Ummm, actually, it appears that the two prices mentioned were payed by bidders on e-bay, and had nothing to do with the actual MSRP of the units. A quick google search shows base models selling for about $1,500 max. Also keep in mind that these were one of the first experiments in a true ultra-portable solution, and that price becomes maybe not reasonable, but a whole lot more understandable. Either way though, they didn't go out of business for charging $6,500 for a small laptop... and, more to the point, just because YOU wouldn't pay money like that for the item obviously doesn't mean no one else will, since the reported price was a winning bid. (Actually, it was 6,101, not 6,500, but whatever.)
Just because they don't get loads of snow doesn't mean that heated sidewalks are a bad idea. I think the main thing that they would be trying to avoid is ICE, not snow. Snow gives a relativity firm footing, and is much less likely to slip someone up than ice (or slush). While Des Moines doesn't get much snow, how much ice do they have on their sidewalks during the winter? Do they have a lot of sleet/slush? The Midwest DOES get ice storms that leave large build ups of ice all over everything. In cases like that, heated sidewalks make tons of sense, because its almost certainly cheaper in the long run than chemicals/human labor, and almost certainly leads to safer surfaces as well, since its more likely to melt all the ice in affected areas, unlike chemicals, which cam leave patches of ice in places that are missed be the people laying it down. Either way, my point is that heated sidewalks aren't just for snow, and someplace that gets very little snow could have a strong case for using heated sidewalks.
Either way, I don't know why this is surprising except for one fact: That it didn't happen much, much sooner. That's what happens when there's no real world consequences for your behavior (or you think you can avoid them).
This statement is VERY overly simplistic. The bandwidth costs that MMO's incur, especially large ones like WoW, are non-trivial. More time playing per subscription period means more bandwidth costs, lowering the profit made from that subscription. Over several hundred thousand subscriptions, that could have a serious effect on profit margins. Obviously, then, the ideal for making money is to have a game where every subscription renews, but no ones actually logs in and plays. I don't know how you would get that into a game (wait, yes I do! Go go Eve Skill traning kits!), but most ideals don't translate that well to real life situations. But the point is that subscription renewals are what matter, and as long as you can get those and still decrease the playtime of those subscriptions, you're going to be increasing profits.
Thinking that way, more traveling can be a a double hit: It increases playtime per subscription, and can also push people away from resubscribing due to the tedium involved. At the same time, instant transportation has its own cons, the biggest of which I can think of would be a massive increase in the speed at which content is completed. Having all your content completed means that people won't be resubscribing. Obviously then, there has to be some medium. I don't know what it is, but I think that WoW (especially with the 3.2 patch) is probably close to it: Travel time is non-trivial, but it's not mind-numbingly long either. The sense of size that it gives the game world is also a positive, in my eyes. We're told that the size of the game world is massive, but if you could transfer anywhere, you would never get that feeling. When you actually have to travel through that world, the scope of it are much more apparent.
Actually, that price drop does make sense in the context of the GPs post. You don't know the history of that car over the 6 months from when it drove off the lot. They way I've had it told to me is thus: Why would someone buy a new car, then turn around and sell it six months later? Sure, they could just be upgrading, or downgrading, or whatever... but 6 months is a really short time to do that in. Many people worry that a car sold that quickly after coming off the lot is being sold because it is a lemon. It doesn't make it a lemon, of course, it could be something else, but perception is everything. That is one of the biggest reasons that people I've talked to have been wary of buying used cars that are too new. Of course, as you move away from the date that you drove off the lot, the car also gets more use and has a higher chance of developing problems, and the unknown history it has also increases. This is why the car will not increase in price one the fears that the car is a lemon start to abate. And of course, as you move farther out, you begin to run into warranty issues (which are, imo, a HUGE part of what you're paying for with most cars), which end up just depressing the value of the car further. Anyways, my point is that it may seem odd that cars drop like that, but once you delve a little deeper it does make sense... and it also means that you CAN get cars well below their actual value if you buy cars that are nearly new, especially if you have the knowledge (or the money) to make sure that the car ISN'T being sold because its trash.
