I think it's only a matter of time between the news cycle starts turning all "Apple the subject of antitrust laws?" or the classic "Should Apple be broken up?". Neither AT&T nor IBM nor MS had a good run with the state dept. Perhaps Apple is overstreching a bit too far here; I for one think the backlash isn't worth that 30% cut.
I have mod points but I'm not going to burn you for this, just tell you that you're wrong and why. Apple, the iPhone, the iPad, are not the only venue in a market. They are not the only place that this can be sold at. They are nothing more than a single avenue in a wide market. They are equivilent to one chain of book stores out of all the book stores out there. That being said, getting 70% of cover price for a periodical is a fantastic deal for the publishers. Much better than printed material as brick and mortar stores usually get more than 30% and then there are the distributor costs. The publishers gets most of its costs from advertising anyway. All of which is why subscriptions can usually be gotten straight from the publisher on periodicals for much much less than 70%.
Where you will see publishers getting into conflict with Apple will be on advertising costs. If apple tries to take too much of that, then they'll start pushing back. Even then, they'll just drop Apple products as a market before much else takes place.
That remains to be seen. This could well open up the opportunity for a lawsuit against Apple, whose policies are not only a limitation on what they will accept, but also a promise of sorts to other developers that they will not accept those things. They are facilitating copyright infringement and they have a review process which is allegedly there to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
I highly doubt it. What do you want to bet that the review process involves the submitter signing something stating that they own what they are trying to sell. It's just like when Kindle users ended up buying copies of 1984 when they didn't have the license. Now that Apple has been informed, it will be corrected. The test will be to see if Apple deletes the illegally sold apps off of people's devices like was done on the Kindle.
That's supposed to be good? I, for one, would rather we hit oil peak as fast as we possibly can so that the petroleum shills get a brutal wake up call. Then, and only then, might we actually make progress.
Nuclear power doesn't compete with oil. It competes with coal mostly and then natural gas and hydro. Oil is used mainly for transportation and manufacturing of plastics, not power. More nuclear power for China means they are in even a better position to use more oil to make all the goods we want instead of letting us make them.
If by "Fan base" you still mean Universities and school systems who are still under contract to replace Apples with more Apples.
I think by fan base he meant desktop publishing, scientific, radiology, video, and other niche markets that depended on decent graphics. Trust me, in the 90's, Microsoft's products just weren't up to task.
Apple has always looked at certain niche markets and produced the "killer apps" for those markets. In the early days, it just meant having the hardware that could do it and then developers would make the actual "killer apps". Now, it means they actually have to produce some of their own software. They still control some key points of the video market, outdoing Adobe's products. Moving into other niche markets such as mp3s, phones, TV, etc isn't that far from what they have been doing, producing good hardware, OS and if need be software to fulfill a market's needs.
This is why everyone attending university gets ends up a shining star: professors, having accumulated years of knowledge and wisdom in their field, all make excellent teachers.
Sorry, they do not all make excellent teachers. I had one that was an excellent researcher. His research work was astounding, but the sad fact was the even with a class of three intelligent upper division physics students who wanted to learn the material, he was just not able to teach it. The guy could integrate by parts three times and then do a Laplace transform to an equation and come up with the solution in his head without even thinking about what he was doing. We would have to badger him for the above information which he stated was "trivial". So trivial that he couldn't write it up on the board to show us how it was done. He just was not a good teacher and he was not the only one that I had that might have been a leader in their feild, but lacked the ability to teach the subject to others.
the DM is anything but a "leader" in D&D. His job is more akin to that of the judges themselves, that passed this retarded ruling.
Have you never DMed or played under one that did quid pro quo trades in game? "Get me a coke for that 15xp you need to get to next level." "Whoever does X, I will give Y." There are plenty of instances where a DM can be a leader or use their position as one of authority. It's just like Farmville. Do this and I will give you this imaginary reward in this imaginary world. But don't think for a second that just because it is imaginary, that it isn't valued. As a DM I've gotten some pretty sweet RL rewards from players for those imaginary rewards.
Besides that, in a previous article exactly like this one months ago (might have been over on rpg.net), someone working in the corrections system pointed out that the mere gathering of people into groups with pens and papers to plan stuff would pretty much kill any such behavior in most prisons, be it for D&D or a church meeting.
