Until you can achieve total matter->energy conversion *without* antimatter, nothing else comes remotely close in terms of thrust-to-reaction-mass efficiency; as such, antimatter could be used in situations where chemical or conventional nuclear systems would be unsuitable (designing a vehicle which can carry enough fuel to escape a steep gravity well, for instance).
To be sure, it's wildly, tremendously inefficient in terms of generation-side energy expenditures -- but no conventional nuclear or chemical reactions come remotely close. Exotic materials may not be used in everyday situations, but they certainly have their place -- military or "big science" projects have a great deal of history of leveraging such things.
There are also medical imaging applications, which may be feasible if the optimistic $25mil/gram estimates come to eventually be grounded in truth.
The most thorough treatment of the subject I've seen is that of Robert Forward (who did a study on the subject commissioned by the military). His findings were to the effect that if antimatter production were treated as an engineering problem rather than a scientific one, production of useful quantities would be entirely feasible using incremental and reasonably-foreseen advances on existing technology.
Whether or not you buy his argument in full, there's no doubt that we throw away most of the energy involved in creating antimatter, and much of that needlessly (as we only know how to capture a very small portion of the results). As such, the claim that "there's no changing" the power requirements is false on its face.
Elk River has nothing but drunks and rednecks. What do they need DIY equipment for?
I grew up in a small town full of drunks and rednecks, and there were a lot of DIYers and folks with interesting hobbies. (I need to look up the model rocketry hobbyist who helped me win a competition among my high school science class for self-propelled ground vehicles[1] -- that was a lot of fun, though I understand they revised the rules for future years to close the loophole we leveraged).
I'm not saying the demographic doesn't have their faults, but you're seriously misjudging them.
Perhaps the problem is that the implementation was not perfect at first, leading to a need for task control, and now things have improved but people have caught the habit?
GP's other point -- that he doesn't trust apps not to continue requesting location updates in hte background -- is also quite plausible. There is nothing stopping such apps from starting a background thread andcontinuously polling for information. Yes, the UI thread is stopped while the activity is not being shown, but that doesn't mean the app is necessarily idle. In this case, manual control of the app lifespan seems sensible to me.
There's also nothing to stop an application from registering itself to events that don't make sense, getting loaded into memory, and polling then -- even if you "killed" that app earlier.
If malicious developer decides that they want to use the permissions you gave them at times other than when the user is intentionally running their application in the background, you can't stop them. Running a task killer, thus, is only an illusion of control, and completely circumventable.
If you don't trust a developer not to pull that kind of thing, you shouldn't be running their apps.
Unless the comments describe how Android's implementation ends up in a result contrary to what's been explicitly documented behavior since before 1.0 (and, beyond that, elementary behavior every Android application developer has to know), I don't really see the value. This is one of those places where croudsourced touchy-feely impressions are just as likely to be misleading as useful... perhaps moreso, given the self-selected nature.
So -- here's the thing. Unless you go out of your way to have a background thread that stays alive, events are triggered by intents. Killing background applications won't stop them from being loaded when an intent happens, it just means they have to get reloaded when one happens, making your phone (guess what!) slower. You aren't saving your privacy against a malicious or misguided application, you're just getting an illusion of control and calling it security.
Long-press the physical "back" button on your Android device, and you're out of the application. Press the physical "home" button, and you're back at your home screen. Long-press the physical "home" button and you're at a menu of recently-used applications. Etc.
There is, in fact, a consistent interface. If it's insufficiently discoverable, that's a different issue.
Android applications do not run in the background unless they go out of their way to do so. When they *do* go out of their way to do so, they can be killed at any time by the operating system. This design makes tools such as "Advanced Task Killer" not only unnecessary, but counterproductive; read the link above for a detailed description of why auto-killing background tasks actually makes Android *slower*.
Riiiight. If Steam didn't have adequate fraud-protection measures, they'd *already* be having problems with illegitimate purchases -- the problem wouldn't be waiting for tools that analyze how users interact in multiplayer (tools which would provide all the more data to use in variance/cheat detection) to announce itself!
Funny thing -- I bought a Kindle DX for the explicit purpose of reading books purchased from Manning Publications (whose preprints are available for purchase only as 9.5x11 PDF, which most smaller e-readers don't handle gracefully). Works great for the purpose.
...while historical adventure games typically did suck in exactly that fashion (searching-for-objects being much too big a gameplay element), have you played much of the modern interactive fiction being noncommercially produced?
