I like to imagine that all scientists operate on this principle. They sit around doing boring paperwork until one of them says "I wonder what happens when a deformable shape like a rubber band rolls around?", to which one of the others replies "Quickly, to the lab!" and they all run off to investigate it.
Actually, that's a pretty good description of lunch with physicists. Except, first we'd have to write down the physical constants of the rubber band, derive the dynamic equations of motion for the rubber band, find the expected behavior, and then run off to the lab to see if our results were correct with the last half of our lunchtime.
I'm sorry, but that's like telling a classic car enthusiast that the way to go is modern kit cars that look like Model T's, Old Ford Trucks from the 30's, and Studebakers. Yes, emulation is better than nothing and would help with saving the software, but that's only part of the situation.
Hell, I'm even worried about computer games. I collect old Macs and games to play on them. While the machines are still out there, various accessories for such are getting harder to find as are the actual games. While on the PC, theoretically, they'll play on a newer machine, the Mac platform has had a couple of changes of processor types that make sit hard to carry software over. Classic isn't even an option on the Intel Mac. There are tons of old games for the Mac toasters alone that formed a good deal of early computer gaming history and are still fun to play: Net Trek, Lunar Rescue, Ancient Art of War, etc. Every now and then I find a copy to buy, but I don't even have the games I played on an those old Macs, let alone the ones I never got to play.
I bet that even really old PC games have lots of issues, if you can track them down. I don't even want to think about what has happened to hardware and games for the old Apple ][s.
That's probably because people are too busy or too lazy. I would vote most as lazy, but probably busy to see the Cc to see whether they were scammed, if they are smart enough to realize that they have been scammed in the first place.
Probably more like too ashamed. If they don't figure it out pretty quick, when they eventually get somebody like me to see why their problem is not going away or explain to them that they bought snake oil, they are usually too embarrassed to do anything more. I know I have lost my money before to an outright (non-internet) con and a large reason I didn't go try and get it back was for feeling stupid for falling for it to begin with. Actually, now I don't actually miss that money and look at it as $20 well spent. Every time since then that somebody comes up to me and proposes something I think is a con (several times, the exact same scam), I can remember back to that $20 I lost in college, laugh and dismiss them without feeling bad (which is a prime motivator they use many times). Many times when I explain to people what has happened, I tell them to think about that money any time they are asked to pay for any transaction they didn't initiate to begin with and not fall for it again. Sure, that let's those people get to keep the money, but even if they did get it back and shut that person down. There would just be another and there are always more people to scam. Most internet scams were scams long before the internet and run via snail mail or even going door to door. It's probably better for them to lose that money once in a lesson that they will never repeat, than feel safe that they can get that money back otherwise.
How far does the storage capacity really need to expand? Hard drives are in the terabyte range now, but not many people really use that much. On media servers or something, maybe, but on your average computer? I've got 50GB in my laptop once you account for my windows partition, and I'm fine with that.
Sure, 50GB may do for you, but you're boring. If you were a photographer, graphic artist, or musician, owned a camcorder, had a music or video collection in current formats, downloaded porn, had to do powerpoint with graphics for work, booted to multiple OSs, or even played games, 50 GB is a pitiful amount of space. If you do two or more of those things, you'd probably already be figuring out when your terabyte HD would be running out of space.
As the speed it would take to get nearby stars in a short period of time is just not physically possible no matter how advanced you are and no civilization has yet wanted to spend 500 years getting here.
That makes some big assumptions on not only the culture of alien races but also their life span. While it might be true of humans, we have no idea what the life span of an alien might be, what their interests are, or what their civilizations value. If we were dealing with a race that usually exists in solitude with a thousand year life span living on an overpopulated world, being on a ship by yourself for the next 500 years might seem like not only a blessing but very doable. Of course, the same race might not have any interest in contacting another race. On the other end, if human life span is on the long side of things, it may make it even less likely they'll try and leave on a great trip.
Marathon was open sourced a while ago and runs very well on... well, pretty much anything these days (including my Intel Mac), so it's not a great example.
Ok, you caught me. I actually am a Mac fan and have a collection of old hardware from a 128 k Mac (used to play Lunar Rescue actually) all the way up to present. I could use the open source Marathon, but then I wouldn't be using the original media on the original hardware, and that's what counts to weirdos like me. I have old versions of Sim City (B&W and color), the Ancient Art of War, the entire Warlords series, etc. I've been a Mac fan since 1985 and like running the old hardware like car fanatics like working and driving old cars. Sure, they could get a kit car that looks like the old car and probably runs better, but that wouldn't be fun would it?
