Except the iPad is not a Kindle, yes it can read eBooks and can connect to the Kindle store but that's not the same as a kindle. To say that the iPad is the same as saying an iPhone is the same as a digital SLR. Yes they can both take pictures, but they're not otherwise even remotely the same.
This is really the challenge of technology of our age. Do we continue to move towards "convergence devices" where one device does everything, sort of, or do we keep specialized devices. I don't really know myself. Combining an iPod and an phone worked really well because the things which a phone needed either complemented or didn't interfere with the things that an iPod needed and vice versa. The combination of a Kindle and an iPad is not necessarily the same thing. eInk is a vastly superior display to read a book on, but it's not even remotely good for any of the other things an iPad can do. At the moment a lot of people seem to be going down the iPad route which makes some sense as an iPad makes a better Kindle than a Kindle does an iPad but they're still missing out quite a lot. On the other hand people seem for the most part to acknowledge that basic physics means that a phone makes a crappy camera, and we haven't seen people giving up on using proper cameras, even if they are still compat point and shoot jobs.
I don't know where we'll end up most of the pundits and posters in this thread seem to believe that everything will converge down to one magical device which will meet all our needs and that that magical device will be something in the iPad form factor. Personally I'm not convinced. The iPad is really still too big to be carried around without thought, too small to have enough screen space. Too jack of all trades and master of none, not a gaming platform, not an eBook reader, not a Phone not a computer. Nor do I believe that however convenient touch is that it is the interface revolution poeple claim it is.
That doesn't mean there isn't a market for the iPad. It doesn't mean that the technology from the iPad won't allow someone to rock out the kind of tablet PC people have always wanted, iPad touch screen, WACOM stylus and the power of some of the new really ligth laptops along with an OS which is designed to be a proper computer Operating system but with a UI which is friendly in touch screen, stylus or even mouse and keyboard mode, all at an affordable price point. That will be the iPad killer if it ever occurs, a tablet which acts like an iPad when you want it to act that way, and acts like a computer when you don't. Android isn't there yet, the iPad part isn't seemless enough and the computer part isn't powerful enough, but it might get there, we might see it in Windows 10. Apple seem to want to take things the other way so I doubt we'll see it from them, but who knows.
We don't actually have enough data to say yet. We know that there are 30 million tablets out there right now, we also know that the vast majority of them are iPads and that marketing strategies that work for Apple don't necessarily apply to anyone else. Apple gets their customers to upgrade their phones on a yearly basis despite the fact that the subsidized replacement model provided by the carriers is based on a two year cycle. This isn't because the next gen iPhone is massively better than the previous generation, or because the upgrade is cheap because neither is true. Steve Jobs was probably the greatest salesman the world has ever known.
What we don't know is how many people use their iPads on a regular basis, how many of them are buying them rather than a PC upgrade, or how long Apple can continue to convince people to upgrade rapidly now Steve Jobs is no longer at the helm.
We know that right now there is a massive market for pretty much anything Apple can produce, we know that there is pretty much zero market for any other variety of tablet as well. Essentially we have no idea about the future of tablets even up to 36 months, let alone what will happen afterwards.
Personally I think that these sorts of devices will have a relatively minimal affect on PC or Laptop sales(that's not to say those sales won't continue to slow, but not because of tablets) as I people who genuinely have no computer related needs that can't be serviced by an iPad is very small. They will probably destroy the netbook market, as that was always a temporary market anyway with laptops getting smaller and cell phones getting more capable that niche as doomed anyway.
It may be that in 5 years average folks are using iPad like devices and not owning any kind of multipurpose computer. It may be that in 5 years iPads and their ilk are considered a fad. I think whichever way it is, you're going to see a lot fewer attempts to compete with the iPad in the coming months. The devices aren't cheap to develop, and the market has shown absolutely no interest in any of the ones which have been released so far.
The kindle is the answer, just not to this question. I have a kindle, they are an absolutely fantastic eBook reader. Battery life measured in weeks, far easier on the eyes, light as a feather and you can buy a book any time you want to virtually anywhere over whisper net(I think you have to do some configuration if you want to buy books outside of your usual country for security reasons). I paid a little more to get the fully kitted out one with no ads, but it was still an absolute bargain for the prices, especially since even when the eBooks still have the hardcover prices for new releases they're still cheaper than mass market paperbacks from the local book store(wonder why all our non specialist book stores are going bankrupt).
