In the UK, Norway (which is where I happen to live and enjoy life) and pretty much the rest of the civiliced world has one major advantage compared to the USA as far as numberportability and free choice in phones go: We have a national, unified standard for cellphone infrastructure!
This means that anyone can (in theory, and if they have enought money) start a telco and start building their own towers - or even piggyback off existing towers (ie; rent exess capacity of the larger telcos), without having to reinvent the wheel.
And I know this may sound alien to our american friends over there, but to change a cellphone provider on this side of the pond, you just open your phone - and remember, you can pick pretty much any phone you like, as long as it supports the standard - and change the SIM-card. Or do as I do, keep two SIMcards - one for private calls (which I pay) and one for work-related calls (which my employer is happy to pick up the bill for).
Oh, and we don't pay for incomming calls either... tell me again whats so great about the US ways of doing telecoms? To me it seems way more beneficial to a few, large telcos than to the poor abused user.
Is it really? Since the last serious attemt to look for traces of life on Mars (the Viking probes), we have found life on earth living under conditions we previously thought it was impossible for life to exist under; in black smokers, in the middle of hot geysirs, inside rocks in the middle of saltlakes and so on. Life is amazingly adaptable, and - despite what some biblethumpers says - able to evolve to suit the place it exists. And martian life, if it exists, have evolved on Mars and as such will be adapted to the contitions there.
Or to qoute someone most/.ers know who are: "It's life Jim, but not as we know it."
Delta V is not a reference to a spefisic rocket, but a measurement of change in velocity. To bad I can't use greek letters, but delta in this meaning looks like a pointy triangle with the point up.
End velocity - initial velocity = Delta Velocity
Or, more simply: V1-V0=DeltaV =)
Your second point however is valid; there is no way we can hope to make a chemical rocket capabel of giving us unlimited DeltaV. One possible suggestion that has been proposed is a nucular or ion engine using interstellar hydrogen as fuel... but to collect enought hydrogen to maintain an acceleration of one G you would have to travel 'plenty fast' allready.
Just throw humans on there.
Yes, in theory, we could have done that in the seventies (by 'we', read NASA and the american taxpayers). The technology needed for a "there and back again" style of mission isn't substancially different from what you need to go to the moon, if you don't mind hanging around with a couple of buddies for, oh, around three years. In fact, NASA did play with the idea of a Mars flyby or landing using Appolo hardware.
...to enable humans to travel to mars...
We already have that technology. Once we managed to stagger up off earths gravitywell - and we did that by going to the moon - we had the tech needed to go anywhere. But again, not fast.
...faster propulsion...
I suppose you mean 'propulsion allowing a higher terminal speed'. Todays chemical rockets are basicly 'burn, then coast'. You accelerate a lot for a while, then glide towards the target. A ion-engine or a nucular rocket will let you accelerate less but for a much longer time, meaning you'll get a higher terminal velocity. The providial Holy Grail for interplanitary missions would be an engine which would let you accelerate forever. Just think about it; you blast off into orbit, then turns on the flightengine. That gently accelerates you to one G.. and keeps that accelatation all the time. Halfway to the target, you simply turns around and deacceleate with one G, leaving you with zero relative speed as you enter orbit around Mars (or wherever you want to go). The speeds you'll reach are way higher than any chemical rocket can provide, the flighttime shortens and we don't have to worry about the determinal effects of living in zero G for years on end. I havn't got my notes and calculator here right now, but maybe someone could punch up some numbers on this?
...possible cold(cryo) sleep...
With the right sort of propulsion (see above), there is no need to bother with things we probaly wont master for centuries anyway.
It could be the first base humanity establishes on another planet.
Maybe - but it probaly wont be the first base humans establish on another heavenly body.
I muchly prefer Opera for browsing Has a simple mailclient built in too, and is free for personal use. What more can you want? Avilable for Windows, Linux, MacOS, OS/2, Solaris, FreeBDS (I thought that was dead?), QNX and EPOC.
Maybe you can call it 'imperial' system because some people will categorize America as an empire.