I think phone companies are much like banks. They're fine until something happens that causes the user displeasure, and then they become the most evil thing on the face of the earth causing them to change their service to some place else. The new place is fine, or even great, until something bad happens there, and then there are two most evil things on the face of the planet.
I'm with AT&T (and an iPhone). They have good service in my area ( I did ask around first for people's opinions of various phone company's service in my city), they had the phone I wanted (pre-iPhone), the store next to my house where I bought my phones, they give my company a discount, and I've never had any issues with them. Why shouldn't I like them?
I'm keeping mine around to run games on, especially old classic games that have stopped working under newer versions of OS X or Intel chips. In addition to that, it might go to my photo studio as a browser and photo editing machine.
Could is be possible that dark matter is just ordinary matter, made up of atoms and such, and that we just haven't found it yet because it absorbs the radiation we scan for?
If I sell a product that doesn't contain *any* of your copyrighted code (and API calls certainly can't be copyrighted), you have no basis to sue me for copyright.
If I understand this, copyright is what allows them to control your use of their code. However, to be allowed to use the code and their copyright, you must agree to the license which may have terms not involving copyright.
The people who play those games should be filtered out of life by having their money taken away from them until they don't have enough to pay for the basics of life.
Thank you for setting us straight that other people's lives are worthless if you don't enjoy their pastimes. However, coming from somebody posting to/., it really does seem like satire.
Seriously, transcribe it manually... automatic speech recognition just doesn't work. And can never work, because much of the time the only reason humans can understand each other is by making informed guesses based on context, which a computer program cannot do.
Funny, considering my job is training doctors to use voice recognition to do all their reporting. Actually, it works fairly well. I also don't mean dictating something that goes to transcriptionists. The doctors dictate the report. The dictation is transcribed into text. They review it and sign off. We got rid of all our transcriptionists years ago. The time for a report to get done went from 24 hours with transcriptionists to 24 minutes with voice recognition. The amount of errors was cut in half. The doctor's work load was also lessened as they could check the final version while still dealing with the data rather than having to go back and review everything all over again a day or two later. Speech recognition was a problem seven years ago, but hardly at all in the last five or so. Yes, the have to go over their dictations and occasionally make some minor corrections. There's always background noise to worry about and some people's accents are hard even for another person to get through, but for things that require quick turn around and need to be verified by the person who is doing it, voice recognition already is the gold standard.
PS several of the doctors like it so well they bought Dragon (pretty much everybody but Phillips use Dragon for their speech engine) for home and use it there for all their email and other writing.
Did Slashdot really just post some news within an hour of it actually happening? I think I may have clicked the wrong bookmark.
It's an Apple story. Apple media events get priority posting because with their walled garden approach, once its done, that's all there is to it but it's presented in a very professional manner. With Linux stories, everybody wants to review the text of the story first and perhaps rewrite it. With Microsoft stories, everybody is waiting for the first service pack before posting.
Welcome to the new world of modern espionage. In a world where countries are less worried about invading each other than preserving and succeeding in a stable international economic market, your spies are going to be mostly industrial in nature. Who doesn't think that the CIA is out there trying to figure out what other countries are stealing from our corporations or what we can steal from somebody else's? My real wonder is how we would introduce that knowledge into our side if we got it as it would be a large potential PR blow up. Countries spying on each others military secrets is almost expected, but countries spying on other countries corporate interests so they can turn such knowledge over to their own corporate interests might actually mean war.
Not exactly good maths there, so probably a PR piece from a 'journalist'.
9 foot^2 = 0.84 m^2. Could be correct, though I wouldn't use "nearly" for something that far off. And it's impossible to tell if the walls are really 9 foot^2 and they just made a very rough guestimate of the metric equivalent.
Or it was information given by a scientist who was keeping things to one significant digit because anything else really is just wasted text in a such an article especially when none of the measurements come out to exactly anything to begin with.
This is where American politics gets weird. The party that proports to be populist is on the wrong side of public opinion for almost all the one-issue voters: guns, abortion, gay rights, creationism, etc. etc.
Heh, heh. Funny thing is, I can't tell which party you're talking about. Both sides talk as if they are the populist party. They're both probably correct as American politics is geared to split up the voters half and half letting swing voters with single issue voter ideals determine the result as they are the ones that will motivate and get out and vote. Yet, even if they are the popular party on a subject, I have yet to see anything that either party presents actually convince me that they have any sort of facts to back their position up. We do not have a liberal* and conservative parties, we have two conservative parties with some opposing view points.