Is the kindle an iPad competitor, hell no, but on the other hand, the iPad isn't really a Kindle competitor either. It will be interesting to see how the new Amazon tablets turn out though, Amazon has the resources to produce something good, the infrastructure to back it up, and they're not stupid either.
The thing about building a railroad through California or any populated area is that you have to deal with the NIMBY's. That means you have to spend huge amounts of money making it seem like the railroad isn't there and building it in a way that takes into account the feelings of anyone who might be at all affected by it(translated as every registered voter within about 10 miles). You need sound proofing, community consultation, construction only during certain hours, crossing points and all sorts of things.
All the Russians have to do is dig a really long tunnel, keep it full of fresh air and not let it collapse and fill with seawater. All of those are engineering problems, not political ones which makes them a whole lot cheaper.
Well of course if we had a single payer system, businesses wouldn't need to absorb the 10-20% increase in costs, and the 10-20% increases in cost wouldn't actually be happening, and for that matter costs would be substantially lower, but that would be socialist, never mind that private businesses would be much better off.
And in the same era, corporations hired thugs to beat striking union members. Whatever your opinions of unions try not to judge them based on what happened to your grandfather in an era were there was a much larger rate of violence on both sides.
You can believe anything you want, but that doesn't make it true.
If you eliminated everything the government does which impinges on your personal freedom you end up with Anarchy, if you don't, you end up with what we have now give or take.
If you read the libertarian platform loosely it allows for pretty much anything we currently have, if you don't it's not functional. The platform is contradictory and maddening as it always has been. You can't have "enforcement of individual rights in resources like land, water, air, and wildlife" and not have environmental legislation, and "deliberate actions that place others involuntarily at significant risk of harm" covers an awful lot. If I build a shoddy bridge and you fall through it and lose a leg, then my deliverate actions have placed you involuntarily at significant risk of harm. Yes you took the risks associated with walking across a bridge, but despite the general beliefs of most libertarians I've met that doesn't include dismemberment or death.
As a note, I'm not saying that government is efficient because it's governemnt I'm saying it's efficient because it lets you do what you do while it takes care of stuff. If you want to build a road, you can build that road yourself, or you can pay someone to build it for you, you can watch that person every second of the day, or you can hire someone to do that for you as well. The moment you stop being 100% involved in the project, you heve representatives who are acting and making decisions on your behalf. Doesn't matter if you select them with votes or with a checkbook. Having everyone in the community stop doing what they're doing and plan, design, and build a road is incredibly inefficient. Having a couple of people organize the whole thing while everyone else does something useful, even if they take 20 times as long and cost 100 times more money is more efficient.
I wasn't talking about feeling hurt I was talking about real effect.
If I build a house that doesn't conform to proper building codes, that doesn't just affect me, it doesn't even just affect people who walk onto my property, it affects everyone who comes anywhere near my property because parts of my house can hit them or their property because I did not affix said parts correctly.
If I drive my car at a hundred and fify miles an hour while drunk I can kill people who weren't in my car, weren't driving and for that matter weren't even on the road.
If I dump toxic chemicals onto my lawn it can run off into everyone's drinking water.
The world is one big interconnected place. There's certainly room for personal liberty, and there's compromises to be made between the needs of the many and the needs of the few, but don't kid yourselves and think that regulation is just about "the man" oppressing you.
Symbian sucks, and they don't have enough money to get MeeGo off the ground. That simple enough for you.
Symbian was developed under a completely different set of premises than iOS or Android, or even Windows Phone 7, premises which turned out to be wrong. Every attempt that Nokia made to try and fix it was stymied by their general incompetence and uselessness. They attempted to develop three separate UI frameworks simultaneously all competing with one another and none of them properly resourced and so they all failed miserably.
In the end Nokia was left with the option of shutting down their mobile division or doing a deal with Microsoft, so they did a deal with Microsoft. Maybe if they'd ditched Symbian and hired the truckload of developers necessary to maintain a linux fork 5 years ago they'd be in a different place, but they didn't and they aren't. Elop may be a Trojan horse planted by Microsoft, but if he is, when the soldiers jump out of the horse they'll find that the locals have already sacked their own city.