He never argued otherwise. His comment was to the effect that there are legal barriers to entry into many of these markets, because of the exclusivity contracts that many municipalities sign with ISPs/providers. Hence saying that was the only force-backed barrier. In the discussion so far, that's the point. Other economic barriers don't matter if you don't have the legal standing to compete in the first place.
The rest of the country not only seems not to know what 'moderation' means, those that do seem to know have a problem figuring out exactly *what* should be the target of said moderation.
And you would use the fact that people can't take personal responsibility for their actions to tax them? That may not be what you're saying, but its what's coming across.
The rest of your statement is also ridiculous. Excess calories, lack of activity, and focus on one type of food can ALL lead to weight problems. There are MANY many reasons people get fat, and to blame it on carbs in particular is ignorant and dangerous in its own way.
Personally, I think that vice taxes should probably not exist, the same way most vice laws should exist. The vast majority of them server no purpose but to force someones morals on someone else, and morals are not, for the most part, something that should be mandated by the government (or any one else, for that matter). The morals I follow are a personal choice, and the responsibility for those morals is something I choose to live with when I choose those morals. I'm fat, and it's because I don't eat right, I don't work out, and I eat too much. But it's MY choices that make me fat, and I don't need the government telling me to get in shape. That's not what they're there for, and frankly, they can piss off.
While there is a certain truth to this, when you look at the comparison in context its not a very good one. First of all, the so called "heretic" seems to be saying that ALL that matters is the power/watt that counts, and that's just not the case. While there are certainly CASES where it holds true, there are often times when the raw power of a chip more than makes up for the higher cost in power. If this wasn't true, everything from super computers to your average desktop would not exist today. Especially in the realm of complex computations for every thing from serious systems modeling to video encoding, the fact of the matter is that processing power is a far bigger consideration than power consumption, and denying that is ignoring an enormous subsection of computer use today. The reason your comparison doesn't work very well is because, while in that case the conventional wisdom was wrong, you're not making a comparison that really connects with the situation. A good comparison would be one where one subset of programs ran very very well on a long pipeline, and another ran very very well on a short pipeline. In this case, the person going against the "conventional wisdom" would be saying that the programs on the short pipeline don't matter, and that a longer pipeline is all that matters, because it helps a specific subset of the programs. That is a comparison that relates well to the case at hand (as I understand it). The "heretic" is actually right for his subset... but for all other subsets (and honestly the majority of them)it doesn't hold true. Now, this probably isn't always going to be the case (and even it has limits, before someone jumps on me for that), but as a whole, I think the statement is a whole lot less wrong than "It's "megahertz per milli-watt,"that counts."
I like how you automatically assume that the people who wrote in Colbert's name have no interest in the matter. I have plenty of interest in this, and I wrote in Colbert's name because, quite frankly, I thought all the names were pretty sucky. IMO its better that the module be named because of a joke, that can be referenced and keep interest in the space program higher than it would be other wise than to name it after a TV show, or name it some other stupid thing that has no meaning behind it.
Either way, stop assuming that just because people wrote in Colbert they don't also have a strong interest in the naming of the capsule.
The problem with this is that the other major programming paradigms work in ways that can be absolutely baffling if you don't work in them at all. Sure its great to be able to learn on your own, but I think that programs should at least try to give you at least a rudimentary base in all the major paradigms. This not only widens your skill set, but often can help you solve problems in ways that would not be apparent to people who have never worked outside one paradigm.
And anyone who knows anything about finances realizes that US Treasuries are still pretty much the safest investments on the planet. He may be making a threat *cough* hint, but its misplaced, and I'm also sure that he knows it.
I think there is a limit to the amount of DRM the average person is willing to accept in their OS. Up until now, people have been willing to put up with shitty DRM. At some point Microsoft will implement a DRM that not even the average person will put up with, at which point most average people will truly become AWARE of DRM for the first time. At that point... while its anyone's guess as to what happens, I think the fallout will be worse than most of us would tend to expect.