*Liberal meaning they actually put some critical thought into a subject. Weigh all their options, use research to determine what the end results would be, and then decide to implement a change. instead, they both have their beliefs which are not really based on anything but the ability to gain votes. Anytime an idea becomes truely populist, both parties simply adopt it and it becomes a non-issue.
I dont mean to be a party pooper, but it does not seem as though armed conflict between north korea and south korea has solved anything in the last 30 years. Perhaps if we still weren't falling lock-step in line with the reagan administrations heritage foundation doctrines toward communism, we might get a chance at a civil multilateral discussion between both parties that could, in the long term, evolve into diplomatic relationships the likes of the industrial exchange that until recently had been a major step forward for both parties.
You haven't read much on North Korea, have you? Go get a book on their history, read it, and then see what you think. The US and even more so the South Koreans have been trying to evolve diplomatic relationships with the north quite a bit. The North continues to simply milk all these for whatever money they can get, not both to honor their side, and break off relations. They have an ongoing policy of breaking agreements, only so they can get perks for agreeing to adhere to them again, so they can break them again for more perks, all the while never actually holding up there side. No, really, we'd probably be happy if they were just a dictatorship, but they are a crazy dictatorship. We might have been able to be diplomatic with Kim Il-Sung. He was just your typical commie dictator. His son is quite a bit crazier. However, at this point, it looks like we're just a few years max from getting to deal with somebody else when Kim Jung-Il dies.
Still, the situation is fucked even if the North Koreans were to honestly and in good faith surrender and join under South Koreas government. It would be much, much worse than when Germany was reunified. Their economy can't even support themselves. Most of their people are pretty much unskilled and incapable of performing anything but the basic manual labor. Their view of the world is a bizarre mix of what the NK government tells them and what they see on smuggled SK TV show tapes. The border is fairly porous right now and SK is having a hard time just trying to assimilate the few North Koreans that manage to sneak across the border because they can't handle the culture, use of money, the idea they don't need permission to leave their house, etc.
Bands can't even trust indie labels. They always have to check their contracts and make sure they can get our of it if they have to. One friend's band got in with a manager they liked on an indie label, worked out some good deals, and everything was looking great. The indie label had another band a major label wanted so they just bought out the indie for the one band. My friends band were left with an album finished, already pressed, and sitting in warehouse, but it wasn't worth the big label's time to even talk to the band about selling those pressed disks to them, let alone going ahead and distributing them. So there they were, their best album to date, finished and ready to go, they can't get it, they can't sell it, they can't produce any more of it, and it was even questionable if they could play the songs in concert because rights were now tied up by a company that would rather just kill it rather than deal with it.
Concerts and merchandise. Not CD sales. That's why Radiohead had no problems giving away their songs for free online.
From listening to my musician friends talk, its about rights management. The real money in making music isn't in recording, or doing concerts, it's in getting paid by advertisers, movies, and other media who want to use your music. The budgets for such things usually are far greater than the income from record sales or even merchandise. However, also from hearing my musician friends talk, the ability to get your money from that sort of things is also tied up by the RIAA, record labels, or such. One had a fairly successful indie band in the 80's (we called them "alternative" back then), it never made much money then but in the 90's his music started getting used in advertising. He still didn't get any money till he found out this was going on and actually got all his paper work filled out with whoever was doing it.
Tesla range: 160-250 miles (depending on options)
Subaru G4e range*: 125 miles
Mini Electric: 100 miles
Chevy volt: 40 miles
Coda Sedan: 90 miles
Nissan Leaf: 100 miles
Yep, with those sort of ranges, there's not much use for electric cars. I live in a city center so for about half my car use, those might be okay. However, the other half (pre time I use a car, not milage) when I can't just walk or take the public transit, I'm heading a minimum of 50 miles away and usually more like 100+. The only car that might be useful would be the Tesla with full options. The rest effectively aren't useful enough for me to deal without some sort of gas driven car. No hiking, camping, seeing friends and family in nearby cities. If I still lived in the suburb of a midwestern city, it was not uncommon to drive 100+ miles in one night. Drive into town and shop at a store, go to a friends, go to a night club, drive home. When I was in Houston, just getting in my car to go anywhere seemed like a two hour round trip on the highway. Since in the midwest, one has to drive to anything and it's usually a significant ways away, they really don't look useful for anything.
