Red Card with the weird symbols was important and that strange dialog box (I was like 10 at the time, gimme a break) at the start was also important. I thought it was broken because every time you started the game it would throw disasters at your city constantly. The tech support guys were apparently trained to treat anybody asking about the copy protection like a theif, and never bothered to tell us what we had to do either (hence the useless return). Luckily, I figured it out with the second copy (unpacking the box myself instead of letting my brother do it and finding the red card made a big difference).
Later on I played Chris Crawford's (I think that was his name) Patton Strikes Back. This one was interesting it that it let you run about halfway through the game, and then stopped and asked "are your papers in order"? It then directed you to a specific page in the manual and had you type in a specific word (third word on the second paragraph for instance). There was a slight problem though, the manual had apparently been revised a bit after the copy protection was put in place, so about 5-10% of the time, your game would be destroyed halfway through because it failed the copy check. That was after we got AOL and it was my first foray into piracy, as getting halfway through a tough game and then losing because the copy protection was buggy was a real outrage. This was the days before games released patches, so as far as I know unless you crack the thing there's always a chance of losing the war because of the copy protection.
Even when it's not explicitly denied by the contract (I don't remember seeing it in there, but that was almost 2 years ago now and that contract was huge and in tiny print) they don't tell you how to do it. Luckily google is your friend and I've been able to use my Blackberry pearl as both a teathered (USB) and bluetooth modem for my laptop. It's pretty handy on the road, although I am required by law to point out that EDGE is slow (120kbps typically, with moderately high latency).
Still, it's plenty usable. My Wife's iPhone on the other hand has absolutely no tethered modem support unless you jailbreak the thing and do some hacking.
Well, they are supporting third party apps, so geotagging might not be impossible, but I doubt it'll be in the built-in software.
It currently uses Google Maps, but it doesn't offer live routing because the accuracy of the "guess where you are based on your signal strength to the towers) system is nowhere near what you'd need to actually navigate. I'm not sure if the GPS enabled version will have turn by turn directions or not, but there is no technical reason they couldn't.
Video teleconferencing is your stumbling block? I can agree with not being able to swap SIM cards, but Video Teleconferencing is one of those features that people talk about a lot but almost never use in my experience.
Most likely torpedo: AT&T 3G data plan price point rape. Or ridiculous download limits (how long does it take you to download 500mB at 3G speeds?)
The reason I got T-Mobile on my phone is because of their data plans. The reason I'm switching when my contract is up is the coverage. Supposedly they can roam through AT&T/Cingular towers, but in practice it doesn't work 90% of the time.
No, but the fact that he cleaned and hosed out the inside of his car and lost the front passenger seat right before the cops showed up was very very odd. His explanation that he was going to turn his tiny car into the worlds least comfortable one person camper didn't exactly help his case either.
Nobody deserves to be murdered, but the motive was there.
From what I understand of the case, Hans's ex-wife just have had a thing for nutcases.
The evidence was circumstantial, but it was pretty damming. If you could never convict someone for murder if you never found the body, then murder becomes a game of hide the body (which it already is to a degree). At some point you have to just weigh the other evidence (nobody has heard from her (not even the family), she hasn't touched any of her bank accounts, she made no preparations for travel, etc..., Hans highly suspicious behavior w.r.t. his car and activites) and use your best judgment. Justice is not perfect, and there is a chance (slim though it may be at this point), that Hans is innocent, but the odds are slim enough that the jury is willing to bet it is not locking up an innocent man.
It's even easier than that, just do a complete wipe of your windows partition. That will clear out all of the lurking DRM for good.
This argument would be better if it wasn't one of the major arguments I heard repeatedly back in 2000 for George W. Bush.
I'm not saying such websites don't exist, but I suspect McAffee is flagging stuff like cross-domain cookies (frequently used in trackers) and other such stuff that's not going to take over your browser/rape your mother.
I suspect they flag a lot of questionable stuff as "dangerous" when it really isn't all that bad. This is McAffee after all. They're going to use these statistics to try to sell people on their internet shield or whatever they call it. Plus, a random sampling of .com sites would hit a whole lot of domain squatters, who's pages are almost always questionable.
Frankly, the whole idea is dumb and will never work for several reasons
- The game is going to suck. MMOs are hard to make, and tie-in games almost always suck. Trying to do both is a recipe for failure
- Even a game with a small playerbase is going to swamp an
"alien invasion" site and bring the game to its knees. This happens in all MMOs when the developers decide to make some special event that only happens in one place. That event crushes the servers that were designed for maybe 50% over regular play levels.
- Given TV production lead times, unless the events are as
lame as "a character mentions it in passing" then the TV show will always be a
month or so behind the game events, an eternity in the gaming world.
- The script will be spastic if you're constantly asking
the writers to redo stuff based on the outcome of a game. Plans they had for
the event can't be made until after it happens, since they don't know which way
it will go
At best, I see this feature being scaled back such that it doesn't affect the storyline of the show, but does get mentioned every now and again. "Whew, good thing we were able to secure sector 6, now back to our story". Or "Oh, no, sector 6 has fallen, truly a bad day for humanity. Well, we need to forge on with our plans..."According to TFA, an install of this fixture capable of lighting a 10x10 room (on a bright day) costs on the order of $5,000. I know the plan is to make the money back in energy savings over the long run, but compared to the relatively small and cheap Fluorescent light you need to light a 10x10 room, it's going to take a very long time to make your money back, even if the cost of energy goes up by a factor of 10 tomorrow, especially if you only turn the light on when you are actually in the room.
America already has a case study where handing thug types (gangs) a reliable revenue stream increases violence considerably. It was called prohibition, and obviously politicians have not learned from the past because they're making the same mistakes all over again with the so called War on Drugs.
I've not seen a car where the Manual has a price premium over the Auto, but the difference is usually on the order of $650 or so, not exactly a bank breaker. The caveat is that is the sticker price, since the dealer (at least in the states) tends to only have a handful of manuals (if any) on the lot, there is a much greater chance he'll have to order the car. If he does that it's a lot harder to get a good deal on it at the bargaining table. Also, it can be very difficult to find a used manual for some cars, especially if you want to avoid one that's been "riced". If you are looking for a truck or a sports car you can generally find a manual, but for a boring old 4 door sedan your odds diminish quickly.
Yes, because clearly a $700 ultraportable is clearly a direct competitor for a $100 laptop aimed at children in developing nations.
Maya's interface has never been heralded as intuitive though. It's very powerful but it's probably not the best showcase for how pie menus can improve a UI.