While I can see some valid points in that argument, the whole system with inches-feet-yards, quarts-pint-gallons and ounces-pound-stones are know as the imperial system because it was the system used by the british empire, while the metric system is know as the metric system because it was developed by the french...
Considering how anti-british and pro-french the US was in it's infancy, it's surpricing that they didn't adopt the SI (System International) the second it came out - when all is said and done, Thommas Jefferson did propose a decimal based system in 1790, five years before france adopted the first metric system. In 1875, the US was one of the first nations to sign the The Convention of the Metre, which was nine years after the metric system was made legal (but not mandatory) in the US. Even so, 213 years after a US stateman suggested a system close to todays metric system, the US remains the only industrialized country in the world that does not use the metric system, but instead insist on using an outdated system of measurements inherated from their earlier cononial overlords...
Those are too hard to pronounce. Who not just distinguish them by prefixing the metric ones with the word "metric", as we do with tons and metric tons.
Perhaps because there are more to the world than your corner, and practicly everone else uses the metric system? Logic dictates that it makes a whole lot more sence to do it the other way:
One kilobyte = 1000 bytes
One imperial kilobyte = 1024 bytes
When all is said and done, 'kilo' is a prefix that means 1000x the base unit. It's the imperial system of measurements that messed up... twelve of that makes one of those, and three of those makes one like these..
Or we could just beat the hard-disk manufacturers with a stick until they understand that most people expect 1 kilobyte to be 1024 bytes:P
Note; this holds true for most first-person shoot-em-up, right back to Castle Wolfenstein and Doom.
Is it violent? Yes.
Is it speculative? Certainly.
Does it use blood and gore as a selling point? Off course.
But does it leads to more violent bahaviour? Now that is hard to prove... and unless it can be absolutly disproved, there will always be people who claims it does and will try to tell the gaming insdustry what they can and cannot do.
We'll always have parents and 'worried people' screaming up on how bad the latest games are. But instead of blaming the gamingindustry - who are basicly turning out more of whats popular - for perverting the youth, shouldn't they instead be taking time to be with their offspring, and possible keep some sort of controll at home over what games the children plays? For some reason, I'm reminded of a certain movie from a few years back, where concerned mothers started a war with Canada because their kids had learned a few naughty words...
Parental responibility. Is that to much to ask for?
A dissident is someone who disagree with someone you disagree with and a terrorist is someone disagreeing with you. In the same way, a freedomfighter is someone fighting an oppresive regime you don't like, while a rebel is someone fighting an oppresive regime you do like.
If you are committed to a competitive marketplace, don't permanently settle on a single vendor for anything.
If you're commited to the real idea behind competition in the markedplace, it stands to reason that you pick the vendor able to deliver the best merchandise in the shortest time for the lowest price. In this case, Google consistently provides me with more relevant links in shorter time than the other searchengines, and you can't get things cheaper than free.
If you are committed to a competitive marketplace, don't permanently settle on a single vendor for anything.
I did. What a bunch of whiners - it's pretty much clear that their websites isn't popular enought to get a good pagerank; and instead of spending time and effort on correcting the issues, they decide that Google is to blame.
Google is a private cooperation. That means that as long as they stay within the limits of the law, they can do pretty much what they like. And if you don't like that, try one of the other searchengines out there. I'll stick to Google.
I agree - even the oh so lousy web-browserfrom the softwarefirm we all love to hate has the option to either accept cookies, ask the luser for each cookie or reject all cookies.
If you do believe that cookies are a bad thing(tm), then you should turn them off - and you might be better off burning your PC and move far, far awy from anyone who can even look at you as well. However, with a little bit of common sence, some insight in how the real world works (trust me - very few people are so interesting that 'big brother' actually invest time in stalking them) and a habit of not doing much wrong, this is naught but a new thing Google has come up with. I don't think this one will last thought, even such a small thing as a counter will add to the time it takes to load Google, and they have put a lot of pride in beeing as fast as they can be.
