I could certainly see laptop rental places opening up in the US. Don't even attempt to bring your laptop. Just rent one when you get there, and have your data shipped to you, encrypted, over the internet. I could see a problem with trusting a laptop you don't own, but you could boot off a LiveCD, or the service could optionally start you with an empty hard disk. I wouldn't trust it anyway, if I was doing something illegal, but if it was simply for the convenience of not having my property seized, I could see it being quite useful.
I'm not so sure about that. 10 year ago, we were all using tables, and it was the "best" way of doing layout on the web. Now we've all moved to using divs, and generally it works a lot better. However, who's to say in another 5-10 years we won't move onto some other way of doing it? Also, Like I said, a language reference isn't so good. The Zen of CSS Design looks like it's much more about concepts and good practices, and isn't simply a language reference.
Especially since a book will quickly become outdated. They can't possibly know what incompatibilities will come up in future browser releases, or what will happen when they start implementing CSS3. If you want to know the basic idea of CSS, and how the concepts work, then a language reference isn't the way to go.
The really screwed up part is that Islam, Judaism, Christianity, all share the same God, And the only difference is how they regard Jesus and Mohamed. They practice their faiths differently, but are all just offshoots of the same base religion.
I imagine it's much easier to stay a certain distance from the asteroid and maintain altitude then to land on the asteroid and risk crashing, or something getting damaged in the process. If you stay above the asteroid, you don't have to worry about finding a suitable landing location.
It's good that it makes you "feel" better, but I don't think it does much to add any security. It's trivially easy for the MITM to forward you login ID to your bank, and pick up the picture they showed you, and forward the picture to you, so that you think you are actually on your bank's site. You might want to read about Bruce Schneier, and his open wireless network. Assuming you have security when you really don't is more dangerous, then knowing you are insecure in the first place.
I think an OpenPGP model would work a lot better. You go down to the bank, and pick up a disk with their public key on it. Only accept keys from those you really trust. That way you can't end up at mybank.example.com which happened to get a certificate for *.example.com, and mistake it for your bank, with a real signed cert that your browser just automatically trusts. The number of sites that you should actually trust with a secure connection is probably quite small. Your bank, your credit card, I don't even know if most other people would have any other ones. Ideally, when you purchase something from an online shop, you wouldn't even send them your credit card information. Just a signed cert from your bank or credit card company (the store would have their public key also) stating that you had authorized money to be transferred to their account.
1-3 KB? An sms message is maximum 140 bytes (160 7-bit characters). If you count protocol overheard, you might be looking at about 256 bytes total. Also, the biggest problem with charging for incoming SMS is that you can't choose not to receive it. With a phone call you can always not pick up, if you don't feel like paying for it, or cut it off it goes on too long. With SMS you have no choice but to receive it. According to other posters, they don't even care if your phone is on and you don't receive it, which would be even worse.
I compared the same one with my iPod Nano. I picked the iPod because it had 24 hours batter life (2 times as much), and also because it can play compressed video. The Zen V Plus does video, but only uncompressed AVI, which is a big problem when you only have 4 GB of space. Doing more is subjective. The iPod doesn't do radio, but I can fit a DVD worth of video in 250MB and it doesn't look bad because the of the lower resolution screen, and the MPEG4 video encoding support. So, I can bring a couple movies, or catch up on a bunch of TV shows while I ride the bus. To me, that's more important than FM radio. My iPod screen doesn't have any scratches, and that's after about 9 months in use. Not sure if that's because I'm more careful than you, or because they use better materials. As a reference point, the shiny metal back on my iPod is quite scuffed up, to the point where the ingraving isn't quite as readable as I would like it. But that's probably because I always leave it shiny (or not so shiny anymore) side down, rather than with screen on the table. So here's a sum up of why I think my iPod is better than the Creative V Plus, and was the right choice for me.
1. Only $40 more than the Zen. (at the time I bought it, Zen seems to have lower their price a bit now)
2. Played MPEG4 Compressed video,
3. Bigger screen (2 inch vs. 1.5 inch)
4. 24 hours of battery life with music, 5 with straight video. (not just claimed by apple, this is what I actually get)
5. I don't completely hate iTunes.
The last one is a big point. I had a Sony Net MD player before that. I wasn't getting suckered into another thing like SonicStage ever again. I had a shuffle, knew what iTunes was, and knew that I could tolerate it. iTunes could be better, but it's defintely not the worst thing out there, and something that I don't have problems with very often. I didn't have a chance to try out the software that came with the Zen, and from reading the website, I wasn't exactly sure if I could just forgo their entire software package, or if it would be required to use their software to transfer music and play lists to the Zen.