I follow IFComp when the opportunity arises, and the quality of the writing (and the puzzles) of each year's winners is astonishingly better than what the commercial games of the 80s offered.
"Troubleshooting" only matters if you're installing ROM Manager yourself. More typically, folks get it bundled in preinstalled (in a version tested against their handset) the first (and only) time they install Cyanogen by hand. From that point on, it Just Works.
Personally, I get more value from an open ecosystem (where, for instance, I can install applications like Swype which change the user experience system-wide -- something Jobs would never allow on the iPhone) than I would from not having that one-time manual install overhead every time I get a new phone. YMMV.
You want your phone to notify you when a new Cyanogen release is out and upgrade over-the-air as a clicky friendly operation? There's an app for that.
...now, there's nothing wrong with sticking with what your phone vendor provides -- anything modernish ships with Android 2.2, and developers will be building their apps with 2.x support for a looong time -- but the "community" option isn't the hassle you think it is.
If you're the kind of person who needs OS $X+1, you're probably also the kind of person who doesn't have a problem with installing Cyanogen, or buying a "with Google" developer-friendly device where owner-rootability is a supported feature rather than a bug.
Sue them for what, exactly? Arbitration companies advertise themselves to corporate clients as a highly effective form of debt collection. You think they'd be quite that shameless if they didn't have carte blanche to do as they please once someone is foolish enough to sign a contract waiving their ability to use the courts?
With rare exceptions, arbitration decisions are not subject to court review on their merits. Courts have ruled that "wacky" and "silly" decisions can be upheld. Even decisions that cause "substantial injustice" are allowed to stand.
Limited public information shows the bias of BMA:
In California, National Arbitration Forum arbitrators handled more than 19,000 disputes involving credit card holders. The card holders prevailed only 4 percent of the time. The companies won 94 percent of the time.
In 16,056 of the 19,000 cases, the arbitrator based a decision solely on documents provided by the company. Consumers won two times; the companies won 16,054 times.
In 2,019 cases where the arbitrator actually held a hearing, the consumer prevailed in only1.4 percent of the cases.
Documents filed in an Alabama court case show that NAF arbitrators decided in favor of the consumer 87 times and in favor of First USA Bank 19,610 (99.6 percent) times.
To be sure, big companies may win in the courts more often than the little guys do... but 99.6%?
Binding arbitration does not always go in favor of big business.
Not always, but close enough.
It's a stacked game -- the corporations know which arbitrators have ruled for and against them, but an individual has no such knowledge. Those arbitrators who tend to find in favor of consumers tend not to be rehired.
"A technique to pirate games", or "a technique to enable OtherOS"? The technique, in and of itself, does neither of those things -- what you call it, then, is a matter of your chosen spin.
That said -- if the "technique to pirate games" spin were more accurate, Sony would have been able to dig evidence to that effect in discovery; I doubt that they would have chosen to settle if they'd found evidence that would let them drag their opponent's name through the mud (and thereby turn around all the persecuting-the-white-hat bad press they'd been getting).
One more thing about your post that made me laugh. Geohat is not some human rights activist. He's a kid that wants to play free video games. Now, I don't have a problem with that myself, but to decide he's now a human rights activist because he got caught stealing games from sony? LOL.
You haven't been paying much attention.
Geohot discovered a technique which could, potentially, be used by others to "steal video games" -- but there has been no credible allegation (and remember, Sony had a big discovery phase to try to prove their point to the contrary) that he himself was working to enable piracy.
As you might recall, the thing that incited Geohot to look at the PS3 was Other OS being disabled -- nothing related to stealing video games at all.
You're making assertions not about ethical relativists, but about normative relativists -- the former group accepts the thesis that there exists no universal standard for ethical behavior, but only those within (far smaller) latter subset believe that this actually has consequences relating to how people ought to behave; the bulk of ethical relativists believe that enforcing personal or cultural standards is necessary and proper, even though those standards are not universal.
Suggest you learn what words mean before trying to use them in the future.
Studies have found that there's a fair amount of homeostasis around the amount people want to budget for gas each year.
It's actually better than that -- for most people (you're clearly an outlier), there's a fair bit of homeostasis around how much time they're willing to spend commuting. So -- whether someone is driving a bicycle or an SUV, they generally won't accept more than a 45-minute commuter time. Sure, there may be some lag for that to take effect (as folks change jobs and housing only so frequently), but it all evens out in the end.