Hate to break it to you, but 'get by with out the shuttle' is excatly what this is supposed to do.
Todays shuttle is a halfway house between very different requirements; It was to carry people, it was to carry cargo, it was to be reusable and it was to be cheap. Managing one, two or possible even four of these is possible, but all four at the same time is very, very difficult to do. This new generation spacecraft removes one of the original requirements - as it's not supposed to be a cargocarrier - and thus makes it much easier to make a reuseable personellcarreing spacecraft thats reasonable cheap to operate (cheaper than the shuttle at any rate).
And as long as the US goverment has decided that a permanent base in space is needed - even if I think the ISS is a far cry from what it should have been - then some way of launcing and recovering the astronauts are needed. Yes, there is the russian Soyuz, but while arguable the most successfull spacecraft of all time with more than 230 missions flown, it's also the oldest spacecraft in operation (the design streach back to the late fifties) and it's not reusable. Or you can try to hitch a ride with the chinese, allthought I have doubts they'll let americans ride with them... all those little differences you know. And the ESA are playing with manned spacecraft too, allthought only on the drawingboards right now. So, all in all, grounding the shuttle and not replacing it with a better, more up to date manned spacecraft will leave the US in the mercy of others as far as manned access to space goes.
...under almost all cell phone plans currently, you have to pay for Text Messages and calls, incoming and outgoing...
Lemme get this straight... when someone calls you or sends you an SMS, you pay for it? Mate, you're getting screwed. If a telcom here in Europe (and most of the rest of the world I guess) even mentioned that it had pondered the remote possibility of doing that, their subscriberbase would melt away like frozen nitrogen on the surface of the sun. It's not that hard replacing the simcard in a mobile phone y'know...
...why do so many people choose to create destructive and malicious programs instead of harvesting the glory that can be had when a really good app is written?
A good question, and a hard one to come up with a definite answer to. Part of the answer, I suspect, is that it is much easier and faster to be a spammer or write a virus (the term 'skript-kiddy' come to mind) than to actually sit down, learn to program, identify a problem, write a good app to retify it and distrebute it... and since people probaly wont be using your app and realising how great it is unless it is free, you can make more money beeing destructive.
While getting rid of the cable is a step in the right direction, my GameBoyAdvance still don't look like a proper PDA when I pull it up during booring meetings...
Frankly, I would believe that I live in a world where even evil terrorist hackers have better things to do than to try and hack into someones handheld game...
You don't frigging need any security when all you do is trying to outwit your mate in Pokemon. It's not like it's a critical system, or contains personal information. Leave it unsecure, it'll leave bandwidth and CPU power to what matter - the game.
The frequency would be great, would hurt your eyes after a couple minutes I would guess...
I guess that depends on what you mean by a "great" frequency. In Europe, television has a frequency of 50Hz (it's 60Hz in the US) - even if I've heard that two and two frames are alike, in other words that the frequency is 25 or 30Hz. Movies in theaters are usually run at 24 frames per second, in other words a frequency of 24Hz.
There is no real need to have frequencies running much higher than that to watch a movie - since a frequency of 72Hz would just mean that the same picture would be drawn three times over, and thats a waste on a device like this.
In addition, there might not make much sence in talking about frequeny at all on a device like this; if they want to save on power, they only alter the state of the pixels that actually changes between each frame.
On the face of it, government involvement seems like a good idea. However, what about all we non-US citizens? Could we all count on our respective governments to cooperate and allow micropayments to really flourish? Or will 'international' users find themselves unable to access bits of the web?
I'd much rather see the internet community develop a useful standard that can be easily adopted by vendors...perhaps such a thing already exists? A technological solution is always better than a government mandate.
Lets face it; over the last few centuries, who is it that has managed to develop several convinient systems for transfering money internationaly - often embracing the latest technology to do so? It's not the various goverments... it's the banks. The banks needed a way to transfer money from one place to another without physicaly moving it, so various system was developed. They even manage to make a profit out of it.