Carter inherited a disastrous economy, which resulted from a prolonged war funded by future earnings. When the bill came due at the end of the decade, the economy had massive problems. Sound familiar?
Most of the things I've seen on why Carter was a bad president give him that part. Where they really come down on him is in two different areas both dealing with defense. Carter was smart. he saw that the Soviet Union was not stable due to increased funding of the cold war. His plan was to back off the cold war, give the USSR a chance to get itself on it's feet. Instead, the Soviet Union took that opportunity to steamroll straight ahead and invaded Afganistan with the USA in a position that we couldn't do anything about it even if we had wanted to.* Then there was the fall of Iran and the hostages along with a botched rescue attempt again showing that we weren't protecting ourselves.**
*Reagan on the other hand ramped up cold war spending in order to break the USSR bank which worked. However, when the bank was breaking, there was a non-zero chance that the USSR would use all those military toys to try and maintain control. Luckily, Gorbachev opted not to have military conflict and let the USSR fall.
**And some put forth that Reagan worked to keep them as hostages till after the election just for that reason.
...or maybe the creators either didn't care if it was discovered or wanted it to be discovered. If it was Israel, the last time they decided to stop another countries nuclear program, they just flew jets over and bombed it. Not too much subtly in that. It could be that they wanted Iran to eventually find it just so they'd know. Saber rattling does little good if nobody can hear the saber or know who's doing it. Perhaps somebody thought it was more important to let Iran know they were out there and would try and stop the program, than let a long term plan go into effect that would would harm but not actually stop the program.
I'm surprised the most obvious challenge in going to the moon isn't mentioned in the article: that it takes a huge amount of energy to get to the moon and then to get back. I mean what are we going to mine that has so much value? Water? Energy production uses a huge amount of water. Going to the moon for some water is counter productive.
We would not be mining the moon for anything that would go back down the gravity well to Earth. We would be mining it for resources for space exploration and operations instead of mining Earth for them. The moon, being smaller has a much smaller cost of getting materials into orbit. If we need a sufficient amount of those materials, it becomes cheaper to ship a mining operation from Earth to the moon and then those materials to space than to ship all the materials straight from Earth. Water is the main resource people are talking about and to reach that break even point, we'd need megatons of the stuff. The only operations that might being to need that much resources from the moon would be large scale habitation or perhaps a trip to Mars. in short, out side of pure science, there will not be any need to mine the moon till there is already a great deal of activity in space at which point mining the moon will just be a cost cutting method.
This guy gets some flak from moderators, but really, he makes an interesting point. How do we know that 'dark matter' isn't an invention to compensate for errors in our understanding of the gravitational force in the same way that the 'luminescent ether' was an invention? I'm not saying the parent is right, I'm only asking, how do we know?
It might be but what people are missing out on is that it is the best explanation pointed at by our data. Trust me, all the other ideas for what might be causing our observations have been looked at, at least any ideas proposed by the naysayers here. Cold matter? Giant black holes? Changes to the laws of gravity? All looked at, studied with proposals have been made, experiments have been done, and they failed when tested. The idea of matter having gravity being out there that does not interact with the electro magnetic forces fits our observations and the more tests that are done, the more they confirm this idea. The reason guys like him get flak is because they are like "birthers". They keep asking and fighting for answers to questions that have been answered a long time ago and are a matter of public record if they would bother to study the subject for ten minutes of wikipedia and the web. No matter how many times this is explained to them, they still don't believe and the probably never will. I'm sure some of these people are just asking honest questions, however, their questions have been answered if not in this./ post about dark matter, in the past ones they didn't read. (They must be new here.)
Quite well, as long as the Nexus S and/or the various Android Dev Phones are available.
How long are they available? I thought about the Nexus One and the it disappeared. What's to say the same doesn't happen to the Nexus S which I didn't even have a clue was coming out till it did till because of Google's dropping of Nexus One? I bought the first iPhone and have gotten two major software upgrades, while many of the Android owners I talk to are bitching about how they can't upgrade the OS. Unless a vendor (Google) shows up and shows that I can expect to upgrade to the next couple of softwear iterations without issue I'm not changing. Hardware limitations I understand. That carriers won't let me upgrade my android version because they want to sell new phones or just don't want to spent the effort to let me update my own phone I don't. UNtil, there is an established brand that I can trust to at least provide future software updates for android phones, I'm not looking at them.
vender lock-in and lock down is bad also people who make free apps should not have to pay $99 year just to have you app in the store.