As such, I'm happy to be a "dirty hippie" spending my 45 minutes getting some exercise and stress relief... and saving money all the while.
I understand your technical points, but it is not "the cloud" if they cannot provide those features. Amazon is just another generic hosting service, not a cloud service.
If you close the definition of a cloud service to the point that nobody can provide a generic cloud service... then what good is the definition anyhow?
An excessively closed definition is similarly useless to an excessively open one -- neither is optimal for purposes of expressing meaning to others. As such, I'll stick with the conventional definition rather than accept your proposed amendment.
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Until you can achieve total matter->energy conversion *without* antimatter, nothing else comes remotely close in terms of thrust-to-reaction-mass efficiency; as such, antimatter could be used in situations where chemical or conventional nuclear systems would be unsuitable (designing a vehicle which can carry enough fuel to escape a steep gravity well, for instance).
To be sure, it's wildly, tremendously inefficient in terms of generation-side energy expenditures -- but no conventional nuclear or chemical reactions come remotely close. Exotic materials may not be used in everyday situations, but they certainly have their place -- military or "big science" projects have a great deal of history of leveraging such things.
There are also medical imaging applications, which may be feasible if the optimistic $25mil/gram estimates come to eventually be grounded in truth.
You're not old enough to remember it?
Yes, it's a real game. Yes, it's kid-friendly. Also? AWESOME.
The most thorough treatment of the subject I've seen is that of Robert Forward (who did a study on the subject commissioned by the military). His findings were to the effect that if antimatter production were treated as an engineering problem rather than a scientific one, production of useful quantities would be entirely feasible using incremental and reasonably-foreseen advances on existing technology.
Whether or not you buy his argument in full, there's no doubt that we throw away most of the energy involved in creating antimatter, and much of that needlessly (as we only know how to capture a very small portion of the results). As such, the claim that "there's no changing" the power requirements is false on its face.
I grew up in a small town full of drunks and rednecks, and there were a lot of DIYers and folks with interesting hobbies. (I need to look up the model rocketry hobbyist who helped me win a competition among my high school science class for self-propelled ground vehicles[1] -- that was a lot of fun, though I understand they revised the rules for future years to close the loophole we leveraged).
I'm not saying the demographic doesn't have their faults, but you're seriously misjudging them.
Seems quite plausible.
There's also nothing to stop an application from registering itself to events that don't make sense, getting loaded into memory, and polling then -- even if you "killed" that app earlier.
If malicious developer decides that they want to use the permissions you gave them at times other than when the user is intentionally running their application in the background, you can't stop them. Running a task killer, thus, is only an illusion of control, and completely circumventable.
If you don't trust a developer not to pull that kind of thing, you shouldn't be running their apps.
Unless the comments describe how Android's implementation ends up in a result contrary to what's been explicitly documented behavior since before 1.0 (and, beyond that, elementary behavior every Android application developer has to know), I don't really see the value. This is one of those places where croudsourced touchy-feely impressions are just as likely to be misleading as useful... perhaps moreso, given the self-selected nature.
So -- here's the thing. Unless you go out of your way to have a background thread that stays alive, events are triggered by intents. Killing background applications won't stop them from being loaded when an intent happens, it just means they have to get reloaded when one happens, making your phone (guess what!) slower. You aren't saving your privacy against a malicious or misguided application, you're just getting an illusion of control and calling it security.
Long-press the physical "back" button on your Android device, and you're out of the application. Press the physical "home" button, and you're back at your home screen. Long-press the physical "home" button and you're at a menu of recently-used applications. Etc.
There is, in fact, a consistent interface. If it's insufficiently discoverable, that's a different issue.
People who suggest Task Killer don't know how Android works.
Android applications do not run in the background unless they go out of their way to do so. When they *do* go out of their way to do so, they can be killed at any time by the operating system. This design makes tools such as "Advanced Task Killer" not only unnecessary, but counterproductive; read the link above for a detailed description of why auto-killing background tasks actually makes Android *slower*.
Riiiight. If Steam didn't have adequate fraud-protection measures, they'd *already* be having problems with illegitimate purchases -- the problem wouldn't be waiting for tools that analyze how users interact in multiplayer (tools which would provide all the more data to use in variance/cheat detection) to announce itself!
If those fake accounts need to spend real money (buy in at retail price) to count, that's not such a likely scenario.