Now, if the banks got their act together and launced a simple to implement system for micropayments - possible just nationwide as a start - I believe that it might take off. As more and more people saw that the system worked, more and more would pick it up; allowing, for instance, slashdot-readers to pay 0.01 cent to the owner of the website we're pounding into rubble, allowing him to pay his ISP for more bandwidth for a limited time. Off course, this could work for pr0n as well, letting you pay for just the pictures / movies you download rather than to pay for all the crap you'll never bother seeing once you realise that all the stuff you just handed over ten bucks for sucks chunks.
One of the great things about the internet is that anyone can publish, no matter how small and insignificant they are. One of the really bad things about the internet is that anyone can publish, no matter how loony and horrendusly wrong they are.
As he points out in the article, one of the reasons why people thought that micropayments would work was filtering. But as Google does that for free, all you need to do to make your pages popular is to get lots of people linking to you... or if you're devious, link to yourself. It don't matter how wrong you are, or how crazy your conspiracytheori is - on the web, you and I carry as much weight as the next guy over.
Sure, papers like the NY times requires registration (thus they ain't complely free, even if you don't hand over money), but at the same time they do provide information you can trust a bit more... and that is worth someting - at least to me.
Free speech and free beer is two different thigns... but if we keep demanging that all the stuff on the web should be free as in beer, we also get all the loonies practising their free speech, adding way to much noise to the signal.
After the hard part of putting together a Notes R3 computing environment that included MS-DOS 6.22, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and a circa-1993 copy of Excel 5.0 obtained from eBay...
Heh.. I got all that on the shelf over the 'puter nicely sorted and in colourcoded diskette-boxes (DOS and WIN in the green one, apps in the red, games in the blue), and if I look in the closet, I got a nice, fast 486DX33 with a whopping 8Mb RAM to run it on. So if setting up a ten year old system is the hard part, the actuall programming must be really, really easy - as I could have that system up in ten minutes.
Pet Peeve #1: All Americans who whine about the price of gas. If you really want to whine, come to the UK where our Government has turned taxing petrol into an art form.
Now, I don't know how much y'all pay for the petrol / gas in the UK, but here in Norway about 80% of what we pay at the pump end up in the coffers of the goverment - taxes, excise duty on petrol, VAT, VAT on the taxes and the CO2-tax...
I visited the US (West Virginia to be spesific) this summer, and I commented on how cheap the petrol was; just 1$49 for a US gallon (3.7 liter), while back home I pay the equalent of 4$90 for a US gallon (the price at the pump today was 9.49 kroner / liter). So honestly, the people in the US has nothing to complain about as far as the cost of gasonile goes... in fact, if the cost of it was higher in the US, we might see more sensible cars rolling of the productionlines, and less of the gas-guzzling SUVs.
It means that the RIAA has finally realised that it can't stop people sharing music over P2P. Thus, knowing that no one in power would dare stop anything that pretends to combat something as vile as childpornografy, they change their aim - at least to outwards apperance.
Lets tell it to the politicans; the RIAA has no legitimate reason to stop people sharing childporn. The only semiofficiall organisation in the US that may have a legitimate reason to do that is the MIAA, and then only for childporn made by their members (which could lead to a lot of akward quiestions later...).
The focus of the RIAA is to prevent people from swapping music, thus making people buy overpriced CDs instead. Everything else is just blue smoke and mirrors.
As for the pedophiles... well, I guess a bullet in the head will 'cure' their sick lusts...
Wrong, on two things. Firstly, this isn't "big brother" watching you.. if anything, it's "little brother". Secondly, it's not in your home, but in public areas. You did know that people could see you in public, didn't you?
I can't see why people get worked up over the fact that there are webcams in public places. The moment you leave your home someone is likely to see you - and if you plan on doing things you would rather that no one saw, you should have done them before you went out. If anything, cameras in public places can be a good thing - in downtown Oslo (thats in Norway) they placed a couple of cameras in one most popular parks for junkies, and look and behold; even thought the junkies still hang out there (everyone has to be somewhere I guess), they don't harass the other people walking by no more.