Sorry. I am unconvinced. If somebody writing software isn't willing to put $99 effort into his product (costs he'd have to pay anyway for hosting and such), I really don't really want to be using their code. I remember having a Palm PDA and going to CNET and other sites and downloading programs to it. Nearly two thirds of them were too buggy to use or simply caused my PDA to freeze on launch. I do not really want to return to those days. For those that do, I'm glad they have their alternative. It's an alternative that I've looked at myself. Once I see advantage in it I'd be willing to switch but running some random guys code who can't put some minimal effort into getting it vetted isn't currently one of them.
We had a shitty but effective standard going here.. and I fear this whole "app" craze is going to put us back in the "dark ages".
Well, that's the difference between idealists and people who actually have to do work. The idealist wants the shitty standard, and the person who does work, wants something that works. Yes, we now have the web, browsers and the technologies that go with them but stand alone apps (or applications if you prefer) simply work better. I work at a hospital dealing with several vendor supplied web applications. First, they all need to go out and download some bit of proprietary software (active X or Java) and often will not function unless you have one specific version of one specific browser. So there really is no difference between using the browser and a stand alone app as you are essentially using a stand alone app anyway, except for the added difficulty and troubles of tying it all to a browser. Then theres that browsers and the web simply aren't very robust. It's always freezing or shutting down (possibly due to other pages they also have loaded or just because nobody really has built a robust web browser) which cause more troubles trying to fix locked reports, full sessions, and such on the back end. The web is great for something that needs to be accessed from random locations, but for dedicated usage, please get over the web and bring back reliable applications.
It was always blindingly obvious that the chaps who developed the WinCE line did so on simulators on their desktops, not on actual phone hardware. The WinCE line has never, ever been designed for actual mobile use.
Why would MS work on actual phone hardware? They din't make hardware then. They just provide the operating system for people who do make hardware, similar to how they did with IBM and the PC. Of course, that's the same situation that Google is in and they seem to be doing it better.
Eventually, I shall die but be replaced online with a small perl script and then live forever, or at least the life of the server. I wonder if anybody will notice.
How is it NASA is qualified to judge the best and worst Sci-Fi movies of all time? Don't they have something more important to be working on?
I'm pretty sure Nasa has some sort of PR department and plenty of geeks who are not only able to describe why movie science is bad, but would love to do so. Combine the two and you end up with a PR release that would do more for NASA than spending thousands on some other press release that not even the geeks will care about.
I'm still having a hard time understanding what technologies exist in 7 that don't in XP AND are something I ( or a business would need ).
The reasons that we are is for 64 bit and ability to use more RAM. We're also in the medical imaging sector so both of those means that our programs can handle more images a lot faster. Also, it's getting to be a pain to support some newer hardware in WinXP as the base install disk doesn't have the drivers needed to boot some of it. Some companies simply aren't supplying drivers for their hardware for WinXP at all so backing down the OS is not really an option.
I don't know if I can agree. I have an iPhone and I've looked at Android phones. They seem pretty similar. I'm sure if I had an android to use for a long period of time, I could come up with some differences, but in general, they are both fairly similar. Here's how I see the differences. I've had the iPhone since it first came out. I've gone through two major software upgrades. After several years, I can understand how older hardware doesn't have newer features or might stop getting new OSs. However, there is a non-trivial amount of people I've talked to who have an android phone and have never gotten a software upgrade and are pissed about it. When looking at android phones, no one is really sure who is responsible for providing such, the manufacturer or the phone company. It really doesn't inspire confidence. I know if I get another iPhone, I will most likely get the next few years worth of software upgrades. With android, it seems like a crap shoot. There's simply no one in that arena I can trust. I might trust Google themselves, but they killed the Nexus just as it was catching on. There new phone came out of no where after I thought they'd said they were done making phones because the other companies have caught up. Until they (or somebody else) actually commit to providing support for the phone I buy for a reasonable amount of time, I just don't think android is in my future.
Really, what's on Mars that can't be done more cheaply by building near earth orbital environments?
Actually, to build near earth orbitals large scale, we'll probably have to go to mars first. If you are talking city sized orbital environments, you need resources, lots of resources. Moving those up from the Earth's gravity well is probably not as cheap as moving them in from comets and asteroids in the solar system. For that matter, for the investment of the first thousand or so, Mars could be made habitable enough and create a thousand times more living space than those resources could in an orbital environment by themselves. From there you have a cheaper and easier place to get materials and manufacture them. A space elevator should be possible on Mars with todays technology.