Actually, you don't get the "occasional civilian benefit." You get LOTS of civilian benefits. There are innumerable technologies and advancements that are descended from military research. Pretty much everything almost any military does will eventually wind up in the hands of civilians some day, and you could make a very strong argument that stifling military research would damage non-military research to a large degree. Ignoring the effect that the military has on technological advance is not a good way to keep your R&D labs going strong, because not only does the military have its hand in anything that may be REMOTELY usable in war, it is also able to spend money on projects that most other people would consider to be wacko. To use the grandparent post, look at the birth of the internet. At the time, what business sense did it make to have a highly resilient, non-centralized, nation spanning network that could survive multiple nuclear strikes? It didn't, and no one would have put money into research into such a network. but it did make MILITARY sense, so the military paid for the research... and today we can all bitch on Slashdot about how the military never gives us anything and we always spend to much on it, no questions asked. Its a funny old world.
Try running Win 98 on Vista's minimum hardware. Hell, lets go whole hog here. Try running Win 3.1 on Vista's minimum hardware. (Okay, you might have to do a lot of work to get it running, but I'm just trying to make a point). I guarantee you that both 98 and 3.1 will run faster than XP on that hardware. By a lot. If it surprises you that vista and xp run slower on the same hardware than xp, then either you're not thinking things through, or you're not very bright. As stated, they are far newer. This means they have a much higher assumed baseline of technology that they can run against, which means that they have far more assumed resources to play with. So yeah, on the same system, Vista runs slower than XP. No surprise (at all, as far as I'm concerned). Honestly, all this speed stuff is pretty pointless. The question with OSes is never really about the fastest, or we would all still be using DOS. The question with OSes is are the fast ENOUGH. This is very subjective, but it basically boils down to: will they run what we want them to run in an acceptably small amount of time. On its original release, Vista did not. However, right now Vista is certainly running fast enough for me, and I expect Win 7 will to. But you're ALWAYS going to take a performance hit moving to an OS that utilizes new technology, and I don't care what OS you use.
Ergonomic studies also confirm that the advantages of Dvorak are either small or nonexistent. For example, A. Miller and J Thomas, two researchers at the IBM Research Laboratory, writing in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, conclude that "no alternative has shown a realistically significant advantage over the QWERTY for general purpose typing." Other studies based on analysis of hand-and-finger motions find differences of only a few percentage points between Dvorak and QWERTY. The consistent finding in ergonomic studies is that the results imply no clear advantage for Dvorak, and certainly no advantage of the magnitude that is so often claimed.
Why can't it cover all the complexities? There's a contract entered by two or more consenting adults. There you go. You cover whatever complexity there might be in your personal contract. Everything's covered. I'm not saying that it will help with divorce rates, but it will end laws like Prop 8 that are based of of religious beliefs and have no standing in an atheist government. And no matter what you think and argue, it was 100% the intent of the founding fathers that this county have an atheistic government.
Also, I think the grandparent sounds a lot like Heinlein's "Contract marriages" from several of his books, and I think its a bloody great idea. People won't always want to live together, and humans are NOT monogamous animals. A contract so that people can split amicably after a time, or renew their contract if everything is going well, sounds like a wonderful idea to me. That, by the way, WOULD reduce divorce rates, and would also be a huge help for people in abusive relationships. Nothing should be so set in stone that its not possible to get out of it if one party, or both, so chooses. As a matter of fact, I think many people would agree that in such a case, it should be EASIER to get out.
I would just like to point out that he took the car to DRIVE TO SCHOOL. I don't know about you guys, but I certainly didn't look forward enough to school that I would try to drive myself there, especially not at 6.
He missed the bus, his mother was asleep, and he wanted to get to school. He obviously didn't want to disturb his mother, and it wasn't good that this occurred... but we all leave keys out in places that are easy to find and reach, and they obviously did SOMETHING right, if the kid was going to school. Maybe people should RTFA before they decide that he was just going on a joyride...
