Realistically, how many people play games without having an internet connection? I usually play games on my desktop, which is physically plugged into my router all the time. Even when I'm using my notebook I am almost always within reach of wi-fi, because I need email and web access. The game needs to phone home three times a month, so there's an extremely good chance that it won't need to check while I'm gaming in the middle of a field or on a bus.
Of course, I don't understand why the software needs to phone home after the installation has been verified. I suppose they're worried about people porting an image of an authorized copy, but that could be handled by checking for significant hardware changes on startup before phoning home. The only thing I can see their DRM system preventing is widespread piracy of copies with identical authorization keys, and even that is dubious. If I have a legitimate copy that has been pirated by my roommate, I still possess a legitimate license.
It's possible to build a hobby solar electric system for well under $1000 including batteries, charge controller and inverter that can provide a reasonable amount of AC power for limited equipment. I have a small single panel system that produces about 15 kWh a month. There are never times when I would generate enough electricity to sell back to the power company (unless I unplugged the fridge and every device on standby throughout the house in the middle of summer), but I do have a couple of "special" AC receptacles in my office that run my laptop and other small devices. The limiting factor for me is the power inverter - I have to be careful not to get too greedy.
I always have the option to use grid power, but I rarely need it in my office environment for anything but the overhead lights and "always on" devices like my wireless router and DSL modem. It was a fun way to get my feet wet with solar, but I wouldn't consider a larger installation with current technology (I'm too far north and there are no exorbitant gov't grants available to me in this area to offset the installation expense).
For the last hundred years, getting fuel for internal combustion engines has basically been a matter of sticking a giant slurpee straw into the ground and pumping it out. We're having a hard time grasping that the Slurpee cup is running dry, and our first instinct is to go to desperate measures to maintain the status quo. The first - and most obvious - source of replacement fuel is biomass, so we're go crazy about corn, sugar and cellulose ethanol extraction. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as cheap or easy to refine as the old "suck the hydrocarbon soup outta the ground" technique. In fact, it's just not practical on a large scale. We need trees and corn for other stuff, and inedible sugar just isn't available in quantities sufficient to replace millions of barrels of oil.
Once governments have finished their attempts at alchemy, they'll increase funding for alternative powerplants for traditional vehicles. That'll prove to be too expensive or infeasible on a large scale. The next step will be to replace traditional automobiles with microvehicles like the Twike and ultra-compact cars. At the same time, people will finally start turning their attention to mass transit. Unfortunately, the cost of building effective large scale transit systems in North America will be stratospheric if the cost of diesel fuel to run construction equipment skyrockets (with an accompanying rise in the cost of materials). It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. One thing's for sure - expect a lot of enormous missteps by government and business, along with some irrational panic from the public before some smart people manage to figure out ways of evolving our society into something less energy dependent and consumer-oriented.
*does anyone know the best way to get ahold of episodes of new Dr. Who, The Mighty Boosh & (soon) Blake's 7*
I'm guessing you're American, so tune in the the SciFi channel for the new Doctor Who. Grumble and whine at them if they're not offering streaming within the USA (after all, the reason that the BBC doesn't allow international streaming is to protect its international partners, who pay the Beeb for broadcast rights in their region). It's available on DVD as well. As far as the new Blake's 7 goes, it's being produced by Sky - the UK's largest satellite broadcaster - not the BBC. I suspect Sky will partner with the SciFi channel as they have in the past. There. You have lots of legal options.
You don't seem to be aware that Stern Electronics - the company that produced the machines you're referring to as unreliable - went out of business in 1985. The modern company, Stern Pinball, was founded by Sam Stern's son Gary in 1999. That was the year that Williams folded their pinball division to concentrate on slot machines. It was also the year that Sega (Data East) decided to get out of the market and sold their Pinball division to Gary Stern. Stern hired several brilliant Williams designers including Pat Lawlor, George Gomez and Steve Richie to design games for "Stern 2.0."
Most of the people I know in Calgary are well educated university graduates who moved from other parts of Canada for work and to be close to the mountains for recreation.
I suspect there's a clause in their Movielink licensing that specifically ties rentals and purchases through the system to a personal computer. Media companies tend to get especially jumpy when someone trots out a new media box for the living room, especially if it offers analog outputs... and I can't see Blockbuster wanting to restrict their set top box to HDMI equipped TVs at this point in the game.