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK, Norway (which is where I happen to live and enjoy life) and pretty much the rest of the civiliced world has one major advantage compared to the USA as far as numberportability and free choice in phones go:
We have a national, unified standard for cellphone infrastructure!
This means that anyone can (in theory, and if they have enought money) start a telco and start building their own towers - or even piggyback off existing towers (ie; rent exess capacity of the larger telcos), without having to reinvent the wheel. And I know this may sound alien to our american friends over there, but to change a cellphone provider on this side of the pond, you just open your phone - and remember, you can pick pretty much any phone you like, as long as it supports the standard - and change the SIM-card. Or do as I do, keep two SIMcards - one for private calls (which I pay) and one for work-related calls (which my employer is happy to pick up the bill for).
Oh, and we don't pay for incomming calls either... tell me again whats so great about the US ways of doing telecoms? To me it seems way more beneficial to a few, large telcos than to the poor abused user.
That is far too low for life by any measure.
Is it really? Since the last serious attemt to look for traces of life on Mars (the Viking probes), we have found life on earth living under conditions we previously thought it was impossible for life to exist under; in black smokers, in the middle of hot geysirs, inside rocks in the middle of saltlakes and so on. Life is amazingly adaptable, and - despite what some biblethumpers says - able to evolve to suit the place it exists. And martian life, if it exists, have evolved on Mars and as such will be adapted to the contitions there.
Or to qoute someone most /.ers know who are: "It's life Jim, but not as we know it."
Delta V is not a reference to a spefisic rocket, but a measurement of change in velocity. To bad I can't use greek letters, but delta in this meaning looks like a pointy triangle with the point up.
End velocity - initial velocity = Delta Velocity
Or, more simply: V1-V0=DeltaV =)
Your second point however is valid; there is no way we can hope to make a chemical rocket capabel of giving us unlimited DeltaV. One possible suggestion that has been proposed is a nucular or ion engine using interstellar hydrogen as fuel... but to collect enought hydrogen to maintain an acceleration of one G you would have to travel 'plenty fast' allready.
Just throw humans on there.
Yes, in theory, we could have done that in the seventies (by 'we', read NASA and the american taxpayers). The technology needed for a "there and back again" style of mission isn't substancially different from what you need to go to the moon, if you don't mind hanging around with a couple of buddies for, oh, around three years. In fact, NASA did play with the idea of a Mars flyby or landing using Appolo hardware.
We already have that technology. Once we managed to stagger up off earths gravitywell - and we did that by going to the moon - we had the tech needed to go anywhere. But again, not fast.
I suppose you mean 'propulsion allowing a higher terminal speed'. Todays chemical rockets are basicly 'burn, then coast'. You accelerate a lot for a while, then glide towards the target. A ion-engine or a nucular rocket will let you accelerate less but for a much longer time, meaning you'll get a higher terminal velocity. The providial Holy Grail for interplanitary missions would be an engine which would let you accelerate forever. Just think about it; you blast off into orbit, then turns on the flightengine. That gently accelerates you to one G.. and keeps that accelatation all the time. Halfway to the target, you simply turns around and deacceleate with one G, leaving you with zero relative speed as you enter orbit around Mars (or wherever you want to go). The speeds you'll reach are way higher than any chemical rocket can provide, the flighttime shortens and we don't have to worry about the determinal effects of living in zero G for years on end. I havn't got my notes and calculator here right now, but maybe someone could punch up some numbers on this?
With the right sort of propulsion (see above), there is no need to bother with things we probaly wont master for centuries anyway.
It could be the first base humanity establishes on another planet.
Maybe - but it probaly wont be the first base humans establish on another heavenly body.
I muchly prefer Opera for browsing Has a simple mailclient built in too, and is free for personal use. What more can you want? Avilable for Windows, Linux, MacOS, OS/2, Solaris, FreeBDS (I thought that was dead?), QNX and EPOC.
Maybe you can call it 'imperial' system because some people will categorize America as an empire.