The thing about google however, is that however much they might violate your privacy and however evil they may be, they won't share your information with others. The reason for this is the fact that unlike Facebook who wants to sell your info to advertisers, Google are the advertisers. The database of information they have collected about you is a valuable resource, it makes them better than their competition. Google will serve you targeted ads, but they don't want anyone else to be able to do that so they won't share the underlying information. It's simply against their interests to do so.
What he means is that one of the reasons you have your phone is so that you can, at least in theory, get in contact with people in case of an emergency or be contacted by others. If you drain your battery playing angry birds, you won't be able to make said call. IE "without draining the charge before a real communication crisis arises".
Polygamy isn't all that uncommon, and there are even a few places(Nepal for instance) where polyandry is quite common. I don't know if everyone involved in it thinks its fair and the morality of the thing is basically a follow on of the previous point. Fairness and morality are somewhat in the eyes of the people involved.
Objectivism doesn't work because people can't think far enough ahead. In reality, providing social welfare is good for the individual providing it because hungry people have a tendency to stop following even the most basic laws, and there are always more poor people than rich people and because you yourself might be there some day. People however do not generally think that far ahead because we're genetically programmed not to so social welfare becomes bad because in the immediate term I am poorer than I was before from paying for it and have no tangible benefit.
Libertarianism doesn't work because it's not actually possible. Pretty much everything you do impacts on the rights of others so everything you do has to, to a greater or lesser extent, be governed by the will of the many overriding the will of the few, and government is self creating due to its inherent efficiency. There are plenty of ways to govern countries apart from the ones we generally try including I'm sure quite a few which haven't been articulated yet, but government of some sort will always exist and the nature of human society means that it will always do things that you don't like but that other people do.
I have yet to encounter a single libertarian whose beliefs boiled down to more than "I don't want to pay taxes or follow laws". They might talk all about freedom and liberty, but what they really want is to have all the benefits of a modern society without any inconveniences or they disagree with some specific thing and claim that their right to freedom overrules that thing. Generally these folks want the government to go out and enforce their particular "freedom" at the expense of others.
Libertarianism is a fundamentally selfish political belief generally held only by people who have benefited greatly from all the services they don't want to pay for.
Very few people believe that the current system is working, but only a lunatic believes that if they eliminated government that things would actually get better. Sure if you're the guy with more guns than your neighbor things might get better for you, but that only so long as you have more guns and ammo and keep using them.
Personally in this instance I blame Steve Jobs. He made all sorts of wild claims about HTML 5 in order to justify the fact that he won't let iOS run anything which remotely appears to threaten the app store as the only source of applications(including certain elements of HTML 4 forget 5). People started to believe that there was a lot more to HTML 5 than there really is. Let me let you in on a little secret folks, very little from HTML 5 or even CSS 3 will make any actual difference to how web applications are written offline storage is vaguely interesting, and some of the new CSS will help though semantic CSS isn't all that useful for actually building apps as opposed to showing content. Javascript hasn't changed and that's really the core of the web as application in the end.
The GPL allows for certain uses of GPL code without the new code also needing to be GPL. Libaries released under the LGPL can be linked by proprietary code and generally speaking kernel system calls are also free to use(drivers are a different story). The guys from Hamstersoft allegedly directly copied code from calibre so due to the licensing terms of the GPL the software into which they copied that code must also be GPL (or have the infringing code entirely removed). If the software is GPL then you can get the source.
It's possible that Honeycomb uses GPL code or links to GPL libraries which are not LGPL or otherwise dual licensed, but so long as they release the sources for the android kernel(which they do) the kernel itself being GPL does not require the remainder of the OS to be GPL.
In essence the GPL is in a sense viral in nature as many of the anti-GPL folks say, but it's not indiscriminantly so.
Thing is nuclear isn't being phased out anywhere. The Germans and a few other countries are pretending that they're phasing out nuclear and focusing more on renewables, but the reality is that they can and do import a lot of their baseload power from France which is very heavily into nuclear power, so the Germans will still have coal and nuclear they just won't have it locally which works I suppose in Europe where distances are short, but if anything went really wrong, they're close enough to still be screwed so it's rather pointless.