The big advantage Blockbuster would enjoy over Apple TV, Vudu, and TiVo, it seems, would be selection.
Bzzt, wrong. Blockbuster will still have to negotiate licensing agreements with the major distribution companies, just like everyone else in the game. They can't simply rip their existing DVD offerings and stream them to customers. Blockbuster's in a tough spot here; if they remain a dealer of physical media, they'll get pummeled by streaming content. Their only hope for survival is to leverage their brand and physical locations to introduce a set-top box that grabs sizable market share. The trouble is that a video rental chain is going to have an extremely difficult time going head to head with the likes of Apple. It'd be like a record chain introducing an mp3 player in the hope that they can prevent iTunes and Amazon from decimating them.
One reason that Sony is so optimistic is that the cutoff for analog TV in the United States is scheduled for February 2009. They anticipate (perhaps correctly) that an enormous number of people will opt to purchase a new high def TV set in advance of the changeover to digital. They'd make ideal Christmas presents. And once a customer has laid out $700 for the TV, it doesn't seem that much of a stretch to add another $400 for a Boo-ray player to show off to their friends. In other words, Sony's statement about "increasing market share" is really a prediction of how fast the technology will be adopted, ann Sony has limited influence on adoption rate - they certainly can manufacture players and media (as well as advertise them), but ultimately it's up to the consumer to make the shift.
In this case, I think Sony's being overoptimistic. Millions of Americans will opt for a DTV converter box (or continue to subscribe to cable or satellite services that will work just fine with analog sets for the foreseeable future). The economy's going to hell in a handbasket, and that will impact the number of souls willing and able to fork out $1000+ for a shiny new boob tube as well. I suspect the HD revolution will take longer than the marketers hope.
My experience is that customizing a Dell always costs an arm and three legs. Upgrading RAM costs twice what it would to buy retail, and please don't tell me that a 320 GB hard drive costs $100 more than a lowly $160 GB model. They make money hand over fist when small/medium business purchase customized machines (I've seen co-workers add on $1000 in not-so-necessary option), but the company has a much harder time with price-sensitive customers. I've purchased three Dells for home use over the past six years, and in each case I waited until they offered an extremely good deal and bought a minimally configured system and added my own memory, second hard drive and video card.
Dell has been losing ground against other manufacturers, and one often sees off-the-shelf machines at Best Buy that offer better value and immediate availability. Part of the reason is that more and more buyers are opting for notebook PCs that are made in China alongside machines from HP, Acer and countless other competitors. In essence, Dell adds an extra layer of complexity to their manufacturing process by allowing customization of these laptops to occur once they arrive in North America. In the meantime, Acer is able to ship preconfigured systems directly to retail outlets without additional expense. The days of the big beige box are coming to an end, and much of Dell's business advantage centered on getting people to buy overpriced (and often unnecessary) upgrades that simply aren't feasible in a notebook form factor.
One last thought... It was sometimes a challenge to ensure that we had sufficient license for some of our utilities. Typically, someone would introduce a good tool into the team and everyone would want a copy. That could cause headaches, especially as team sizes fluctuated throughout a project.
It depends on the organization. I used to work in a 20 or so person division of a software company in which the technical staff were allowed to configure and maintain their machines, within certain constraints. The funny thing is that the primary development team ended up with the same software on their machines, the consulting engineers ended up with their own tool suite, and the marketing guys just relied on the support staff to keep them running. There were a few differences as far as text editor and debugging tool preferences, but generally you could sit down at any machine and expect it to have everything you needed - a virgin install contained our core tools and network stuff anyway. That said, it was *really* nice to be able to install a necessary program or utility without having to go through layers of bureaucracy.
However, I've also done stints at telcos and other massive organizations where things were incredibly locked down out of necessity/paranoia. I never had too much difficulty getting tools/permissions that I needed, but that was probably because of my role within the IT group. Had I been a marketing guy trying to install some sort of whacky video software, things might not have gone so smoothly.