If Columbus was the only stupid one, and everyone else was telling him he was wrong, home come to this day, Native Americans are still referred to as "Indians". If it wasn't what people commonly called them, the name would have never caught on.
Doesn't seem surprising to me in the least. Given enough pressure and heat, not only do the inner electrons start to interact, but so do the nuclei. This is called fusion. I'm not a particle physicist, but it seems to be mostly related. As you increase the amount of heat and pressure, and therefore increase the energy acting on the particles, the particles that under normal lab conditions usually wouldn't interact, because of insufficient energy to be moved, are now completely able to participate in a reaction.
Is it though? Until we actually get the technology to travel to other planets we could inhabit, or to terraform other planets to make them inhabitable, then what's the point of sending actual people? It's nice that people can live outside the sphere of earth, in space stations and such, but they couldn't survive long out there without refreshments from down below. In the event that some meteor did hit earth, and made it uninhabitable, even if we did send people outside the planet so they wouldn't get killed, the wouldn't end up lasting long. Probably run out of supplies in a couple months. Instead, it makes much more sense just to send robots up, do the dirty work, and leave keep the very useful and smart people safe here on earth.
That's what I thought when I read the summary. If there is true evidence of life on Mars, it could really rejuvenate the space program. Not only in the US, but in many other countries too. Who wouldn't want to be the first planet to bring back a sample of this stuff, so it can be studied more closely.
The iPod supports MP3 too. You made it sound like it doesn't. Although the iPod does support DRM formats, it doesn't require that you use them. One advantage of the iPods supporting DRM is that you can rent movies from iTunes, and watch them on you iPod. But if you don't like that DRM, don't worry, you can play any non-DRM video you want on the Nano. One small disadvantage of the stone is that it doesn't come with a clip. Although you can buy a cover with a clip that costs under $5, it shows that they didn't really think the whole thing through when designing it, and came out with the clip after.
I wouldn't say that most apple products have a big price tag. Sure you can get a cheaper MP3 player, but it's cheaper for a reason. Try to find one with comparable features and design and easy of use for the same price. It doesn't exist. Apple can charge a little more because their products are better. You can get a shuffle for $49 (1GB) or $69 (2GB), or a more fully loaded Nano for $149 (4GB) and $199 (8GB), which play video and everything. I'm not sure how you think that's overpriced.
I'm with you on PalmOS. I looked into getting a LifeDrive when they came out. Seemed like really interesting hardware. However from everything I hear, the OSis complete crap. Crashes all the time, completely unstable. On the other hand, PalmOS has a really rich library of apps, and it's completely open to anyone. That's one big advantage over the iPhone. I guess we couldn't get a phone with everything.
Or you could tap into the fibre line running through native land, and start an internet casino hosting service. It's arguably the only legal casino hosting in North America.
Just in case you didn't know, phone lines can pack quite a punch. The electrical signal sent down the line is enough to make those old 30 pound black phones ring. My dad decided to do all the internal phone wiring in his house, and he says that from actual experience with being shocked, that you should be pretty careful when messing with phone lines. Wikipedia says the ringing signal is generally over 100 volts.
So the trick is to wait until really late in the game, and then copy everybody else, add a few features that most people don't care about, and call yourself superior on the first iteration? This is like MS putting out a car, which is identical to some other car, except with an automatic sunroof, selling it below cost, because they have money to burn, and everybody saying they did it better on their first try.
You could just mark the characters as "bought", and then let people who bought their character, as well as the stats they bought them at. Maybe the non-bought characters would target the bought ones more. But that might be the price you have to pay just buying your way into society.
That's what I was thinking. This isn't a bot that lets you ruin the experience for other players. It's a bot that lets you level up without playing the game for hours on end. If it was a PK bot I would understand. If I was Blizzard, I would take advantage of the fact that nobody wants to start off at level 1, and have people pay extra to start with characters at certain specs. Let the guy start out at whatever specs he can think of (like selecting a computer from Dell), and make them pay extra for it.
You have to still be pretty careful when looking at game benchmark scores. ATI has cheated before with popular games. I wouldn't put it past a lot of companies.
That's what I would think they are doing. If you write a processor benchmark in C, you don't really know what it gets assembled into, you don't know if it's actually even using the SSE/SSE2/SSE3 optimizations. It's hard to know what path the program is taking unless you only give it one path. You'll still get some discrepancies between processors that don't support the same features, because the one that doesn't support SSE will take longer than the one that does, but at least you won't show one processor being faster, when it should in all senses be the same.
I don't remember getting that much physical education in school. Maybe 40 minutes, 3 days a week? I don't think the physical fitness of the students had anything to do with that time in the school gym, and had a lot more to do with how they spent their free time during recess and lunch.