Funny thing -- I bought a Kindle DX for the explicit purpose of reading books purchased from Manning Publications (whose preprints are available for purchase only as 9.5x11 PDF, which most smaller e-readers don't handle gracefully). Works great for the purpose.
...while historical adventure games typically did suck in exactly that fashion (searching-for-objects being much too big a gameplay element), have you played much of the modern interactive fiction being noncommercially produced?
I follow IFComp when the opportunity arises, and the quality of the writing (and the puzzles) of each year's winners is astonishingly better than what the commercial games of the 80s offered.
...which is why OpenID providers who take security seriously (such as Verisign) refuse to display password entry in any request with a Referrer field.
I imagine you're no fan of that scumbag Ronald Reagan and his cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide (acid rain)?
"Troubleshooting" only matters if you're installing ROM Manager yourself. More typically, folks get it bundled in preinstalled (in a version tested against their handset) the first (and only) time they install Cyanogen by hand. From that point on, it Just Works.
Personally, I get more value from an open ecosystem (where, for instance, I can install applications like Swype which change the user experience system-wide -- something Jobs would never allow on the iPhone) than I would from not having that one-time manual install overhead every time I get a new phone. YMMV.
You want your phone to notify you when a new Cyanogen release is out and upgrade over-the-air as a clicky friendly operation? There's an app for that.
...now, there's nothing wrong with sticking with what your phone vendor provides -- anything modernish ships with Android 2.2, and developers will be building their apps with 2.x support for a looong time -- but the "community" option isn't the hassle you think it is.
If you're the kind of person who needs OS $X+1, you're probably also the kind of person who doesn't have a problem with installing Cyanogen, or buying a "with Google" developer-friendly device where owner-rootability is a supported feature rather than a bug.
Sue them for what, exactly? Arbitration companies advertise themselves to corporate clients as a highly effective form of debt collection. You think they'd be quite that shameless if they didn't have carte blanche to do as they please once someone is foolish enough to sign a contract waiving their ability to use the courts?
To quote Public Citizen:
To be sure, big companies may win in the courts more often than the little guys do... but 99.6%?
Not always, but close enough.
It's a stacked game -- the corporations know which arbitrators have ruled for and against them, but an individual has no such knowledge. Those arbitrators who tend to find in favor of consumers tend not to be rehired.
"A technique to pirate games", or "a technique to enable OtherOS"? The technique, in and of itself, does neither of those things -- what you call it, then, is a matter of your chosen spin.
That said -- if the "technique to pirate games" spin were more accurate, Sony would have been able to dig evidence to that effect in discovery; I doubt that they would have chosen to settle if they'd found evidence that would let them drag their opponent's name through the mud (and thereby turn around all the persecuting-the-white-hat bad press they'd been getting).
You haven't been paying much attention.
Geohot discovered a technique which could, potentially, be used by others to "steal video games" -- but there has been no credible allegation (and remember, Sony had a big discovery phase to try to prove their point to the contrary) that he himself was working to enable piracy.
As you might recall, the thing that incited Geohot to look at the PS3 was Other OS being disabled -- nothing related to stealing video games at all.
You're making assertions not about ethical relativists, but about normative relativists -- the former group accepts the thesis that there exists no universal standard for ethical behavior, but only those within (far smaller) latter subset believe that this actually has consequences relating to how people ought to behave; the bulk of ethical relativists believe that enforcing personal or cultural standards is necessary and proper, even though those standards are not universal.
Suggest you learn what words mean before trying to use them in the future.
Studies have found that there's a fair amount of homeostasis around the amount people want to budget for gas each year.
It's actually better than that -- for most people (you're clearly an outlier), there's a fair bit of homeostasis around how much time they're willing to spend commuting. So -- whether someone is driving a bicycle or an SUV, they generally won't accept more than a 45-minute commuter time. Sure, there may be some lag for that to take effect (as folks change jobs and housing only so frequently), but it all evens out in the end.
As such, I'm happy to be a "dirty hippie" spending my 45 minutes getting some exercise and stress relief... and saving money all the while.
I understand your technical points, but it is not "the cloud" if they cannot provide those features. Amazon is just another generic hosting service, not a cloud service.
If you close the definition of a cloud service to the point that nobody can provide a generic cloud service... then what good is the definition anyhow?
An excessively closed definition is similarly useless to an excessively open one -- neither is optimal for purposes of expressing meaning to others. As such, I'll stick with the conventional definition rather than accept your proposed amendment.