It doesn't matter how small a PC is if it doesn't fit the needs of the users. It does indeed look like they were targeting this machine at kids, but that doesn't avoid the fact that this thing would be hard to use for them, too. Crank your monitor resolution down to 800x480 and try working for an hour and you'll get the idea. The general thinking about this machine seems to have been "OMG, it runs Linux and only costs $300 and its small and cute." But I would argue that 90% of the people who bought this machine would have been better served by buying a $399 Acer 14" notebook during a sale at Best Buy.
The price has crept up to within $100 of a "standard" basic notebook. The only thing this little machine has going for it is size - 800 x 480 is utterly useless because you spend too much time dealing with cartoonishly huge windows. I run into this kind of trouble every time I visit my parent's house and attempt to use their machine set to 800 x 600 - it's bloody unproductive. I'd gladly reconsider the eee when they release the upcoming version with a 1024 x not-quite-enough screen, but I fear the price will be at least $399 for a semi-usable configuration.
The book was published just over two years ago, and it now sells a few hundred copies a year. In all, I sold less than I would have through a publisher, but the difference is that I earn significantly more for each copy sold, especially if they're purchased directly from essentialretro.com. It's a decision I'd make again, unless I stumble across a book idea that is so good that it would sell a million copies.:)
Thanks for the suggestion. It looks like AbeBooks carries my book, although they charge more than cover price for some reason. I'll investigate and see what has to be done to get my book listed at a discount.
Wrong. Don't confuse POD with vanity publishing. It is possible to directly self-publish a book through a major distributor without a fluffy middleman, My book www.essentialretro.com and hundreds of thousands of others are published on demand through Lightning Source, a division of Ingram (one of the largest book distributors). It costs a mere $12 a year to list in the Ingram catalog (which gets my book onto Amazon) and I earn around 35% of each book sold, with the rest going to pay LSI for printing and fulfilling the book and Amazon for selling it. Amazon maintains a small inventory of my book to ensure that it's available to ship "within 24 hours" and they automatically order more from LSI when they run low. The system works very well and I don't have to do anything to keep my book in print.
Amazon's standard percentage for each sale is a whopping 45% (I've specified a "short discount" of only 35%, which they somewhat grudgingly accept). I investigated Booksurge in the past, and it has several significant shortcomings. First, it would result in me earning about 10% less per book sold, they offer a smaller number of trim sizes and distribution through normal channels is nowhere near as comprehensive as Ingram/LSI (who allow my book to be special ordered at nearly all bookshops). Personally, I'll start directing traffic to an Amazon competitor instead - Barnes & Noble offer me the same terms. Amazon can go take their proprietary system and get stuffed.
It's interesting to note how this piece reflects the then-prevalent belief that technology would bring a Utopian age. No one stopped to think about the consequences of using thousands of ICBMs as transportation devices, or the industrial waste generated by wall-sized televisions and domed cities. Plastic was magical - we hadn't yet realized how toxic it could be, or how addicted we would become to it. Domed cities and millions of cars that travel 300 mph are the stuff of science fiction novels, but they'd be awful in practice - Just imagine how unbearably warn and clammy a dome would be under bright summer sun (or how quickly it would be discolored by dust storms and acid rain), or how poorly wildlife would coexist with a stream of automated bullet cars zipping along plastic roads. Somehow, we need to figure out how to do with less - much less - while figuring out how to tread less heavily on the earth. It might be an impossible task.
I suspect that a DNA database of "future possible offenders" would be skewed heavily toward children of lower income families with substandard educational background and a history of breaking the law. No one is going to swab a DNA sample of a member of the royal family or the children of the rich and privileged because they'd scream bloody murder. In other words, the database be a misguided attempt to explain societal ills through physiology. We've been down this road before and the result has often been mass genocide as "superior" individuals deem it time to cleanse the world of "inferior" folk.
Besides, a database of likely offenders will not do anything to prevent a crime. It will simply provide a pool of high-risk individuals that the police will regard with greater suspicion after the event. The legal system has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to wrongfully convict people because of prejudice, sloppy police work and a poor representation. What chance does an innocent kid have if he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and has already been labeled as genetically dangerous in the police database?
The Hobbit is as close as Tolkien got to writing a children's book, replete with witty asides throughout. My father was an English teacher, and he read it to me while we lived not far from the Bird and Baby, where he and the other members of the Inklings gathered for years. I was seven years old at the time, and it enthralled me. I recently read it to my son, and he enjoyed all save the most tedious passages. That said, English is not my wife's first language and she refused to read a word of it.