While I can see some valid points in that argument, the whole system with inches-feet-yards, quarts-pint-gallons and ounces-pound-stones are know as the imperial system because it was the system used by the british empire, while the metric system is know as the metric system because it was developed by the french...
Considering how anti-british and pro-french the US was in it's infancy, it's surpricing that they didn't adopt the SI (System International) the second it came out - when all is said and done, Thommas Jefferson did propose a decimal based system in 1790, five years before france adopted the first metric system. In 1875, the US was one of the first nations to sign the The Convention of the Metre, which was nine years after the metric system was made legal (but not mandatory) in the US. Even so, 213 years after a US stateman suggested a system close to todays metric system, the US remains the only industrialized country in the world that does not use the metric system, but instead insist on using an outdated system of measurements inherated from their earlier cononial overlords...
Those are too hard to pronounce. Who not just distinguish them by prefixing the metric ones with the word "metric", as we do with tons and metric tons.
Perhaps because there are more to the world than your corner, and practicly everone else uses the metric system? Logic dictates that it makes a whole lot more sence to do it the other way:
One kilobyte = 1000 bytes
One imperial kilobyte = 1024 bytes
When all is said and done, 'kilo' is a prefix that means 1000x the base unit. It's the imperial system of measurements that messed up... twelve of that makes one of those, and three of those makes one like these..
Or we could just beat the hard-disk manufacturers with a stick until they understand that most people expect 1 kilobyte to be 1024 bytes :P
Note; this holds true for most first-person shoot-em-up, right back to Castle Wolfenstein and Doom.
Is it violent? Yes.
Is it speculative? Certainly.
Does it use blood and gore as a selling point? Off course.
But does it leads to more violent bahaviour? Now that is hard to prove... and unless it can be absolutly disproved, there will always be people who claims it does and will try to tell the gaming insdustry what they can and cannot do.
We'll always have parents and 'worried people' screaming up on how bad the latest games are. But instead of blaming the gamingindustry - who are basicly turning out more of whats popular - for perverting the youth, shouldn't they instead be taking time to be with their offspring, and possible keep some sort of controll at home over what games the children plays? For some reason, I'm reminded of a certain movie from a few years back, where concerned mothers started a war with Canada because their kids had learned a few naughty words...
Parental responibility. Is that to much to ask for?
I'm not sure he can, but it is very easy:
A dissident is someone who disagree with someone you disagree with and a terrorist is someone disagreeing with you. In the same way, a freedomfighter is someone fighting an oppresive regime you don't like, while a rebel is someone fighting an oppresive regime you do like.
If you are committed to a competitive marketplace, don't permanently settle on a single vendor for anything.
If you're commited to the real idea behind competition in the markedplace, it stands to reason that you pick the vendor able to deliver the best merchandise in the shortest time for the lowest price. In this case, Google consistently provides me with more relevant links in shorter time than the other searchengines, and you can't get things cheaper than free.
If you are committed to a competitive marketplace, don't permanently settle on a single vendor for anything.
I did. What a bunch of whiners - it's pretty much clear that their websites isn't popular enought to get a good pagerank; and instead of spending time and effort on correcting the issues, they decide that Google is to blame.
Google is a private cooperation. That means that as long as they stay within the limits of the law, they can do pretty much what they like. And if you don't like that, try one of the other searchengines out there. I'll stick to Google.
I agree - even the oh so lousy web-browserfrom the softwarefirm we all love to hate has the option to either accept cookies, ask the luser for each cookie or reject all cookies.
If you do believe that cookies are a bad thing(tm), then you should turn them off - and you might be better off burning your PC and move far, far awy from anyone who can even look at you as well. However, with a little bit of common sence, some insight in how the real world works (trust me - very few people are so interesting that 'big brother' actually invest time in stalking them) and a habit of not doing much wrong, this is naught but a new thing Google has come up with. I don't think this one will last thought, even such a small thing as a counter will add to the time it takes to load Google, and they have put a lot of pride in beeing as fast as they can be.
Hate to break it to you, but 'get by with out the shuttle' is excatly what this is supposed to do.