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I could certainly see laptop rental places opening up in the US. Don't even attempt to bring your laptop. Just rent one when you get there, and have your data shipped to you, encrypted, over the internet. I could see a problem with trusting a laptop you don't own, but you could boot off a LiveCD, or the service could optionally start you with an empty hard disk. I wouldn't trust it anyway, if I was doing something illegal, but if it was simply for the convenience of not having my property seized, I could see it being quite useful.
I'm not so sure about that. 10 year ago, we were all using tables, and it was the "best" way of doing layout on the web. Now we've all moved to using divs, and generally it works a lot better. However, who's to say in another 5-10 years we won't move onto some other way of doing it? Also, Like I said, a language reference isn't so good. The Zen of CSS Design looks like it's much more about concepts and good practices, and isn't simply a language reference.
Especially since a book will quickly become outdated. They can't possibly know what incompatibilities will come up in future browser releases, or what will happen when they start implementing CSS3. If you want to know the basic idea of CSS, and how the concepts work, then a language reference isn't the way to go.
The really screwed up part is that Islam, Judaism, Christianity, all share the same God, And the only difference is how they regard Jesus and Mohamed. They practice their faiths differently, but are all just offshoots of the same base religion.
I imagine it's much easier to stay a certain distance from the asteroid and maintain altitude then to land on the asteroid and risk crashing, or something getting damaged in the process. If you stay above the asteroid, you don't have to worry about finding a suitable landing location.
It's good that it makes you "feel" better, but I don't think it does much to add any security. It's trivially easy for the MITM to forward you login ID to your bank, and pick up the picture they showed you, and forward the picture to you, so that you think you are actually on your bank's site. You might want to read about Bruce Schneier, and his open wireless network. Assuming you have security when you really don't is more dangerous, then knowing you are insecure in the first place.
I think an OpenPGP model would work a lot better. You go down to the bank, and pick up a disk with their public key on it. Only accept keys from those you really trust. That way you can't end up at mybank.example.com which happened to get a certificate for *.example.com, and mistake it for your bank, with a real signed cert that your browser just automatically trusts. The number of sites that you should actually trust with a secure connection is probably quite small. Your bank, your credit card, I don't even know if most other people would have any other ones. Ideally, when you purchase something from an online shop, you wouldn't even send them your credit card information. Just a signed cert from your bank or credit card company (the store would have their public key also) stating that you had authorized money to be transferred to their account.
1-3 KB? An sms message is maximum 140 bytes (160 7-bit characters). If you count protocol overheard, you might be looking at about 256 bytes total. Also, the biggest problem with charging for incoming SMS is that you can't choose not to receive it. With a phone call you can always not pick up, if you don't feel like paying for it, or cut it off it goes on too long. With SMS you have no choice but to receive it. According to other posters, they don't even care if your phone is on and you don't receive it, which would be even worse.
At 6 km/h, a brisk walk would beat it, easy. I think my toddler can walk at about 4 km/h.
I compared the same one with my iPod Nano. I picked the iPod because it had 24 hours batter life (2 times as much), and also because it can play compressed video. The Zen V Plus does video, but only uncompressed AVI, which is a big problem when you only have 4 GB of space. Doing more is subjective. The iPod doesn't do radio, but I can fit a DVD worth of video in 250MB and it doesn't look bad because the of the lower resolution screen, and the MPEG4 video encoding support. So, I can bring a couple movies, or catch up on a bunch of TV shows while I ride the bus. To me, that's more important than FM radio. My iPod screen doesn't have any scratches, and that's after about 9 months in use. Not sure if that's because I'm more careful than you, or because they use better materials. As a reference point, the shiny metal back on my iPod is quite scuffed up, to the point where the ingraving isn't quite as readable as I would like it. But that's probably because I always leave it shiny (or not so shiny anymore) side down, rather than with screen on the table. So here's a sum up of why I think my iPod is better than the Creative V Plus, and was the right choice for me.
1. Only $40 more than the Zen. (at the time I bought it, Zen seems to have lower their price a bit now)
2. Played MPEG4 Compressed video,
3. Bigger screen (2 inch vs. 1.5 inch)
4. 24 hours of battery life with music, 5 with straight video. (not just claimed by apple, this is what I actually get)
5. I don't completely hate iTunes.
The last one is a big point. I had a Sony Net MD player before that. I wasn't getting suckered into another thing like SonicStage ever again. I had a shuffle, knew what iTunes was, and knew that I could tolerate it. iTunes could be better, but it's defintely not the worst thing out there, and something that I don't have problems with very often. I didn't have a chance to try out the software that came with the Zen, and from reading the website, I wasn't exactly sure if I could just forgo their entire software package, or if it would be required to use their software to transfer music and play lists to the Zen.