Just imagine how useful it would be to have the real time location of the city's police force as well.;) The $64,000 dollar question is, of course, whether public funds should be invested in building Google's infrastructure. Yes, cloud computing is more cost effective that rolling your own systems, it's convenient, outsourced, on a common platform, etc. On the other hand, will this result in the city losing control of their data? Will the city share in any revenue that Google earns from their investment in Google Earth(TM)(R)(PDQ)? And, honestly, does knowing where the city's fire trucks are in real time provide any meaningful benefit to the citizens? I suspect there downfall of the system will be that city staff will begin to put more emphasis on demonstrating that a green space was mowed instead of actually picking weeds and focusing on quality of service.
I'm going to call you on this one. "Very firm Christian beliefs" is a meaningless motherhood statement. That little detail aside, haven't you ever found it convenient that the "right" religion is usually the one we're indoctrinated with since childhood, or the church just down the street? I suspect precious few people in somewhere like Omaha Nebraska have ever woken up one morning and realized that the Shinto study of Hatsumiyamairi is the true path to enlightenment. Nope, people get sucked into the tried and true.;)
The problem with eBay is that it has shifted away from being a private auction site used by people trying to sell their own stuff. The modern eBay is home to thousands of somewhat shifty "Power Sellers" who buy stuff at estate sales, thrift stores, and garage sales. They list the stuff with often misleading descriptions and rip people off. Unfortunately, these junk dealers generate huge profit for eBay (I worked out the total fees related to a transaction once, and they came to about 15%, including PayPal, listing and final value costs).
It's time to split eBay into two sites - Pro and Casual Sellers. Let users quickly and easily filter out the "power sellers" and others who sell hundreds of items a year and focus on the amateur sellers offering their well-kept vintage cameras, video game consoles and so on. While they're at it, they also need to fix their feedback approach once and for all. Disabling negative feedback from sellers hamstrings good people and puts them at the mercy of sometimes irrational and mentally unbalanced buyers.
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Realistically, how many people play games without having an internet connection? I usually play games on my desktop, which is physically plugged into my router all the time. Even when I'm using my notebook I am almost always within reach of wi-fi, because I need email and web access. The game needs to phone home three times a month, so there's an extremely good chance that it won't need to check while I'm gaming in the middle of a field or on a bus.
Of course, I don't understand why the software needs to phone home after the installation has been verified. I suppose they're worried about people porting an image of an authorized copy, but that could be handled by checking for significant hardware changes on startup before phoning home. The only thing I can see their DRM system preventing is widespread piracy of copies with identical authorization keys, and even that is dubious. If I have a legitimate copy that has been pirated by my roommate, I still possess a legitimate license.It's possible to build a hobby solar electric system for well under $1000 including batteries, charge controller and inverter that can provide a reasonable amount of AC power for limited equipment. I have a small single panel system that produces about 15 kWh a month. There are never times when I would generate enough electricity to sell back to the power company (unless I unplugged the fridge and every device on standby throughout the house in the middle of summer), but I do have a couple of "special" AC receptacles in my office that run my laptop and other small devices. The limiting factor for me is the power inverter - I have to be careful not to get too greedy. I always have the option to use grid power, but I rarely need it in my office environment for anything but the overhead lights and "always on" devices like my wireless router and DSL modem. It was a fun way to get my feet wet with solar, but I wouldn't consider a larger installation with current technology (I'm too far north and there are no exorbitant gov't grants available to me in this area to offset the installation expense).
For the last hundred years, getting fuel for internal combustion engines has basically been a matter of sticking a giant slurpee straw into the ground and pumping it out. We're having a hard time grasping that the Slurpee cup is running dry, and our first instinct is to go to desperate measures to maintain the status quo. The first - and most obvious - source of replacement fuel is biomass, so we're go crazy about corn, sugar and cellulose ethanol extraction. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as cheap or easy to refine as the old "suck the hydrocarbon soup outta the ground" technique. In fact, it's just not practical on a large scale. We need trees and corn for other stuff, and inedible sugar just isn't available in quantities sufficient to replace millions of barrels of oil.