Todays shuttle is a halfway house between very different requirements; It was to carry people, it was to carry cargo, it was to be reusable and it was to be cheap. Managing one, two or possible even four of these is possible, but all four at the same time is very, very difficult to do. This new generation spacecraft removes one of the original requirements - as it's not supposed to be a cargocarrier - and thus makes it much easier to make a reuseable personellcarreing spacecraft thats reasonable cheap to operate (cheaper than the shuttle at any rate).
And as long as the US goverment has decided that a permanent base in space is needed - even if I think the ISS is a far cry from what it should have been - then some way of launcing and recovering the astronauts are needed. Yes, there is the russian Soyuz, but while arguable the most successfull spacecraft of all time with more than 230 missions flown, it's also the oldest spacecraft in operation (the design streach back to the late fifties) and it's not reusable. Or you can try to hitch a ride with the chinese, allthought I have doubts they'll let americans ride with them... all those little differences you know. And the ESA are playing with manned spacecraft too, allthought only on the drawingboards right now. So, all in all, grounding the shuttle and not replacing it with a better, more up to date manned spacecraft will leave the US in the mercy of others as far as manned access to space goes.
Maybe someone could come up with a novel solution...
Turn the volume up - a lot.
Lemme get this straight... when someone calls you or sends you an SMS, you pay for it? Mate, you're getting screwed. If a telcom here in Europe (and most of the rest of the world I guess) even mentioned that it had pondered the remote possibility of doing that, their subscriberbase would melt away like frozen nitrogen on the surface of the sun. It's not that hard replacing the simcard in a mobile phone y'know...
A good question, and a hard one to come up with a definite answer to. Part of the answer, I suspect, is that it is much easier and faster to be a spammer or write a virus (the term 'skript-kiddy' come to mind) than to actually sit down, learn to program, identify a problem, write a good app to retify it and distrebute it... and since people probaly wont be using your app and realising how great it is unless it is free, you can make more money beeing destructive.
It is just human nature, I'm sorry to say.
While getting rid of the cable is a step in the right direction, my GameBoyAdvance still don't look like a proper PDA when I pull it up during booring meetings...
Frankly, I would believe that I live in a world where even evil terrorist hackers have better things to do than to try and hack into someones handheld game...
You don't frigging need any security when all you do is trying to outwit your mate in Pokemon. It's not like it's a critical system, or contains personal information. Leave it unsecure, it'll leave bandwidth and CPU power to what matter - the game.
The frequency would be great, would hurt your eyes after a couple minutes I would guess...
I guess that depends on what you mean by a "great" frequency. In Europe, television has a frequency of 50Hz (it's 60Hz in the US) - even if I've heard that two and two frames are alike, in other words that the frequency is 25 or 30Hz. Movies in theaters are usually run at 24 frames per second, in other words a frequency of 24Hz.
There is no real need to have frequencies running much higher than that to watch a movie - since a frequency of 72Hz would just mean that the same picture would be drawn three times over, and thats a waste on a device like this.
In addition, there might not make much sence in talking about frequeny at all on a device like this; if they want to save on power, they only alter the state of the pixels that actually changes between each frame.
If you want extreme, you should check out these extreme guys... extremly fast!
On the face of it, government involvement seems like a good idea. However, what about all we non-US citizens? Could we all count on our respective governments to cooperate and allow micropayments to really flourish? Or will 'international' users find themselves unable to access bits of the web?
I'd much rather see the internet community develop a useful standard that can be easily adopted by vendors...perhaps such a thing already exists? A technological solution is always better than a government mandate.
Lets face it; over the last few centuries, who is it that has managed to develop several convinient systems for transfering money internationaly - often embracing the latest technology to do so? It's not the various goverments... it's the banks. The banks needed a way to transfer money from one place to another without physicaly moving it, so various system was developed. They even manage to make a profit out of it.