Also, in the long run, making Mars habitable would be cheaper than orbital environments. Once you get the temperature up and atmosphere established, upkeep will be nonexistant compared to that of a similar amount of orbital environments. Plus an atmosphere for protection from radiation and meteorites. Working in a gravity well and atmosphere has it's advantages.
Since no one ever RTFA, the gist is that Wikileaks sees things in a very simple, black and white universe. Everything must be open at all times. With the leak of the Pentagon Papers, not all of it was leaked initially. In fact, portions of it were held back for years because the leak would only cause harm to diplomatic relations and it had no bearing on the purpose of the leak (to expose the fact that the US government lied to its people about Vietnam).
But I think the key issue here, is that wikilinks is not American and probably sides more with the people of the countries that are being lied to by their governments than the people of the US being lied to by theirs. So, hurting American diplomatic relations is probably not a big concern. The case is not so much as American media telling the American people that the American government has lied to them, but rather a Laotian media telling Laotian and Cambodian people that the American government has been bombing them with knowledge of the Laotian and Cambodian governments via American documents, if using the Pentagon papers as an example.
The submitter "actually enjoys a lot of advertising"? What's wrong with them?
Ads have a lot of useful information. If you want to keep up on trends, prices, what is going on in any industry, the ads in the suitable media will tell you a lot quicker and more completely than any articles that get written. Catalogs, movie listings, concert and theater listings, are all just ads. You need them if you intend to know what it going on in the world. Commercials on TV do have an entertainment value a good amount of the time, just to keep the viewers watching instead of getting up and going to the kitchen. Ads in magazines often have an artistic value go get the reader to look at the pretty and interesting pictures rather than turn the page. Ads done right are of benefit to both the advertiser and the reader. It's not as if all ads are trying to sell things people don't need, people need to buy stuff anyway and if they can find out what they are looking for in ads then they win. If checking out what new computer gear is out and what the prices are, picking up a computer magazine and looking at the ads will tell you. Same for photography where the ads not only do a better job of informing the reader what is the current technology, but also what contests are looking for submissions, what the trends are, etc.
The trouble with online advertising is that it hasn't quite found a way to help the reader yet. They rarely have enough page space to be interesting. Forced ads before videos or webpages often take longer than the desired content. The only thing web ads really can do is be annoying to try and get the attention of the reader. Targeted advertising is getting better so that people actually see ads for stuff that insertests them. Motorcyclists see things about motorcycles. Photographers see ads related to photography. Etc. It's still not to the point that it is likely to do any good. I imagine what the person in TFA is trying to do is the online equivilent of being able to go back and look at the ads in a magazine when you are looking for that information.
"But the crux of the matter was, the simpler the approximation, the more we could associate ourselves in that role,"
Peanuts. Calvin and Hobbes, xkcd.
Or World of Warcraft. I have seen several gaming articles talk about how WoW graphics, while not as realistic as other games, hold up better and for longer because they are more cartoon like. Years later, a cartoon still looks like a cartoon, but what was realistic graphics are noticably dated.
This isn't news. Filing a lawsuit doesn't say anything; It's a numbers game. Think of it like this: Let's say you have a 10% chance of prevailing, it will cost you 1 million dollars in legal fees to get a shot at rolling those dice, and the payoff if you make it is 150 million in licensing fees. Is it worth it? Now, stop and consider that because of the way the patent system is setup, you can have many additional challenges, each with about a 10% chance of success. If a lawsuit is filed, it is because the risk/benefit analysis is favorable. It has nothing to do with justice, fairness, or any intangible value you might care to place on it.
This is one business throwing the dice and seeing if the bet pays off. It isn't news until pay day.
Gee, if you would have only pointed this out at the beginning of all the SCO stuff, you could have saved us years of reading non-news posts.
Slashdot Mirror
I have mod points but I'm not going to burn you for this, just tell you that you're wrong and why. Apple, the iPhone, the iPad, are not the only venue in a market. They are not the only place that this can be sold at. They are nothing more than a single avenue in a wide market. They are equivilent to one chain of book stores out of all the book stores out there. That being said, getting 70% of cover price for a periodical is a fantastic deal for the publishers. Much better than printed material as brick and mortar stores usually get more than 30% and then there are the distributor costs. The publishers gets most of its costs from advertising anyway. All of which is why subscriptions can usually be gotten straight from the publisher on periodicals for much much less than 70%.