Once governments have finished their attempts at alchemy, they'll increase funding for alternative powerplants for traditional vehicles. That'll prove to be too expensive or infeasible on a large scale. The next step will be to replace traditional automobiles with microvehicles like the Twike and ultra-compact cars. At the same time, people will finally start turning their attention to mass transit. Unfortunately, the cost of building effective large scale transit systems in North America will be stratospheric if the cost of diesel fuel to run construction equipment skyrockets (with an accompanying rise in the cost of materials). It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. One thing's for sure - expect a lot of enormous missteps by government and business, along with some irrational panic from the public before some smart people manage to figure out ways of evolving our society into something less energy dependent and consumer-oriented.
*does anyone know the best way to get ahold of episodes of new Dr. Who, The Mighty Boosh & (soon) Blake's 7*
I'm guessing you're American, so tune in the the SciFi channel for the new Doctor Who. Grumble and whine at them if they're not offering streaming within the USA (after all, the reason that the BBC doesn't allow international streaming is to protect its international partners, who pay the Beeb for broadcast rights in their region). It's available on DVD as well. As far as the new Blake's 7 goes, it's being produced by Sky - the UK's largest satellite broadcaster - not the BBC. I suspect Sky will partner with the SciFi channel as they have in the past. There. You have lots of legal options.
You don't seem to be aware that Stern Electronics - the company that produced the machines you're referring to as unreliable - went out of business in 1985. The modern company, Stern Pinball, was founded by Sam Stern's son Gary in 1999. That was the year that Williams folded their pinball division to concentrate on slot machines. It was also the year that Sega (Data East) decided to get out of the market and sold their Pinball division to Gary Stern. Stern hired several brilliant Williams designers including Pat Lawlor, George Gomez and Steve Richie to design games for "Stern 2.0."
I guess only 2,000 survivors made down to the planet's surface from the Battlestar Galactica. They should have listened to Starbuck earlier.
Most of the people I know in Calgary are well educated university graduates who moved from other parts of Canada for work and to be close to the mountains for recreation.
I suspect there's a clause in their Movielink licensing that specifically ties rentals and purchases through the system to a personal computer. Media companies tend to get especially jumpy when someone trots out a new media box for the living room, especially if it offers analog outputs... and I can't see Blockbuster wanting to restrict their set top box to HDMI equipped TVs at this point in the game.
The big advantage Blockbuster would enjoy over Apple TV, Vudu, and TiVo, it seems, would be selection.
Bzzt, wrong. Blockbuster will still have to negotiate licensing agreements with the major distribution companies, just like everyone else in the game. They can't simply rip their existing DVD offerings and stream them to customers. Blockbuster's in a tough spot here; if they remain a dealer of physical media, they'll get pummeled by streaming content. Their only hope for survival is to leverage their brand and physical locations to introduce a set-top box that grabs sizable market share. The trouble is that a video rental chain is going to have an extremely difficult time going head to head with the likes of Apple. It'd be like a record chain introducing an mp3 player in the hope that they can prevent iTunes and Amazon from decimating them.
One reason that Sony is so optimistic is that the cutoff for analog TV in the United States is scheduled for February 2009. They anticipate (perhaps correctly) that an enormous number of people will opt to purchase a new high def TV set in advance of the changeover to digital. They'd make ideal Christmas presents. And once a customer has laid out $700 for the TV, it doesn't seem that much of a stretch to add another $400 for a Boo-ray player to show off to their friends. In other words, Sony's statement about "increasing market share" is really a prediction of how fast the technology will be adopted, ann Sony has limited influence on adoption rate - they certainly can manufacture players and media (as well as advertise them), but ultimately it's up to the consumer to make the shift.
In this case, I think Sony's being overoptimistic. Millions of Americans will opt for a DTV converter box (or continue to subscribe to cable or satellite services that will work just fine with analog sets for the foreseeable future). The economy's going to hell in a handbasket, and that will impact the number of souls willing and able to fork out $1000+ for a shiny new boob tube as well. I suspect the HD revolution will take longer than the marketers hope.
My experience is that customizing a Dell always costs an arm and three legs. Upgrading RAM costs twice what it would to buy retail, and please don't tell me that a 320 GB hard drive costs $100 more than a lowly $160 GB model. They make money hand over fist when small/medium business purchase customized machines (I've seen co-workers add on $1000 in not-so-necessary option), but the company has a much harder time with price-sensitive customers. I've purchased three Dells for home use over the past six years, and in each case I waited until they offered an extremely good deal and bought a minimally configured system and added my own memory, second hard drive and video card.