The other factor is the fact that, while I know almost nothing about German politics, I'll bet dollars to donuts that Merkel will be out on her ear before too long simply because the German government doesn't have any choice but to keep bailing out southern European countries and there will be electoral hell to pay for it eventually so the "pretend commitment" may not last long enough to actually phase out a single plant.
Well aside from the fact that that's probably not enough to actually play the game it that's what you wanted to, not everyone pays European prices. I live in an ADSL blackspot, so I've got a shared wireless connection for the house. It costs me about $50/month for 7 GB of total traffic including uploads, if I wanted to carry it around I'd have to get another account. That's a crap load of money to spend just to play a single player game.
Even if what you say is true, which it isn't, they still wouldn't want to "indiscriminantly" kill billions of people because at the very very least they wouldn't want to kill themselves.
Sure we have engineers and scientists who would work on a project to kill billions, and we have governments who would want it.
What we don't have are governments who want to indiscriminantly kill billions of people. Sure, a device intended to kill billions of specific people could accidentally kill everyone, but no one is working towards that explicit goal. In addition we also don't actually have any weapons which are capable of killing billions of people despite trillions of dollars of research. We have a bunch of weapons which individually kill a few hundred thousand people which could, together, kill billions of people, but that's not an accident.
Even some sort of weaponized supervirus would be unlikely to wipe out humanity as a whole, human civilization sure, but humanity as a whole is fairly unlikely. We are you see, very very good at surviving.
Except that it wouldn't. It would be a self replicating organism which, like everything else required energy and materials to reproduce. Converting arbitrary materials into other materials is extraordinarily energy intensive and so would put it at a significant disadvantage reproductively speaking compared to other current organisms, or it would have to use the materials it was made of to produce more of itself like everything else. Given that there's pretty much nothing on earth which is readily available for either energy or materials which something isn't already using for that purpose it'd have a heck of a time catching up.
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Except the iPad is not a Kindle, yes it can read eBooks and can connect to the Kindle store but that's not the same as a kindle. To say that the iPad is the same as saying an iPhone is the same as a digital SLR. Yes they can both take pictures, but they're not otherwise even remotely the same.
This is really the challenge of technology of our age. Do we continue to move towards "convergence devices" where one device does everything, sort of, or do we keep specialized devices. I don't really know myself. Combining an iPod and an phone worked really well because the things which a phone needed either complemented or didn't interfere with the things that an iPod needed and vice versa. The combination of a Kindle and an iPad is not necessarily the same thing. eInk is a vastly superior display to read a book on, but it's not even remotely good for any of the other things an iPad can do. At the moment a lot of people seem to be going down the iPad route which makes some sense as an iPad makes a better Kindle than a Kindle does an iPad but they're still missing out quite a lot. On the other hand people seem for the most part to acknowledge that basic physics means that a phone makes a crappy camera, and we haven't seen people giving up on using proper cameras, even if they are still compat point and shoot jobs.
I don't know where we'll end up most of the pundits and posters in this thread seem to believe that everything will converge down to one magical device which will meet all our needs and that that magical device will be something in the iPad form factor. Personally I'm not convinced. The iPad is really still too big to be carried around without thought, too small to have enough screen space. Too jack of all trades and master of none, not a gaming platform, not an eBook reader, not a Phone not a computer. Nor do I believe that however convenient touch is that it is the interface revolution poeple claim it is.
That doesn't mean there isn't a market for the iPad. It doesn't mean that the technology from the iPad won't allow someone to rock out the kind of tablet PC people have always wanted, iPad touch screen, WACOM stylus and the power of some of the new really ligth laptops along with an OS which is designed to be a proper computer Operating system but with a UI which is friendly in touch screen, stylus or even mouse and keyboard mode, all at an affordable price point. That will be the iPad killer if it ever occurs, a tablet which acts like an iPad when you want it to act that way, and acts like a computer when you don't. Android isn't there yet, the iPad part isn't seemless enough and the computer part isn't powerful enough, but it might get there, we might see it in Windows 10. Apple seem to want to take things the other way so I doubt we'll see it from them, but who knows.