This raises the question, what does one do when your electric car runs out of juice? You can't really just pick up the battery and carry it to a station to recharge to get enough charge to get to that station with the car. Can a tow truck come charge you up enough to do so? Or do you have to get towed. Given the way my laptop batteries are with inaccurate readings or just cutting out when they get old, I really worry about electric cars.
Why would they think that? I cannot imagine that Apple would want to turn away the $99 SDK fee, the sale of a Macintosh computer and any additional revenues generated by the sale and/or use of a simple application for any reason.
Here's two reasons. One, your $99 isn't worth having to deal with even more really bad apps by anybody. They want a bit higher bar to submit apps just to make sure it is worth their while to do so. Two, for the same reason they tried to convince everybody there was no need for an SDK and the web was the programming environment when the iPhone first came out. If everybody programs their webpages to work with Safari, then the the web once again becomes platform independant or at least no longer limited to Windows IE, and that helps with Mac sales more than anything. Given a level playing feild of a web that doesn't depend on platform, Apple thinks they can win on simply providing the better product.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that's a pretty good description of lunch with physicists. Except, first we'd have to write down the physical constants of the rubber band, derive the dynamic equations of motion for the rubber band, find the expected behavior, and then run off to the lab to see if our results were correct with the last half of our lunchtime.
I'm sorry, but that's like telling a classic car enthusiast that the way to go is modern kit cars that look like Model T's, Old Ford Trucks from the 30's, and Studebakers. Yes, emulation is better than nothing and would help with saving the software, but that's only part of the situation.
Hell, I'm even worried about computer games. I collect old Macs and games to play on them. While the machines are still out there, various accessories for such are getting harder to find as are the actual games. While on the PC, theoretically, they'll play on a newer machine, the Mac platform has had a couple of changes of processor types that make sit hard to carry software over. Classic isn't even an option on the Intel Mac. There are tons of old games for the Mac toasters alone that formed a good deal of early computer gaming history and are still fun to play: Net Trek, Lunar Rescue, Ancient Art of War, etc. Every now and then I find a copy to buy, but I don't even have the games I played on an those old Macs, let alone the ones I never got to play.
I bet that even really old PC games have lots of issues, if you can track them down. I don't even want to think about what has happened to hardware and games for the old Apple ][s.
Probably more like too ashamed. If they don't figure it out pretty quick, when they eventually get somebody like me to see why their problem is not going away or explain to them that they bought snake oil, they are usually too embarrassed to do anything more. I know I have lost my money before to an outright (non-internet) con and a large reason I didn't go try and get it back was for feeling stupid for falling for it to begin with. Actually, now I don't actually miss that money and look at it as $20 well spent. Every time since then that somebody comes up to me and proposes something I think is a con (several times, the exact same scam), I can remember back to that $20 I lost in college, laugh and dismiss them without feeling bad (which is a prime motivator they use many times). Many times when I explain to people what has happened, I tell them to think about that money any time they are asked to pay for any transaction they didn't initiate to begin with and not fall for it again. Sure, that let's those people get to keep the money, but even if they did get it back and shut that person down. There would just be another and there are always more people to scam. Most internet scams were scams long before the internet and run via snail mail or even going door to door. It's probably better for them to lose that money once in a lesson that they will never repeat, than feel safe that they can get that money back otherwise.
Sure, 50GB may do for you, but you're boring. If you were a photographer, graphic artist, or musician, owned a camcorder, had a music or video collection in current formats, downloaded porn, had to do powerpoint with graphics for work, booted to multiple OSs, or even played games, 50 GB is a pitiful amount of space. If you do two or more of those things, you'd probably already be figuring out when your terabyte HD would be running out of space.
That makes some big assumptions on not only the culture of alien races but also their life span. While it might be true of humans, we have no idea what the life span of an alien might be, what their interests are, or what their civilizations value. If we were dealing with a race that usually exists in solitude with a thousand year life span living on an overpopulated world, being on a ship by yourself for the next 500 years might seem like not only a blessing but very doable. Of course, the same race might not have any interest in contacting another race. On the other end, if human life span is on the long side of things, it may make it even less likely they'll try and leave on a great trip.
Ok, you caught me. I actually am a Mac fan and have a collection of old hardware from a 128 k Mac (used to play Lunar Rescue actually) all the way up to present. I could use the open source Marathon, but then I wouldn't be using the original media on the original hardware, and that's what counts to weirdos like me. I have old versions of Sim City (B&W and color), the Ancient Art of War, the entire Warlords series, etc. I've been a Mac fan since 1985 and like running the old hardware like car fanatics like working and driving old cars. Sure, they could get a kit car that looks like the old car and probably runs better, but that wouldn't be fun would it?