Dell has been losing ground against other manufacturers, and one often sees off-the-shelf machines at Best Buy that offer better value and immediate availability. Part of the reason is that more and more buyers are opting for notebook PCs that are made in China alongside machines from HP, Acer and countless other competitors. In essence, Dell adds an extra layer of complexity to their manufacturing process by allowing customization of these laptops to occur once they arrive in North America. In the meantime, Acer is able to ship preconfigured systems directly to retail outlets without additional expense. The days of the big beige box are coming to an end, and much of Dell's business advantage centered on getting people to buy overpriced (and often unnecessary) upgrades that simply aren't feasible in a notebook form factor.
One last thought... It was sometimes a challenge to ensure that we had sufficient license for some of our utilities. Typically, someone would introduce a good tool into the team and everyone would want a copy. That could cause headaches, especially as team sizes fluctuated throughout a project.
It depends on the organization. I used to work in a 20 or so person division of a software company in which the technical staff were allowed to configure and maintain their machines, within certain constraints. The funny thing is that the primary development team ended up with the same software on their machines, the consulting engineers ended up with their own tool suite, and the marketing guys just relied on the support staff to keep them running. There were a few differences as far as text editor and debugging tool preferences, but generally you could sit down at any machine and expect it to have everything you needed - a virgin install contained our core tools and network stuff anyway. That said, it was *really* nice to be able to install a necessary program or utility without having to go through layers of bureaucracy.
However, I've also done stints at telcos and other massive organizations where things were incredibly locked down out of necessity/paranoia. I never had too much difficulty getting tools/permissions that I needed, but that was probably because of my role within the IT group. Had I been a marketing guy trying to install some sort of whacky video software, things might not have gone so smoothly.
It doesn't matter how small a PC is if it doesn't fit the needs of the users. It does indeed look like they were targeting this machine at kids, but that doesn't avoid the fact that this thing would be hard to use for them, too. Crank your monitor resolution down to 800x480 and try working for an hour and you'll get the idea. The general thinking about this machine seems to have been "OMG, it runs Linux and only costs $300 and its small and cute." But I would argue that 90% of the people who bought this machine would have been better served by buying a $399 Acer 14" notebook during a sale at Best Buy.
The price has crept up to within $100 of a "standard" basic notebook. The only thing this little machine has going for it is size - 800 x 480 is utterly useless because you spend too much time dealing with cartoonishly huge windows. I run into this kind of trouble every time I visit my parent's house and attempt to use their machine set to 800 x 600 - it's bloody unproductive. I'd gladly reconsider the eee when they release the upcoming version with a 1024 x not-quite-enough screen, but I fear the price will be at least $399 for a semi-usable configuration.
The book was published just over two years ago, and it now sells a few hundred copies a year. In all, I sold less than I would have through a publisher, but the difference is that I earn significantly more for each copy sold, especially if they're purchased directly from essentialretro.com. It's a decision I'd make again, unless I stumble across a book idea that is so good that it would sell a million copies. :)
Thanks for the suggestion. It looks like AbeBooks carries my book, although they charge more than cover price for some reason. I'll investigate and see what has to be done to get my book listed at a discount.
Wrong. Don't confuse POD with vanity publishing. It is possible to directly self-publish a book through a major distributor without a fluffy middleman, My book www.essentialretro.com and hundreds of thousands of others are published on demand through Lightning Source, a division of Ingram (one of the largest book distributors). It costs a mere $12 a year to list in the Ingram catalog (which gets my book onto Amazon) and I earn around 35% of each book sold, with the rest going to pay LSI for printing and fulfilling the book and Amazon for selling it. Amazon maintains a small inventory of my book to ensure that it's available to ship "within 24 hours" and they automatically order more from LSI when they run low. The system works very well and I don't have to do anything to keep my book in print.