We don't actually have enough data to say yet. We know that there are 30 million tablets out there right now, we also know that the vast majority of them are iPads and that marketing strategies that work for Apple don't necessarily apply to anyone else. Apple gets their customers to upgrade their phones on a yearly basis despite the fact that the subsidized replacement model provided by the carriers is based on a two year cycle. This isn't because the next gen iPhone is massively better than the previous generation, or because the upgrade is cheap because neither is true. Steve Jobs was probably the greatest salesman the world has ever known.
What we don't know is how many people use their iPads on a regular basis, how many of them are buying them rather than a PC upgrade, or how long Apple can continue to convince people to upgrade rapidly now Steve Jobs is no longer at the helm.
We know that right now there is a massive market for pretty much anything Apple can produce, we know that there is pretty much zero market for any other variety of tablet as well. Essentially we have no idea about the future of tablets even up to 36 months, let alone what will happen afterwards.
Personally I think that these sorts of devices will have a relatively minimal affect on PC or Laptop sales(that's not to say those sales won't continue to slow, but not because of tablets) as I people who genuinely have no computer related needs that can't be serviced by an iPad is very small. They will probably destroy the netbook market, as that was always a temporary market anyway with laptops getting smaller and cell phones getting more capable that niche as doomed anyway.
It may be that in 5 years average folks are using iPad like devices and not owning any kind of multipurpose computer. It may be that in 5 years iPads and their ilk are considered a fad. I think whichever way it is, you're going to see a lot fewer attempts to compete with the iPad in the coming months. The devices aren't cheap to develop, and the market has shown absolutely no interest in any of the ones which have been released so far.
The kindle is the answer, just not to this question. I have a kindle, they are an absolutely fantastic eBook reader. Battery life measured in weeks, far easier on the eyes, light as a feather and you can buy a book any time you want to virtually anywhere over whisper net(I think you have to do some configuration if you want to buy books outside of your usual country for security reasons). I paid a little more to get the fully kitted out one with no ads, but it was still an absolute bargain for the prices, especially since even when the eBooks still have the hardcover prices for new releases they're still cheaper than mass market paperbacks from the local book store(wonder why all our non specialist book stores are going bankrupt).
Is the kindle an iPad competitor, hell no, but on the other hand, the iPad isn't really a Kindle competitor either. It will be interesting to see how the new Amazon tablets turn out though, Amazon has the resources to produce something good, the infrastructure to back it up, and they're not stupid either.
Except container ships use really awful fuel which is being phased out of protected arctic and antarctic regions as part of international Law.
The thing about building a railroad through California or any populated area is that you have to deal with the NIMBY's. That means you have to spend huge amounts of money making it seem like the railroad isn't there and building it in a way that takes into account the feelings of anyone who might be at all affected by it(translated as every registered voter within about 10 miles). You need sound proofing, community consultation, construction only during certain hours, crossing points and all sorts of things.
All the Russians have to do is dig a really long tunnel, keep it full of fresh air and not let it collapse and fill with seawater. All of those are engineering problems, not political ones which makes them a whole lot cheaper.
Well of course if we had a single payer system, businesses wouldn't need to absorb the 10-20% increase in costs, and the 10-20% increases in cost wouldn't actually be happening, and for that matter costs would be substantially lower, but that would be socialist, never mind that private businesses would be much better off.
And in the same era, corporations hired thugs to beat striking union members. Whatever your opinions of unions try not to judge them based on what happened to your grandfather in an era were there was a much larger rate of violence on both sides.
Well of course it will. I just interpreted your comment as confusion as to the meaning of the phrase so I clarified.
You can believe anything you want, but that doesn't make it true.
If you eliminated everything the government does which impinges on your personal freedom you end up with Anarchy, if you don't, you end up with what we have now give or take.
If you read the libertarian platform loosely it allows for pretty much anything we currently have, if you don't it's not functional. The platform is contradictory and maddening as it always has been. You can't have "enforcement of individual rights in resources like land, water, air, and wildlife" and not have environmental legislation, and "deliberate actions that place others involuntarily at significant risk of harm" covers an awful lot. If I build a shoddy bridge and you fall through it and lose a leg, then my deliverate actions have placed you involuntarily at significant risk of harm. Yes you took the risks associated with walking across a bridge, but despite the general beliefs of most libertarians I've met that doesn't include dismemberment or death.