I think phone companies are much like banks. They're fine until something happens that causes the user displeasure, and then they become the most evil thing on the face of the earth causing them to change their service to some place else. The new place is fine, or even great, until something bad happens there, and then there are two most evil things on the face of the planet.
I'm with AT&T (and an iPhone). They have good service in my area ( I did ask around first for people's opinions of various phone company's service in my city), they had the phone I wanted (pre-iPhone), the store next to my house where I bought my phones, they give my company a discount, and I've never had any issues with them. Why shouldn't I like them?
Marathon... ...and Alpha Centauri: Alien Crossfire
I'm keeping mine around to run games on, especially old classic games that have stopped working under newer versions of OS X or Intel chips. In addition to that, it might go to my photo studio as a browser and photo editing machine.
In short, no. The argument for dark matter comes from multiple different sources. If there was normal matter absorbing stuff out there and not emitting in a manner we are detecting, then we'd detect it also because we would detect a star or galaxy far away and it would get in the way of it. We'd determine several different ways to tell how far the object was and how bright it should be, and when it comes up less bright than what we expect or with unusual absorbtion lines, we'd know that there was stuff between us. If it emits light, we detect it. If it absorbs light, we'd detect it. If it was sitting behind other things we do detect, there are ways we'd detect it. If it was all in massive black holes in galaxy centers, we'd be able to detect it. I can't remember all the different methods off the top of my head right now, but you can read up on it if you don't trust me. There have not been just one case where evidence has suggested dark matter, but multiple different approaches where dark matter seems to be the only answer. We can come up with upper and lower bounds of the amount of normal matter in the universe and it falls so short of how much stuff we actually think is out there, that there is no real way that we could be off that much.
If I understand this, copyright is what allows them to control your use of their code. However, to be allowed to use the code and their copyright, you must agree to the license which may have terms not involving copyright.
Thank you for setting us straight that other people's lives are worthless if you don't enjoy their pastimes. However, coming from somebody posting to /., it really does seem like satire.
Funny, considering my job is training doctors to use voice recognition to do all their reporting. Actually, it works fairly well. I also don't mean dictating something that goes to transcriptionists. The doctors dictate the report. The dictation is transcribed into text. They review it and sign off. We got rid of all our transcriptionists years ago. The time for a report to get done went from 24 hours with transcriptionists to 24 minutes with voice recognition. The amount of errors was cut in half. The doctor's work load was also lessened as they could check the final version while still dealing with the data rather than having to go back and review everything all over again a day or two later. Speech recognition was a problem seven years ago, but hardly at all in the last five or so. Yes, the have to go over their dictations and occasionally make some minor corrections. There's always background noise to worry about and some people's accents are hard even for another person to get through, but for things that require quick turn around and need to be verified by the person who is doing it, voice recognition already is the gold standard.
PS several of the doctors like it so well they bought Dragon (pretty much everybody but Phillips use Dragon for their speech engine) for home and use it there for all their email and other writing.
It's an Apple story. Apple media events get priority posting because with their walled garden approach, once its done, that's all there is to it but it's presented in a very professional manner. With Linux stories, everybody wants to review the text of the story first and perhaps rewrite it. With Microsoft stories, everybody is waiting for the first service pack before posting.
Welcome to the new world of modern espionage. In a world where countries are less worried about invading each other than preserving and succeeding in a stable international economic market, your spies are going to be mostly industrial in nature. Who doesn't think that the CIA is out there trying to figure out what other countries are stealing from our corporations or what we can steal from somebody else's? My real wonder is how we would introduce that knowledge into our side if we got it as it would be a large potential PR blow up. Countries spying on each others military secrets is almost expected, but countries spying on other countries corporate interests so they can turn such knowledge over to their own corporate interests might actually mean war.
Or it was information given by a scientist who was keeping things to one significant digit because anything else really is just wasted text in a such an article especially when none of the measurements come out to exactly anything to begin with.
Damn. beat me to it while I was typing.
Now I'm going to get Redundant mods that's hurt my karma.
Let's call it ZZ-Top.
Heh, heh. Funny thing is, I can't tell which party you're talking about. Both sides talk as if they are the populist party. They're both probably correct as American politics is geared to split up the voters half and half letting swing voters with single issue voter ideals determine the result as they are the ones that will motivate and get out and vote. Yet, even if they are the popular party on a subject, I have yet to see anything that either party presents actually convince me that they have any sort of facts to back their position up. We do not have a liberal* and conservative parties, we have two conservative parties with some opposing view points.