Now, if the banks got their act together and launced a simple to implement system for micropayments - possible just nationwide as a start - I believe that it might take off. As more and more people saw that the system worked, more and more would pick it up; allowing, for instance, slashdot-readers to pay 0.01 cent to the owner of the website we're pounding into rubble, allowing him to pay his ISP for more bandwidth for a limited time. Off course, this could work for pr0n as well, letting you pay for just the pictures / movies you download rather than to pay for all the crap you'll never bother seeing once you realise that all the stuff you just handed over ten bucks for sucks chunks.
Free is good... or is it?
One of the great things about the internet is that anyone can publish, no matter how small and insignificant they are. One of the really bad things about the internet is that anyone can publish, no matter how loony and horrendusly wrong they are.
As he points out in the article, one of the reasons why people thought that micropayments would work was filtering. But as Google does that for free, all you need to do to make your pages popular is to get lots of people linking to you... or if you're devious, link to yourself. It don't matter how wrong you are, or how crazy your conspiracytheori is - on the web, you and I carry as much weight as the next guy over.
Sure, papers like the NY times requires registration (thus they ain't complely free, even if you don't hand over money), but at the same time they do provide information you can trust a bit more... and that is worth someting - at least to me.
Free speech and free beer is two different thigns... but if we keep demanging that all the stuff on the web should be free as in beer, we also get all the loonies practising their free speech, adding way to much noise to the signal.
After the hard part of putting together a Notes R3 computing environment that included MS-DOS 6.22, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and a circa-1993 copy of Excel 5.0 obtained from eBay...
Heh.. I got all that on the shelf over the 'puter nicely sorted and in colourcoded diskette-boxes (DOS and WIN in the green one, apps in the red, games in the blue), and if I look in the closet, I got a nice, fast 486DX33 with a whopping 8Mb RAM to run it on. So if setting up a ten year old system is the hard part, the actuall programming must be really, really easy - as I could have that system up in ten minutes.
Pet Peeve #1: All Americans who whine about the price of gas. If you really want to whine, come to the UK where our Government has turned taxing petrol into an art form.
Now, I don't know how much y'all pay for the petrol / gas in the UK, but here in Norway about 80% of what we pay at the pump end up in the coffers of the goverment - taxes, excise duty on petrol, VAT, VAT on the taxes and the CO2-tax...
I visited the US (West Virginia to be spesific) this summer, and I commented on how cheap the petrol was; just 1$49 for a US gallon (3.7 liter), while back home I pay the equalent of 4$90 for a US gallon (the price at the pump today was 9.49 kroner / liter). So honestly, the people in the US has nothing to complain about as far as the cost of gasonile goes... in fact, if the cost of it was higher in the US, we might see more sensible cars rolling of the productionlines, and less of the gas-guzzling SUVs.
It means that the RIAA has finally realised that it can't stop people sharing music over P2P. Thus, knowing that no one in power would dare stop anything that pretends to combat something as vile as childpornografy, they change their aim - at least to outwards apperance.
Lets tell it to the politicans; the RIAA has no legitimate reason to stop people sharing childporn. The only semiofficiall organisation in the US that may have a legitimate reason to do that is the MIAA, and then only for childporn made by their members (which could lead to a lot of akward quiestions later...).
The focus of the RIAA is to prevent people from swapping music, thus making people buy overpriced CDs instead. Everything else is just blue smoke and mirrors.
As for the pedophiles... well, I guess a bullet in the head will 'cure' their sick lusts...
Sounds more like 1984 to me.
Wrong, on two things. Firstly, this isn't "big brother" watching you.. if anything, it's "little brother". Secondly, it's not in your home, but in public areas. You did know that people could see you in public, didn't you?
I can't see why people get worked up over the fact that there are webcams in public places. The moment you leave your home someone is likely to see you - and if you plan on doing things you would rather that no one saw, you should have done them before you went out. If anything, cameras in public places can be a good thing - in downtown Oslo (thats in Norway) they placed a couple of cameras in one most popular parks for junkies, and look and behold; even thought the junkies still hang out there (everyone has to be somewhere I guess), they don't harass the other people walking by no more.