Amazon's standard percentage for each sale is a whopping 45% (I've specified a "short discount" of only 35%, which they somewhat grudgingly accept). I investigated Booksurge in the past, and it has several significant shortcomings. First, it would result in me earning about 10% less per book sold, they offer a smaller number of trim sizes and distribution through normal channels is nowhere near as comprehensive as Ingram/LSI (who allow my book to be special ordered at nearly all bookshops). Personally, I'll start directing traffic to an Amazon competitor instead - Barnes & Noble offer me the same terms. Amazon can go take their proprietary system and get stuffed.
It's interesting to note how this piece reflects the then-prevalent belief that technology would bring a Utopian age. No one stopped to think about the consequences of using thousands of ICBMs as transportation devices, or the industrial waste generated by wall-sized televisions and domed cities. Plastic was magical - we hadn't yet realized how toxic it could be, or how addicted we would become to it. Domed cities and millions of cars that travel 300 mph are the stuff of science fiction novels, but they'd be awful in practice - Just imagine how unbearably warn and clammy a dome would be under bright summer sun (or how quickly it would be discolored by dust storms and acid rain), or how poorly wildlife would coexist with a stream of automated bullet cars zipping along plastic roads. Somehow, we need to figure out how to do with less - much less - while figuring out how to tread less heavily on the earth. It might be an impossible task.
I suspect that a DNA database of "future possible offenders" would be skewed heavily toward children of lower income families with substandard educational background and a history of breaking the law. No one is going to swab a DNA sample of a member of the royal family or the children of the rich and privileged because they'd scream bloody murder. In other words, the database be a misguided attempt to explain societal ills through physiology. We've been down this road before and the result has often been mass genocide as "superior" individuals deem it time to cleanse the world of "inferior" folk.
Besides, a database of likely offenders will not do anything to prevent a crime. It will simply provide a pool of high-risk individuals that the police will regard with greater suspicion after the event. The legal system has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to wrongfully convict people because of prejudice, sloppy police work and a poor representation. What chance does an innocent kid have if he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and has already been labeled as genetically dangerous in the police database?
The Hobbit is as close as Tolkien got to writing a children's book, replete with witty asides throughout. My father was an English teacher, and he read it to me while we lived not far from the Bird and Baby, where he and the other members of the Inklings gathered for years. I was seven years old at the time, and it enthralled me. I recently read it to my son, and he enjoyed all save the most tedious passages. That said, English is not my wife's first language and she refused to read a word of it.
Just imagine how useful it would be to have the real time location of the city's police force as well. ;) The $64,000 dollar question is, of course, whether public funds should be invested in building Google's infrastructure. Yes, cloud computing is more cost effective that rolling your own systems, it's convenient, outsourced, on a common platform, etc. On the other hand, will this result in the city losing control of their data? Will the city share in any revenue that Google earns from their investment in Google Earth(TM)(R)(PDQ)? And, honestly, does knowing where the city's fire trucks are in real time provide any meaningful benefit to the citizens? I suspect there downfall of the system will be that city staff will begin to put more emphasis on demonstrating that a green space was mowed instead of actually picking weeds and focusing on quality of service.
it's referred to as a scythe, as the grim reaper just informed me when he sfhq290h H xa, . 42
I'm going to call you on this one. "Very firm Christian beliefs" is a meaningless motherhood statement. That little detail aside, haven't you ever found it convenient that the "right" religion is usually the one we're indoctrinated with since childhood, or the church just down the street? I suspect precious few people in somewhere like Omaha Nebraska have ever woken up one morning and realized that the Shinto study of Hatsumiyamairi is the true path to enlightenment. Nope, people get sucked into the tried and true. ;)
The problem with eBay is that it has shifted away from being a private auction site used by people trying to sell their own stuff. The modern eBay is home to thousands of somewhat shifty "Power Sellers" who buy stuff at estate sales, thrift stores, and garage sales. They list the stuff with often misleading descriptions and rip people off. Unfortunately, these junk dealers generate huge profit for eBay (I worked out the total fees related to a transaction once, and they came to about 15%, including PayPal, listing and final value costs).
It's time to split eBay into two sites - Pro and Casual Sellers. Let users quickly and easily filter out the "power sellers" and others who sell hundreds of items a year and focus on the amateur sellers offering their well-kept vintage cameras, video game consoles and so on. While they're at it, they also need to fix their feedback approach once and for all. Disabling negative feedback from sellers hamstrings good people and puts them at the mercy of sometimes irrational and mentally unbalanced buyers.