*Liberal meaning they actually put some critical thought into a subject. Weigh all their options, use research to determine what the end results would be, and then decide to implement a change. instead, they both have their beliefs which are not really based on anything but the ability to gain votes. Anytime an idea becomes truely populist, both parties simply adopt it and it becomes a non-issue.
You haven't read much on North Korea, have you? Go get a book on their history, read it, and then see what you think. The US and even more so the South Koreans have been trying to evolve diplomatic relationships with the north quite a bit. The North continues to simply milk all these for whatever money they can get, not both to honor their side, and break off relations. They have an ongoing policy of breaking agreements, only so they can get perks for agreeing to adhere to them again, so they can break them again for more perks, all the while never actually holding up there side. No, really, we'd probably be happy if they were just a dictatorship, but they are a crazy dictatorship. We might have been able to be diplomatic with Kim Il-Sung. He was just your typical commie dictator. His son is quite a bit crazier. However, at this point, it looks like we're just a few years max from getting to deal with somebody else when Kim Jung-Il dies.
Still, the situation is fucked even if the North Koreans were to honestly and in good faith surrender and join under South Koreas government. It would be much, much worse than when Germany was reunified. Their economy can't even support themselves. Most of their people are pretty much unskilled and incapable of performing anything but the basic manual labor. Their view of the world is a bizarre mix of what the NK government tells them and what they see on smuggled SK TV show tapes. The border is fairly porous right now and SK is having a hard time just trying to assimilate the few North Koreans that manage to sneak across the border because they can't handle the culture, use of money, the idea they don't need permission to leave their house, etc.
Bands can't even trust indie labels. They always have to check their contracts and make sure they can get our of it if they have to. One friend's band got in with a manager they liked on an indie label, worked out some good deals, and everything was looking great. The indie label had another band a major label wanted so they just bought out the indie for the one band. My friends band were left with an album finished, already pressed, and sitting in warehouse, but it wasn't worth the big label's time to even talk to the band about selling those pressed disks to them, let alone going ahead and distributing them. So there they were, their best album to date, finished and ready to go, they can't get it, they can't sell it, they can't produce any more of it, and it was even questionable if they could play the songs in concert because rights were now tied up by a company that would rather just kill it rather than deal with it.
From listening to my musician friends talk, its about rights management. The real money in making music isn't in recording, or doing concerts, it's in getting paid by advertisers, movies, and other media who want to use your music. The budgets for such things usually are far greater than the income from record sales or even merchandise. However, also from hearing my musician friends talk, the ability to get your money from that sort of things is also tied up by the RIAA, record labels, or such. One had a fairly successful indie band in the 80's (we called them "alternative" back then), it never made much money then but in the 90's his music started getting used in advertising. He still didn't get any money till he found out this was going on and actually got all his paper work filled out with whoever was doing it.
Yep, with those sort of ranges, there's not much use for electric cars. I live in a city center so for about half my car use, those might be okay. However, the other half (pre time I use a car, not milage) when I can't just walk or take the public transit, I'm heading a minimum of 50 miles away and usually more like 100+. The only car that might be useful would be the Tesla with full options. The rest effectively aren't useful enough for me to deal without some sort of gas driven car. No hiking, camping, seeing friends and family in nearby cities. If I still lived in the suburb of a midwestern city, it was not uncommon to drive 100+ miles in one night. Drive into town and shop at a store, go to a friends, go to a night club, drive home. When I was in Houston, just getting in my car to go anywhere seemed like a two hour round trip on the highway. Since in the midwest, one has to drive to anything and it's usually a significant ways away, they really don't look useful for anything.
This raises the question, what does one do when your electric car runs out of juice? You can't really just pick up the battery and carry it to a station to recharge to get enough charge to get to that station with the car. Can a tow truck come charge you up enough to do so? Or do you have to get towed. Given the way my laptop batteries are with inaccurate readings or just cutting out when they get old, I really worry about electric cars.
Here's two reasons. One, your $99 isn't worth having to deal with even more really bad apps by anybody. They want a bit higher bar to submit apps just to make sure it is worth their while to do so. Two, for the same reason they tried to convince everybody there was no need for an SDK and the web was the programming environment when the iPhone first came out. If everybody programs their webpages to work with Safari, then the the web once again becomes platform independant or at least no longer limited to Windows IE, and that helps with Mac sales more than anything. Given a level playing feild of a web that doesn't depend on platform, Apple thinks they can win on simply providing the better product.