As a note, I'm not saying that government is efficient because it's governemnt I'm saying it's efficient because it lets you do what you do while it takes care of stuff. If you want to build a road, you can build that road yourself, or you can pay someone to build it for you, you can watch that person every second of the day, or you can hire someone to do that for you as well. The moment you stop being 100% involved in the project, you heve representatives who are acting and making decisions on your behalf. Doesn't matter if you select them with votes or with a checkbook. Having everyone in the community stop doing what they're doing and plan, design, and build a road is incredibly inefficient. Having a couple of people organize the whole thing while everyone else does something useful, even if they take 20 times as long and cost 100 times more money is more efficient.
I wasn't talking about feeling hurt I was talking about real effect.
If I build a house that doesn't conform to proper building codes, that doesn't just affect me, it doesn't even just affect people who walk onto my property, it affects everyone who comes anywhere near my property because parts of my house can hit them or their property because I did not affix said parts correctly.
If I drive my car at a hundred and fify miles an hour while drunk I can kill people who weren't in my car, weren't driving and for that matter weren't even on the road.
If I dump toxic chemicals onto my lawn it can run off into everyone's drinking water.
The world is one big interconnected place. There's certainly room for personal liberty, and there's compromises to be made between the needs of the many and the needs of the few, but don't kid yourselves and think that regulation is just about "the man" oppressing you.
Symbian sucks, and they don't have enough money to get MeeGo off the ground. That simple enough for you.
Symbian was developed under a completely different set of premises than iOS or Android, or even Windows Phone 7, premises which turned out to be wrong. Every attempt that Nokia made to try and fix it was stymied by their general incompetence and uselessness. They attempted to develop three separate UI frameworks simultaneously all competing with one another and none of them properly resourced and so they all failed miserably.
In the end Nokia was left with the option of shutting down their mobile division or doing a deal with Microsoft, so they did a deal with Microsoft. Maybe if they'd ditched Symbian and hired the truckload of developers necessary to maintain a linux fork 5 years ago they'd be in a different place, but they didn't and they aren't. Elop may be a Trojan horse planted by Microsoft, but if he is, when the soldiers jump out of the horse they'll find that the locals have already sacked their own city.
The thing about google however, is that however much they might violate your privacy and however evil they may be, they won't share your information with others. The reason for this is the fact that unlike Facebook who wants to sell your info to advertisers, Google are the advertisers. The database of information they have collected about you is a valuable resource, it makes them better than their competition. Google will serve you targeted ads, but they don't want anyone else to be able to do that so they won't share the underlying information. It's simply against their interests to do so.
What he means is that one of the reasons you have your phone is so that you can, at least in theory, get in contact with people in case of an emergency or be contacted by others. If you drain your battery playing angry birds, you won't be able to make said call. IE "without draining the charge before a real communication crisis arises".
Polygamy isn't all that uncommon, and there are even a few places(Nepal for instance) where polyandry is quite common. I don't know if everyone involved in it thinks its fair and the morality of the thing is basically a follow on of the previous point. Fairness and morality are somewhat in the eyes of the people involved.
Objectivism doesn't work because people can't think far enough ahead. In reality, providing social welfare is good for the individual providing it because hungry people have a tendency to stop following even the most basic laws, and there are always more poor people than rich people and because you yourself might be there some day. People however do not generally think that far ahead because we're genetically programmed not to so social welfare becomes bad because in the immediate term I am poorer than I was before from paying for it and have no tangible benefit.
Libertarianism doesn't work because it's not actually possible. Pretty much everything you do impacts on the rights of others so everything you do has to, to a greater or lesser extent, be governed by the will of the many overriding the will of the few, and government is self creating due to its inherent efficiency. There are plenty of ways to govern countries apart from the ones we generally try including I'm sure quite a few which haven't been articulated yet, but government of some sort will always exist and the nature of human society means that it will always do things that you don't like but that other people do.