Where you will see publishers getting into conflict with Apple will be on advertising costs. If apple tries to take too much of that, then they'll start pushing back. Even then, they'll just drop Apple products as a market before much else takes place.
I highly doubt it. What do you want to bet that the review process involves the submitter signing something stating that they own what they are trying to sell. It's just like when Kindle users ended up buying copies of 1984 when they didn't have the license. Now that Apple has been informed, it will be corrected. The test will be to see if Apple deletes the illegally sold apps off of people's devices like was done on the Kindle.
Nuclear power doesn't compete with oil. It competes with coal mostly and then natural gas and hydro. Oil is used mainly for transportation and manufacturing of plastics, not power. More nuclear power for China means they are in even a better position to use more oil to make all the goods we want instead of letting us make them.
I think by fan base he meant desktop publishing, scientific, radiology, video, and other niche markets that depended on decent graphics. Trust me, in the 90's, Microsoft's products just weren't up to task.
Apple has always looked at certain niche markets and produced the "killer apps" for those markets. In the early days, it just meant having the hardware that could do it and then developers would make the actual "killer apps". Now, it means they actually have to produce some of their own software. They still control some key points of the video market, outdoing Adobe's products. Moving into other niche markets such as mp3s, phones, TV, etc isn't that far from what they have been doing, producing good hardware, OS and if need be software to fulfill a market's needs.
Sorry, they do not all make excellent teachers. I had one that was an excellent researcher. His research work was astounding, but the sad fact was the even with a class of three intelligent upper division physics students who wanted to learn the material, he was just not able to teach it. The guy could integrate by parts three times and then do a Laplace transform to an equation and come up with the solution in his head without even thinking about what he was doing. We would have to badger him for the above information which he stated was "trivial". So trivial that he couldn't write it up on the board to show us how it was done. He just was not a good teacher and he was not the only one that I had that might have been a leader in their feild, but lacked the ability to teach the subject to others.
Have you never DMed or played under one that did quid pro quo trades in game? "Get me a coke for that 15xp you need to get to next level." "Whoever does X, I will give Y." There are plenty of instances where a DM can be a leader or use their position as one of authority. It's just like Farmville. Do this and I will give you this imaginary reward in this imaginary world. But don't think for a second that just because it is imaginary, that it isn't valued. As a DM I've gotten some pretty sweet RL rewards from players for those imaginary rewards.
Besides that, in a previous article exactly like this one months ago (might have been over on rpg.net), someone working in the corrections system pointed out that the mere gathering of people into groups with pens and papers to plan stuff would pretty much kill any such behavior in most prisons, be it for D&D or a church meeting.
Most of the things I've seen on why Carter was a bad president give him that part. Where they really come down on him is in two different areas both dealing with defense. Carter was smart. he saw that the Soviet Union was not stable due to increased funding of the cold war. His plan was to back off the cold war, give the USSR a chance to get itself on it's feet. Instead, the Soviet Union took that opportunity to steamroll straight ahead and invaded Afganistan with the USA in a position that we couldn't do anything about it even if we had wanted to.* Then there was the fall of Iran and the hostages along with a botched rescue attempt again showing that we weren't protecting ourselves.**
*Reagan on the other hand ramped up cold war spending in order to break the USSR bank which worked. However, when the bank was breaking, there was a non-zero chance that the USSR would use all those military toys to try and maintain control. Luckily, Gorbachev opted not to have military conflict and let the USSR fall.
**And some put forth that Reagan worked to keep them as hostages till after the election just for that reason.
...or maybe the creators either didn't care if it was discovered or wanted it to be discovered. If it was Israel, the last time they decided to stop another countries nuclear program, they just flew jets over and bombed it. Not too much subtly in that. It could be that they wanted Iran to eventually find it just so they'd know. Saber rattling does little good if nobody can hear the saber or know who's doing it. Perhaps somebody thought it was more important to let Iran know they were out there and would try and stop the program, than let a long term plan go into effect that would would harm but not actually stop the program.