This is not actually 100% true. Many attacks are based off a two roll system, not a single roll system, and the number of attacks that are based of a two roll system seem to have been increased with the release of WOTLK. Of course, the article seems to be poorly written, unless they have input from the devs, since many of the two roll mechanics are not well understood at this point, being very very new and not well tested yet.
I disagree. What better way to patent troll than to remove all the competition, and steal everyone's patents yourself? Besides, larger companies have the resources to effectively fight patent trolls, and I don't think that the trolls go after them that much. Its small and mid-sized companies that have to watch out.
From TFA: "Using an infrared camera, the secondary "display" can also be used as a multitouch surface. What's more, it can display video."
In conjunction with the part where you can use the TRANSLUCENT MATERIAL (doesn't HAVE to be PAPER)to see inside of something who's outsides are displayed on the main screen (ala their car example) I could actually see this being pretty damn useful.
Besides, many many many things are invented that don't seem useful until someone thinks outside the box with them, then wallah, magic shit happens! Honestly, I could see this being useful for a number of things right now, and I'll be the first to admit that I am not really a very good innovator.
Umm, actually, you're a moron. The Great Depression was ample proof that the global market is, in fact, global. We continue to see that in shifts in stocks at various exchanges around the world as the react to each other. If the US economy collapses completely, the world WILL go into a severe depression. This is not a one way street. If a serious and total economic collapse happened in any number of other regions in the world, the US economy would also go down. In other words, we're all going down together.
PS. The current standard for international trade is still the dollar. Its pretty obvious that until its no longer the dollar, anything that effects the value of the dollar (the strength US economy, for instance) will affect global trade/markets. Just wanted to throw this out there for you in case the paragraph above wasn't enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm, actually, it appears that the two prices mentioned were payed by bidders on e-bay, and had nothing to do with the actual MSRP of the units. A quick google search shows base models selling for about $1,500 max. Also keep in mind that these were one of the first experiments in a true ultra-portable solution, and that price becomes maybe not reasonable, but a whole lot more understandable. Either way though, they didn't go out of business for charging $6,500 for a small laptop... and, more to the point, just because YOU wouldn't pay money like that for the item obviously doesn't mean no one else will, since the reported price was a winning bid. (Actually, it was 6,101, not 6,500, but whatever.)
Just because they don't get loads of snow doesn't mean that heated sidewalks are a bad idea. I think the main thing that they would be trying to avoid is ICE, not snow. Snow gives a relativity firm footing, and is much less likely to slip someone up than ice (or slush). While Des Moines doesn't get much snow, how much ice do they have on their sidewalks during the winter? Do they have a lot of sleet/slush? The Midwest DOES get ice storms that leave large build ups of ice all over everything. In cases like that, heated sidewalks make tons of sense, because its almost certainly cheaper in the long run than chemicals/human labor, and almost certainly leads to safer surfaces as well, since its more likely to melt all the ice in affected areas, unlike chemicals, which cam leave patches of ice in places that are missed be the people laying it down. Either way, my point is that heated sidewalks aren't just for snow, and someplace that gets very little snow could have a strong case for using heated sidewalks.
I'm not at all... hence the part in parentheses :)
Either way, I don't know why this is surprising except for one fact: That it didn't happen much, much sooner. That's what happens when there's no real world consequences for your behavior (or you think you can avoid them).
