Its education, in that it provides a small example for a kid to roll around in his head without as much pain as any bigger real world example I can think of. I ask again, whats your superior suggestion to teach "the harsh reality of capitalism" with superior defined as causes less pain to the kid?
Your standard/. car analogy was not very good, although I respect the effort to uphold/. tradition (seriously). I'm guessing your point is you don't like bankruptcy laws, no-fault insurance, or the existence of uninsured motorist coverage because of payout disparity depending on wealth?
The "toughen up a bit" is not to make me feel better (none of that stuff ever happened to me, although I suppose if it did I'd be tougher now) the point is to make the kid less brittle when something bad happens to them. The old argument of "make sure you have a pet, so the first death in the family the kid experiences is merely his goldfish, not grannie"
Aren't they basically artistic skins of the same basic gameplay? So "importing" the pets into farmville or whatever with a new art theme doesn't strike me as technically challenging. So your doghouse because a farm barn in the database, but if you want, you can use the same internationalization engine that changes the name from "barn" to "agricola" or WTF to now change "barn" to "doghouse".
It would be like a game company with 50 WWII FPS sequel games "shutting down" one by rolling it into another. Not apparently a major technical achievement.
1) "A financial product is about as conceptual as you can get,” says Wilson Ervin, a senior adviser at Credit Suisse. “You just need paper and ink.”-- The Economist magazine [economist.com]
2) "In an even more blunt description, Tourre calls the CDOs he produced "intellectual masturbation" and likens himself to Dr. Frankenstein.
Another funny similarity is that sounds a heck of a lot like academia / PHD thesis time.
Physics grad students moving to wall street as quants get all the blame, but the problem goes a lot deeper into academia than just the F=ma guys.
Great quote. Hundreds of years of economic history show that's literally a unthinkable concept during a bubble run-up, but around the peak / after the pop everyone agrees it was of course self evident in retrospect. Happens every time, doesn't matter if its tulips, dotcoms, real estate, or, apparently, MMOs / social networking.
This historical comparison has certain negative implications for the near and medium term future of MMOs and "social networking".
There isn't much of a gaming element in Transport Tycoon or SimCity either
LOL what? Learned skills combine with an element of randomness in a competition to maximize an arbitrary numerical metric? When did they take that outta TT or SC?
teaching our children and teenagers (the main market for Zynga games), and to a lesser extent young adults, the harsh reality of capitalism by inflicting emotional pain is not socially acceptable
So... what would be an improvement? I think this is better than having a unemployed family member live under a highway overpass, or parents get downsized lose medical coverage and die, kicked out of house in foreclosure, watching grannie eat alpo because she has no income anymore, or about 80 bazillion other ways to teach kids about the realities of capitalism... Killing off some kids virtual pet is fairly compassionate in comparison to any other teachable moment...
First they came for my pet and I said nothing Then they came for my fish and I still said nothing etc Just wait for the delicious tears when someday WoW shuts down
what is the difference between red cross and mafia?
One gives you money before your business burns down, the other gives you money after your business burns down. Or something similar WRT broken kneecaps.
I'm pretty sure any religion you'd look at, with exception maybe of pastafarians (yum noodly appendages!) would have huge recent skeletons in their closets
Buddhism? I think not. Paganism? I think not. Unitarian universalists? I think not.
No its pretty much JUST the mainline judeo-christians and fringe cults that misbehave.
affect the ability of authors to make a living from their work.
This is the mistake. In 1991 I helped change the contaminated hydraulic oil in an industrial cardboard bailer/press. It was a 100% success. No one thinks it unusual that I was paid up front in one lump sum for my labor at that time of dumping in uncountable bottles of hyd oil rather than 10 cents every time someone uses that cardboard bailer for the remainder of my life plus the next 74 years, or whatever it is.
If you shrunk the copyright duration down to roughly how long it took the author to write a book, it would hardly result in the downfall of western civ. Lets give them a decade. That sounds realistically fair. For example, I'm going to cough up $15 for Stross's next book, not wait ten years. In fact I buy all his books on the day of release, so a 1 day copyright wouldn't realistically affect his income from me.
If you eliminated it completely, Stross would either have to live on a pre-order bounty system (no more laundry series until he gets $50K in the bank!) or speeches / book signings, or just apathy. Most likely it would result in the death of the middlemen. Yes I could buy a copy from a cheater of the equivalence of those shady copied DVD sellers, but in the modern internet era its no challenge anymore for anyone in the world to buy a copy of the book directly from Stross. In fact I'd throw in an extra $20 for a personally autographed copy, which under the current middleman system, my extra $20 probably represents his share of about 1K sales.
Would I buy a copy of HP Lovecrafts work from one of his heirs? Hmm hard question. God knows they don't deserve the money merely for having the luck of being born to the author. On the other hand if they guilt tripped me by maintaining an museum or using the money for a touring exhibition of artifacts or even something like a tuition scholarship for young wannabe authors, well, yeah, they'd be doing enough good work to deserve my cash.