I have yet to encounter a single libertarian whose beliefs boiled down to more than "I don't want to pay taxes or follow laws". They might talk all about freedom and liberty, but what they really want is to have all the benefits of a modern society without any inconveniences or they disagree with some specific thing and claim that their right to freedom overrules that thing. Generally these folks want the government to go out and enforce their particular "freedom" at the expense of others.
Libertarianism is a fundamentally selfish political belief generally held only by people who have benefited greatly from all the services they don't want to pay for.
Very few people believe that the current system is working, but only a lunatic believes that if they eliminated government that things would actually get better. Sure if you're the guy with more guns than your neighbor things might get better for you, but that only so long as you have more guns and ammo and keep using them.
Personally in this instance I blame Steve Jobs. He made all sorts of wild claims about HTML 5 in order to justify the fact that he won't let iOS run anything which remotely appears to threaten the app store as the only source of applications(including certain elements of HTML 4 forget 5). People started to believe that there was a lot more to HTML 5 than there really is. Let me let you in on a little secret folks, very little from HTML 5 or even CSS 3 will make any actual difference to how web applications are written offline storage is vaguely interesting, and some of the new CSS will help though semantic CSS isn't all that useful for actually building apps as opposed to showing content. Javascript hasn't changed and that's really the core of the web as application in the end.
The GPL allows for certain uses of GPL code without the new code also needing to be GPL. Libaries released under the LGPL can be linked by proprietary code and generally speaking kernel system calls are also free to use(drivers are a different story). The guys from Hamstersoft allegedly directly copied code from calibre so due to the licensing terms of the GPL the software into which they copied that code must also be GPL (or have the infringing code entirely removed). If the software is GPL then you can get the source.
It's possible that Honeycomb uses GPL code or links to GPL libraries which are not LGPL or otherwise dual licensed, but so long as they release the sources for the android kernel(which they do) the kernel itself being GPL does not require the remainder of the OS to be GPL.
In essence the GPL is in a sense viral in nature as many of the anti-GPL folks say, but it's not indiscriminantly so.
Thing is nuclear isn't being phased out anywhere. The Germans and a few other countries are pretending that they're phasing out nuclear and focusing more on renewables, but the reality is that they can and do import a lot of their baseload power from France which is very heavily into nuclear power, so the Germans will still have coal and nuclear they just won't have it locally which works I suppose in Europe where distances are short, but if anything went really wrong, they're close enough to still be screwed so it's rather pointless.
The other factor is the fact that, while I know almost nothing about German politics, I'll bet dollars to donuts that Merkel will be out on her ear before too long simply because the German government doesn't have any choice but to keep bailing out southern European countries and there will be electoral hell to pay for it eventually so the "pretend commitment" may not last long enough to actually phase out a single plant.
Well aside from the fact that that's probably not enough to actually play the game it that's what you wanted to, not everyone pays European prices. I live in an ADSL blackspot, so I've got a shared wireless connection for the house. It costs me about $50/month for 7 GB of total traffic including uploads, if I wanted to carry it around I'd have to get another account. That's a crap load of money to spend just to play a single player game.
Even if what you say is true, which it isn't, they still wouldn't want to "indiscriminantly" kill billions of people because at the very very least they wouldn't want to kill themselves.
One where mommy doesn't pay my data bill perhaps.
Sure we have engineers and scientists who would work on a project to kill billions, and we have governments who would want it.
What we don't have are governments who want to indiscriminantly kill billions of people. Sure, a device intended to kill billions of specific people could accidentally kill everyone, but no one is working towards that explicit goal. In addition we also don't actually have any weapons which are capable of killing billions of people despite trillions of dollars of research. We have a bunch of weapons which individually kill a few hundred thousand people which could, together, kill billions of people, but that's not an accident.
Even some sort of weaponized supervirus would be unlikely to wipe out humanity as a whole, human civilization sure, but humanity as a whole is fairly unlikely. We are you see, very very good at surviving.
Except that it wouldn't. It would be a self replicating organism which, like everything else required energy and materials to reproduce. Converting arbitrary materials into other materials is extraordinarily energy intensive and so would put it at a significant disadvantage reproductively speaking compared to other current organisms, or it would have to use the materials it was made of to produce more of itself like everything else. Given that there's pretty much nothing on earth which is readily available for either energy or materials which something isn't already using for that purpose it'd have a heck of a time catching up.