This statement is VERY overly simplistic. The bandwidth costs that MMO's incur, especially large ones like WoW, are non-trivial. More time playing per subscription period means more bandwidth costs, lowering the profit made from that subscription. Over several hundred thousand subscriptions, that could have a serious effect on profit margins. Obviously, then, the ideal for making money is to have a game where every subscription renews, but no ones actually logs in and plays. I don't know how you would get that into a game (wait, yes I do! Go go Eve Skill traning kits!), but most ideals don't translate that well to real life situations. But the point is that subscription renewals are what matter, and as long as you can get those and still decrease the playtime of those subscriptions, you're going to be increasing profits. Thinking that way, more traveling can be a a double hit: It increases playtime per subscription, and can also push people away from resubscribing due to the tedium involved. At the same time, instant transportation has its own cons, the biggest of which I can think of would be a massive increase in the speed at which content is completed. Having all your content completed means that people won't be resubscribing. Obviously then, there has to be some medium. I don't know what it is, but I think that WoW (especially with the 3.2 patch) is probably close to it: Travel time is non-trivial, but it's not mind-numbingly long either. The sense of size that it gives the game world is also a positive, in my eyes. We're told that the size of the game world is massive, but if you could transfer anywhere, you would never get that feeling. When you actually have to travel through that world, the scope of it are much more apparent.
Actually, that price drop does make sense in the context of the GPs post. You don't know the history of that car over the 6 months from when it drove off the lot. They way I've had it told to me is thus: Why would someone buy a new car, then turn around and sell it six months later? Sure, they could just be upgrading, or downgrading, or whatever... but 6 months is a really short time to do that in. Many people worry that a car sold that quickly after coming off the lot is being sold because it is a lemon. It doesn't make it a lemon, of course, it could be something else, but perception is everything. That is one of the biggest reasons that people I've talked to have been wary of buying used cars that are too new. Of course, as you move away from the date that you drove off the lot, the car also gets more use and has a higher chance of developing problems, and the unknown history it has also increases. This is why the car will not increase in price one the fears that the car is a lemon start to abate. And of course, as you move farther out, you begin to run into warranty issues (which are, imo, a HUGE part of what you're paying for with most cars), which end up just depressing the value of the car further. Anyways, my point is that it may seem odd that cars drop like that, but once you delve a little deeper it does make sense... and it also means that you CAN get cars well below their actual value if you buy cars that are nearly new, especially if you have the knowledge (or the money) to make sure that the car ISN'T being sold because its trash.
I'm so conflicted... Fox News actually reporting something that affects me in a positive way? I don't know how to feel!
He never argued otherwise. His comment was to the effect that there are legal barriers to entry into many of these markets, because of the exclusivity contracts that many municipalities sign with ISPs/providers. Hence saying that was the only force-backed barrier. In the discussion so far, that's the point. Other economic barriers don't matter if you don't have the legal standing to compete in the first place.
The rest of the country not only seems not to know what 'moderation' means, those that do seem to know have a problem figuring out exactly *what* should be the target of said moderation.
And you would use the fact that people can't take personal responsibility for their actions to tax them? That may not be what you're saying, but its what's coming across. The rest of your statement is also ridiculous. Excess calories, lack of activity, and focus on one type of food can ALL lead to weight problems. There are MANY many reasons people get fat, and to blame it on carbs in particular is ignorant and dangerous in its own way. Personally, I think that vice taxes should probably not exist, the same way most vice laws should exist. The vast majority of them server no purpose but to force someones morals on someone else, and morals are not, for the most part, something that should be mandated by the government (or any one else, for that matter). The morals I follow are a personal choice, and the responsibility for those morals is something I choose to live with when I choose those morals. I'm fat, and it's because I don't eat right, I don't work out, and I eat too much. But it's MY choices that make me fat, and I don't need the government telling me to get in shape. That's not what they're there for, and frankly, they can piss off.
Your imagination doesn't count!
No.... we're not "better," just much less likely to use them against others. I guess it may be a fine distinction, but I think its there.