The agency has no proof that electronic devices can harm a plane's avionics
That's weird. Just ask an A+P mechanic who's had to track down weird interference problems on a plane.
Also its just gossip but most pilot lounges have had an informal conversation or two along the lines of "fly over that tower and your avionics get weird"
The killer is stuff like ancient NDB/ADF radios... as long as there's a published ILS NDB approach in the entire USA airspace, you'll be stuck with what amounts to AM radio avionics on planes which are pretty good at hearing interference. Its possible, although hard, to mess up a VOR rx. I'm guessing VHF FM land mobile hand held radios (like, police and fire radios) are never going to be permitted on flying aircraft unless permanently installed and tested. GPS seems pretty hard to jam, but now you've got a single point of failure. Maybe a GPS, glosnass, and galileo triple stack of satnav would be approved, in a couple decades. Maybe.
The FCC is uninterested in REALLY enforcing unintentional radiator regulations. Once in a while for a political stunt. The most/. famous story I can think of was the original class A rated TRS-80 model I being sold to class B residential users, that thing was so electrically noisy that the 'Shack gave up and released the model III instead of trying to patch up the model I. If they really enforced standards, then maybe the FAA could do some EMC/EMI work to prove a VOR rx cannot be interfered with, etc. But they don't, and there's a world full of noisy junk as any HF ham radio operator will attest, so...
The US military has been shaped by paranoia about a preemptive strike ever since Pearl Harbor. They don't want to be caught a decade behind and short on forces ever again
Aka sept 11th 2001
Enough money has been spent that we can't ack or recognize a failure without really bad things happening to the messenger. But it seems to be true, however much of a thoughtcrime it may be to consider it. You could ague the same idea WRT the recent unpleasantness with the dead ambassador.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could just give him that endurance and strength
Bio is risky but we have centuries long tradition of war profiteering by manufacturing all manner of APCs, tanks, traditional aircraft, attack choppers, etc.
Its not the Spartan 300 anymore.
"hmm the C.O. isn't strong enough to fire an arrow beyond 100 yards... could use a magic potion to make him a SuperArcher... nah F it issue him a M16 and be done with it"
"hmm the C.O. is getting tired out on long pack marches.... we could bioengineer the 6 million dollar man's legs on to him... nah F it issue him a HMMVW with command radios and be done with it."
The speed thing is for aircraft pilots "as necessary" only. Never heard of your average grunt getting stimulants beyond coffee and retail energy drinks (monster, red bull, etc)
The suppressant is a joke that went out of style around the time of coed army units, I'm guessing 70s / post vietnam era. Other than wedding cake, no scientifically proven substance like that exists, and you don't want to know the details but rest assured there was absolutely no suppression of that type going on in the 90s, not the recruits, not the drill instructors, not in the regular units, absolutely not. Anyone claiming that obviously was at the wrong bases in the 90s.
You can get kicked out by failing PT, and I knew guys during the drawdown in the 90s who got kicked out (if they need warm bodies, there's a lot of "look the other way", but if they need to kick 2 guys out for every slot due to the drawdown, well, things get a little more strict). What I'd like to know is the obvious solution to failing PT seems to be roids plus a little exercise, so does.mil test for roids in addition to the random drug tests (and note that I was in.mil in the 90s and never got random tested, I wonder if its as rare now or more common or ?)
Ah my mistake... I only have and use amazon instant prime because it comes with the "free 2-day shipping" thing. Once I saved enough on "free shipping" to pay for the prime subscription, I started saving my free shipping toward some roku hardware. I didn't take long, due to buying a lot of stuff from amazon. The roku does have apps for netflix, hulu plus, pandora, vudu, hbo to go, and a ton of sports stuff, none of which I subscribe to or have any interest in.
I do have extensive personal experience that on the roku, the tunein radio streamer, the amazon video player, and the plex media player work perfectly. I would guess the netflix and hundreds of other player / streamer apps should work equally well, although I've never used any of them.
I'm not sure if the other boxes do anything that the roku doesn't. The next step after that is, 98% of what the roku can do, I don't care about, so a new box that I 99% don't care about, would not be much of an improvement.
I only use itunes to sync apps with my ipad, not for media. I would guess streaming itunes media is the only thing a apple TV could do that my roku can't. It would cost an extra $50 over the cost of my roku to be able to do something I'm not interested in doing, so...
Also you have to be careful with vaporware. "Maybe an intel thing might someday stream XYZ" is quite a bit different from "I can buy a box off the shelf at Target for $50 that streams XYZ, today, as in this afternoon"
Its very cheap... As a dedicated amazon instant prime device its hard/impossible to beat. When the latest mythtv version pretty much ruined the music app into something too complicated for endusers, plex on the roku to listen to music works pretty well.