We would not be mining the moon for anything that would go back down the gravity well to Earth. We would be mining it for resources for space exploration and operations instead of mining Earth for them. The moon, being smaller has a much smaller cost of getting materials into orbit. If we need a sufficient amount of those materials, it becomes cheaper to ship a mining operation from Earth to the moon and then those materials to space than to ship all the materials straight from Earth. Water is the main resource people are talking about and to reach that break even point, we'd need megatons of the stuff. The only operations that might being to need that much resources from the moon would be large scale habitation or perhaps a trip to Mars. in short, out side of pure science, there will not be any need to mine the moon till there is already a great deal of activity in space at which point mining the moon will just be a cost cutting method.
It might be but what people are missing out on is that it is the best explanation pointed at by our data. Trust me, all the other ideas for what might be causing our observations have been looked at, at least any ideas proposed by the naysayers here. Cold matter? Giant black holes? Changes to the laws of gravity? All looked at, studied with proposals have been made, experiments have been done, and they failed when tested. The idea of matter having gravity being out there that does not interact with the electro magnetic forces fits our observations and the more tests that are done, the more they confirm this idea. The reason guys like him get flak is because they are like "birthers". They keep asking and fighting for answers to questions that have been answered a long time ago and are a matter of public record if they would bother to study the subject for ten minutes of wikipedia and the web. No matter how many times this is explained to them, they still don't believe and the probably never will. I'm sure some of these people are just asking honest questions, however, their questions have been answered if not in this ./ post about dark matter, in the past ones they didn't read. (They must be new here.)
They make a nice whine.
How long are they available? I thought about the Nexus One and the it disappeared. What's to say the same doesn't happen to the Nexus S which I didn't even have a clue was coming out till it did till because of Google's dropping of Nexus One? I bought the first iPhone and have gotten two major software upgrades, while many of the Android owners I talk to are bitching about how they can't upgrade the OS. Unless a vendor (Google) shows up and shows that I can expect to upgrade to the next couple of softwear iterations without issue I'm not changing. Hardware limitations I understand. That carriers won't let me upgrade my android version because they want to sell new phones or just don't want to spent the effort to let me update my own phone I don't. UNtil, there is an established brand that I can trust to at least provide future software updates for android phones, I'm not looking at them.
Sorry. I am unconvinced. If somebody writing software isn't willing to put $99 effort into his product (costs he'd have to pay anyway for hosting and such), I really don't really want to be using their code. I remember having a Palm PDA and going to CNET and other sites and downloading programs to it. Nearly two thirds of them were too buggy to use or simply caused my PDA to freeze on launch. I do not really want to return to those days. For those that do, I'm glad they have their alternative. It's an alternative that I've looked at myself. Once I see advantage in it I'd be willing to switch but running some random guys code who can't put some minimal effort into getting it vetted isn't currently one of them.
Well, that's the difference between idealists and people who actually have to do work. The idealist wants the shitty standard, and the person who does work, wants something that works. Yes, we now have the web, browsers and the technologies that go with them but stand alone apps (or applications if you prefer) simply work better. I work at a hospital dealing with several vendor supplied web applications. First, they all need to go out and download some bit of proprietary software (active X or Java) and often will not function unless you have one specific version of one specific browser. So there really is no difference between using the browser and a stand alone app as you are essentially using a stand alone app anyway, except for the added difficulty and troubles of tying it all to a browser. Then theres that browsers and the web simply aren't very robust. It's always freezing or shutting down (possibly due to other pages they also have loaded or just because nobody really has built a robust web browser) which cause more troubles trying to fix locked reports, full sessions, and such on the back end. The web is great for something that needs to be accessed from random locations, but for dedicated usage, please get over the web and bring back reliable applications.
Why would MS work on actual phone hardware? They din't make hardware then. They just provide the operating system for people who do make hardware, similar to how they did with IBM and the PC. Of course, that's the same situation that Google is in and they seem to be doing it better.
Eventually, I shall die but be replaced online with a small perl script and then live forever, or at least the life of the server. I wonder if anybody will notice.
I'm pretty sure Nasa has some sort of PR department and plenty of geeks who are not only able to describe why movie science is bad, but would love to do so. Combine the two and you end up with a PR release that would do more for NASA than spending thousands on some other press release that not even the geeks will care about.