While there is a certain truth to this, when you look at the comparison in context its not a very good one. First of all, the so called "heretic" seems to be saying that ALL that matters is the power/watt that counts, and that's just not the case. While there are certainly CASES where it holds true, there are often times when the raw power of a chip more than makes up for the higher cost in power. If this wasn't true, everything from super computers to your average desktop would not exist today. Especially in the realm of complex computations for every thing from serious systems modeling to video encoding, the fact of the matter is that processing power is a far bigger consideration than power consumption, and denying that is ignoring an enormous subsection of computer use today. The reason your comparison doesn't work very well is because, while in that case the conventional wisdom was wrong, you're not making a comparison that really connects with the situation. A good comparison would be one where one subset of programs ran very very well on a long pipeline, and another ran very very well on a short pipeline. In this case, the person going against the "conventional wisdom" would be saying that the programs on the short pipeline don't matter, and that a longer pipeline is all that matters, because it helps a specific subset of the programs. That is a comparison that relates well to the case at hand (as I understand it). The "heretic" is actually right for his subset... but for all other subsets (and honestly the majority of them)it doesn't hold true. Now, this probably isn't always going to be the case (and even it has limits, before someone jumps on me for that), but as a whole, I think the statement is a whole lot less wrong than "It's "megahertz per milli-watt,"that counts."
I like how you automatically assume that the people who wrote in Colbert's name have no interest in the matter. I have plenty of interest in this, and I wrote in Colbert's name because, quite frankly, I thought all the names were pretty sucky. IMO its better that the module be named because of a joke, that can be referenced and keep interest in the space program higher than it would be other wise than to name it after a TV show, or name it some other stupid thing that has no meaning behind it. Either way, stop assuming that just because people wrote in Colbert they don't also have a strong interest in the naming of the capsule.
The problem with this is that the other major programming paradigms work in ways that can be absolutely baffling if you don't work in them at all. Sure its great to be able to learn on your own, but I think that programs should at least try to give you at least a rudimentary base in all the major paradigms. This not only widens your skill set, but often can help you solve problems in ways that would not be apparent to people who have never worked outside one paradigm.
And anyone who knows anything about finances realizes that US Treasuries are still pretty much the safest investments on the planet. He may be making a threat *cough* hint, but its misplaced, and I'm also sure that he knows it.
I think there is a limit to the amount of DRM the average person is willing to accept in their OS. Up until now, people have been willing to put up with shitty DRM. At some point Microsoft will implement a DRM that not even the average person will put up with, at which point most average people will truly become AWARE of DRM for the first time. At that point... while its anyone's guess as to what happens, I think the fallout will be worse than most of us would tend to expect.
Actually, you don't get the "occasional civilian benefit." You get LOTS of civilian benefits. There are innumerable technologies and advancements that are descended from military research. Pretty much everything almost any military does will eventually wind up in the hands of civilians some day, and you could make a very strong argument that stifling military research would damage non-military research to a large degree. Ignoring the effect that the military has on technological advance is not a good way to keep your R&D labs going strong, because not only does the military have its hand in anything that may be REMOTELY usable in war, it is also able to spend money on projects that most other people would consider to be wacko. To use the grandparent post, look at the birth of the internet. At the time, what business sense did it make to have a highly resilient, non-centralized, nation spanning network that could survive multiple nuclear strikes? It didn't, and no one would have put money into research into such a network. but it did make MILITARY sense, so the military paid for the research... and today we can all bitch on Slashdot about how the military never gives us anything and we always spend to much on it, no questions asked. Its a funny old world.
Try running Win 98 on Vista's minimum hardware. Hell, lets go whole hog here. Try running Win 3.1 on Vista's minimum hardware. (Okay, you might have to do a lot of work to get it running, but I'm just trying to make a point). I guarantee you that both 98 and 3.1 will run faster than XP on that hardware. By a lot. If it surprises you that vista and xp run slower on the same hardware than xp, then either you're not thinking things through, or you're not very bright. As stated, they are far newer. This means they have a much higher assumed baseline of technology that they can run against, which means that they have far more assumed resources to play with. So yeah, on the same system, Vista runs slower than XP. No surprise (at all, as far as I'm concerned). Honestly, all this speed stuff is pretty pointless. The question with OSes is never really about the fastest, or we would all still be using DOS. The question with OSes is are the fast ENOUGH. This is very subjective, but it basically boils down to: will they run what we want them to run in an acceptably small amount of time. On its original release, Vista did not. However, right now Vista is certainly running fast enough for me, and I expect Win 7 will to. But you're ALWAYS going to take a performance hit moving to an OS that utilizes new technology, and I don't care what OS you use.