If Columbus was the only stupid one, and everyone else was telling him he was wrong, home come to this day, Native Americans are still referred to as "Indians". If it wasn't what people commonly called them, the name would have never caught on.
Doesn't seem surprising to me in the least. Given enough pressure and heat, not only do the inner electrons start to interact, but so do the nuclei. This is called fusion. I'm not a particle physicist, but it seems to be mostly related. As you increase the amount of heat and pressure, and therefore increase the energy acting on the particles, the particles that under normal lab conditions usually wouldn't interact, because of insufficient energy to be moved, are now completely able to participate in a reaction.
Is it though? Until we actually get the technology to travel to other planets we could inhabit, or to terraform other planets to make them inhabitable, then what's the point of sending actual people? It's nice that people can live outside the sphere of earth, in space stations and such, but they couldn't survive long out there without refreshments from down below. In the event that some meteor did hit earth, and made it uninhabitable, even if we did send people outside the planet so they wouldn't get killed, the wouldn't end up lasting long. Probably run out of supplies in a couple months. Instead, it makes much more sense just to send robots up, do the dirty work, and leave keep the very useful and smart people safe here on earth.
That's what I thought when I read the summary. If there is true evidence of life on Mars, it could really rejuvenate the space program. Not only in the US, but in many other countries too. Who wouldn't want to be the first planet to bring back a sample of this stuff, so it can be studied more closely.
The iPod supports MP3 too. You made it sound like it doesn't. Although the iPod does support DRM formats, it doesn't require that you use them. One advantage of the iPods supporting DRM is that you can rent movies from iTunes, and watch them on you iPod. But if you don't like that DRM, don't worry, you can play any non-DRM video you want on the Nano. One small disadvantage of the stone is that it doesn't come with a clip. Although you can buy a cover with a clip that costs under $5, it shows that they didn't really think the whole thing through when designing it, and came out with the clip after.
I wouldn't say that most apple products have a big price tag. Sure you can get a cheaper MP3 player, but it's cheaper for a reason. Try to find one with comparable features and design and easy of use for the same price. It doesn't exist. Apple can charge a little more because their products are better. You can get a shuffle for $49 (1GB) or $69 (2GB), or a more fully loaded Nano for $149 (4GB) and $199 (8GB), which play video and everything. I'm not sure how you think that's overpriced.
I'm with you on PalmOS. I looked into getting a LifeDrive when they came out. Seemed like really interesting hardware. However from everything I hear, the OSis complete crap. Crashes all the time, completely unstable. On the other hand, PalmOS has a really rich library of apps, and it's completely open to anyone. That's one big advantage over the iPhone. I guess we couldn't get a phone with everything.
Or you could tap into the fibre line running through native land, and start an internet casino hosting service. It's arguably the only legal casino hosting in North America.
Just in case you didn't know, phone lines can pack quite a punch. The electrical signal sent down the line is enough to make those old 30 pound black phones ring. My dad decided to do all the internal phone wiring in his house, and he says that from actual experience with being shocked, that you should be pretty careful when messing with phone lines. Wikipedia says the ringing signal is generally over 100 volts.
So the trick is to wait until really late in the game, and then copy everybody else, add a few features that most people don't care about, and call yourself superior on the first iteration? This is like MS putting out a car, which is identical to some other car, except with an automatic sunroof, selling it below cost, because they have money to burn, and everybody saying they did it better on their first try.
You could just mark the characters as "bought", and then let people who bought their character, as well as the stats they bought them at. Maybe the non-bought characters would target the bought ones more. But that might be the price you have to pay just buying your way into society.
That's what I was thinking. This isn't a bot that lets you ruin the experience for other players. It's a bot that lets you level up without playing the game for hours on end. If it was a PK bot I would understand. If I was Blizzard, I would take advantage of the fact that nobody wants to start off at level 1, and have people pay extra to start with characters at certain specs. Let the guy start out at whatever specs he can think of (like selecting a computer from Dell), and make them pay extra for it.
You have to still be pretty careful when looking at game benchmark scores. ATI has cheated before with popular games. I wouldn't put it past a lot of companies.
That's what I would think they are doing. If you write a processor benchmark in C, you don't really know what it gets assembled into, you don't know if it's actually even using the SSE/SSE2/SSE3 optimizations. It's hard to know what path the program is taking unless you only give it one path. You'll still get some discrepancies between processors that don't support the same features, because the one that doesn't support SSE will take longer than the one that does, but at least you won't show one processor being faster, when it should in all senses be the same.
I don't remember getting that much physical education in school. Maybe 40 minutes, 3 days a week? I don't think the physical fitness of the students had anything to do with that time in the school gym, and had a lot more to do with how they spent their free time during recess and lunch.