The reasons that we are is for 64 bit and ability to use more RAM. We're also in the medical imaging sector so both of those means that our programs can handle more images a lot faster. Also, it's getting to be a pain to support some newer hardware in WinXP as the base install disk doesn't have the drivers needed to boot some of it. Some companies simply aren't supplying drivers for their hardware for WinXP at all so backing down the OS is not really an option.
I don't know if I can agree. I have an iPhone and I've looked at Android phones. They seem pretty similar. I'm sure if I had an android to use for a long period of time, I could come up with some differences, but in general, they are both fairly similar. Here's how I see the differences. I've had the iPhone since it first came out. I've gone through two major software upgrades. After several years, I can understand how older hardware doesn't have newer features or might stop getting new OSs. However, there is a non-trivial amount of people I've talked to who have an android phone and have never gotten a software upgrade and are pissed about it. When looking at android phones, no one is really sure who is responsible for providing such, the manufacturer or the phone company. It really doesn't inspire confidence. I know if I get another iPhone, I will most likely get the next few years worth of software upgrades. With android, it seems like a crap shoot. There's simply no one in that arena I can trust. I might trust Google themselves, but they killed the Nexus just as it was catching on. There new phone came out of no where after I thought they'd said they were done making phones because the other companies have caught up. Until they (or somebody else) actually commit to providing support for the phone I buy for a reasonable amount of time, I just don't think android is in my future.
Actually, to build near earth orbitals large scale, we'll probably have to go to mars first. If you are talking city sized orbital environments, you need resources, lots of resources. Moving those up from the Earth's gravity well is probably not as cheap as moving them in from comets and asteroids in the solar system. For that matter, for the investment of the first thousand or so, Mars could be made habitable enough and create a thousand times more living space than those resources could in an orbital environment by themselves. From there you have a cheaper and easier place to get materials and manufacture them. A space elevator should be possible on Mars with todays technology.
Also, in the long run, making Mars habitable would be cheaper than orbital environments. Once you get the temperature up and atmosphere established, upkeep will be nonexistant compared to that of a similar amount of orbital environments. Plus an atmosphere for protection from radiation and meteorites. Working in a gravity well and atmosphere has it's advantages.
But I think the key issue here, is that wikilinks is not American and probably sides more with the people of the countries that are being lied to by their governments than the people of the US being lied to by theirs. So, hurting American diplomatic relations is probably not a big concern. The case is not so much as American media telling the American people that the American government has lied to them, but rather a Laotian media telling Laotian and Cambodian people that the American government has been bombing them with knowledge of the Laotian and Cambodian governments via American documents, if using the Pentagon papers as an example.
Yep, and you both annoy the rest of us about the same too.
Ads have a lot of useful information. If you want to keep up on trends, prices, what is going on in any industry, the ads in the suitable media will tell you a lot quicker and more completely than any articles that get written. Catalogs, movie listings, concert and theater listings, are all just ads. You need them if you intend to know what it going on in the world. Commercials on TV do have an entertainment value a good amount of the time, just to keep the viewers watching instead of getting up and going to the kitchen. Ads in magazines often have an artistic value go get the reader to look at the pretty and interesting pictures rather than turn the page. Ads done right are of benefit to both the advertiser and the reader. It's not as if all ads are trying to sell things people don't need, people need to buy stuff anyway and if they can find out what they are looking for in ads then they win. If checking out what new computer gear is out and what the prices are, picking up a computer magazine and looking at the ads will tell you. Same for photography where the ads not only do a better job of informing the reader what is the current technology, but also what contests are looking for submissions, what the trends are, etc.
The trouble with online advertising is that it hasn't quite found a way to help the reader yet. They rarely have enough page space to be interesting. Forced ads before videos or webpages often take longer than the desired content. The only thing web ads really can do is be annoying to try and get the attention of the reader. Targeted advertising is getting better so that people actually see ads for stuff that insertests them. Motorcyclists see things about motorcycles. Photographers see ads related to photography. Etc. It's still not to the point that it is likely to do any good. I imagine what the person in TFA is trying to do is the online equivilent of being able to go back and look at the ads in a magazine when you are looking for that information.
Or World of Warcraft. I have seen several gaming articles talk about how WoW graphics, while not as realistic as other games, hold up better and for longer because they are more cartoon like. Years later, a cartoon still looks like a cartoon, but what was realistic graphics are noticably dated.
Gee, if you would have only pointed this out at the beginning of all the SCO stuff, you could have saved us years of reading non-news posts.