Ergonomic studies also confirm that the advantages of Dvorak are either small or nonexistent. For example, A. Miller and J Thomas, two researchers at the IBM Research Laboratory, writing in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, conclude that "no alternative has shown a realistically significant advantage over the QWERTY for general purpose typing." Other studies based on analysis of hand-and-finger motions find differences of only a few percentage points between Dvorak and QWERTY. The consistent finding in ergonomic studies is that the results imply no clear advantage for Dvorak, and certainly no advantage of the magnitude that is so often claimed.
Why can't it cover all the complexities? There's a contract entered by two or more consenting adults. There you go. You cover whatever complexity there might be in your personal contract. Everything's covered. I'm not saying that it will help with divorce rates, but it will end laws like Prop 8 that are based of of religious beliefs and have no standing in an atheist government. And no matter what you think and argue, it was 100% the intent of the founding fathers that this county have an atheistic government. Also, I think the grandparent sounds a lot like Heinlein's "Contract marriages" from several of his books, and I think its a bloody great idea. People won't always want to live together, and humans are NOT monogamous animals. A contract so that people can split amicably after a time, or renew their contract if everything is going well, sounds like a wonderful idea to me. That, by the way, WOULD reduce divorce rates, and would also be a huge help for people in abusive relationships. Nothing should be so set in stone that its not possible to get out of it if one party, or both, so chooses. As a matter of fact, I think many people would agree that in such a case, it should be EASIER to get out.
I would just like to point out that he took the car to DRIVE TO SCHOOL. I don't know about you guys, but I certainly didn't look forward enough to school that I would try to drive myself there, especially not at 6. He missed the bus, his mother was asleep, and he wanted to get to school. He obviously didn't want to disturb his mother, and it wasn't good that this occurred... but we all leave keys out in places that are easy to find and reach, and they obviously did SOMETHING right, if the kid was going to school. Maybe people should RTFA before they decide that he was just going on a joyride...
This is not actually 100% true. Many attacks are based off a two roll system, not a single roll system, and the number of attacks that are based of a two roll system seem to have been increased with the release of WOTLK. Of course, the article seems to be poorly written, unless they have input from the devs, since many of the two roll mechanics are not well understood at this point, being very very new and not well tested yet.
I disagree. What better way to patent troll than to remove all the competition, and steal everyone's patents yourself? Besides, larger companies have the resources to effectively fight patent trolls, and I don't think that the trolls go after them that much. Its small and mid-sized companies that have to watch out.
From TFA: "Using an infrared camera, the secondary "display" can also be used as a multitouch surface. What's more, it can display video." In conjunction with the part where you can use the TRANSLUCENT MATERIAL (doesn't HAVE to be PAPER)to see inside of something who's outsides are displayed on the main screen (ala their car example) I could actually see this being pretty damn useful. Besides, many many many things are invented that don't seem useful until someone thinks outside the box with them, then wallah, magic shit happens! Honestly, I could see this being useful for a number of things right now, and I'll be the first to admit that I am not really a very good innovator.
Umm, actually, you're a moron. The Great Depression was ample proof that the global market is, in fact, global. We continue to see that in shifts in stocks at various exchanges around the world as the react to each other. If the US economy collapses completely, the world WILL go into a severe depression. This is not a one way street. If a serious and total economic collapse happened in any number of other regions in the world, the US economy would also go down. In other words, we're all going down together. PS. The current standard for international trade is still the dollar. Its pretty obvious that until its no longer the dollar, anything that effects the value of the dollar (the strength US economy, for instance) will affect global trade/markets. Just wanted to throw this out there for you in case the paragraph above wasn't enough.