That's the problem with the endless stream of newcomers. "We're going to do exactly what your $50 Roku does off the shelf, except we're vaporware and will cost $100 more! Hurrah for us!"
Lack of ventilation more so than too much insulation. New enough to have "advanced" insulation, too old for modern heat recovery ventilator machines in the HVAC.
There has been very few to look in to sub-surface building, such a shame.
I've looked into it. Sump pump / water leak costs / waterproofing attempts are extraordinarily expensive.
Also you are correct, dude in wifebeater tee shirt can dig a house basement sized hole in plain ole dirt for 3-figures... I'm guessing an entire basement can be completely built for only a couple thousand. Supposedly $5/sqft finished is reasonable. Don't confuse building a living space with shoving a basement full of $10K worth of HVAC gear... you can still build the raw empty basement for just a couple thousand. Also don't confuse confiscatory taxes and permit fees with the actual cost, in a civilized area most of the expense is the labor not permits.
The killer is I ran some numbers and digging the NYC 2nd ave subway is something like 37 million dollars every 10 feet. I'm guessing a skyscraper is less per 10ft.
Fiber optics relay daylight from the roof to stairwells and other non-window spaces that in conventional buildings would cost money to heat.
... cost money to light, during the day. At night you still need lights. Fiber is fairly IR transparent, even if they really did mean "heat", which I find unlikely, they still need heat during the night, especially long winter nights. I'm sure they'll have all the heat necessary during long summer days.
It'll be better than that, but not much. The killer problem is the average house would probably work pretty well WRT multipath distortion, but they don't need the bandwidth, and the office which needs the bandwidth is all steel framing and steel cubicles and steel beams and aluminum window frames which is going to multipath distort the signal into unusability. The TLDR is where its needed it won't work, and where it'll work its not needed. Whoops. Well back to selling kitty litter over the internet...
Another curious question is I wonder what the power budget is for this beast. If it makes a tablet too hot to touch or kills the battery in 30 minutes then I'm not too interested. Maybe a modern complicated wifi chipset uses less power than an ancient legacy chipset... but a modern simple slow chipset would surely use less. My point being I've never felt limited by a handheld device's LAN speed... battery life, sure
My somewhat extensive experience with mythtv and wireless is that you need speed to work around latency due to interference or random multipath or whatever it is that occasionally slows stuff down. If you've got 1000 mb to transfer over 1000 seconds then on average you only need average speed X. However if you need to transfer exactly 1 mb every second, or the picture breaks up, and you occasionally endure 9/10ths of a second interference/outages, then you need 10 times the average speed to deliver. Or a bigger buffer, which means a long spooling up delay.
A good IT analogy is its like the difference between batch processing and a realtime OS.
Or maybe a standard/. car analogy is something like if you've got a 200 mile range gas tank, it doesn't really matter where the gas station is as long as its less than 200 miles away when you have a full tank... but the instant that the closest open gas station is 201 miles away, you're all done. Maybe thats an awful analogy...
No wait I've got a better car analogy. My gas station can deliver something like 5 gallons per minute, which seems like gross overkill for my fuel injectors which barely burn 2 gallons per hour on the highway. However the key point is my fuel injectors do NOT use 2 gallons per hour, they really use a microscopic droplet 60 times per second. Or something like that. Too early in the morning...
Legos have been around for 40 or more years. I think Lego has proven they are not a fad.
I was brought up on generic sets some time ago. "This month's disney movie tie in" and "video game of the year" are much more faddish markets. Don't get me wrong, its a fun fad... but its still "just" a fad.
From memory I was brought up on the "city builder" sets which were approx 1 sq foot city blocks, sorta (like a fire house, etc), and I remember a very generic yet cool space ship series, and something like "expert builder" like a car with moving pistons, a working 2-speed transmission, and working rack and pinion steering. I'm sure they had faddish "original release of star wars" kits or board games that I don't remember... The danger is "investing" in something that only makes sense to a kid of 2012 and is destined for the recycle bin for a kid of 2022.
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Its education, in that it provides a small example for a kid to roll around in his head without as much pain as any bigger real world example I can think of. I ask again, whats your superior suggestion to teach "the harsh reality of capitalism" with superior defined as causes less pain to the kid?
Your standard /. car analogy was not very good, although I respect the effort to uphold /. tradition (seriously). I'm guessing your point is you don't like bankruptcy laws, no-fault insurance, or the existence of uninsured motorist coverage because of payout disparity depending on wealth?
The "toughen up a bit" is not to make me feel better (none of that stuff ever happened to me, although I suppose if it did I'd be tougher now) the point is to make the kid less brittle when something bad happens to them. The old argument of "make sure you have a pet, so the first death in the family the kid experiences is merely his goldfish, not grannie"
Aren't they basically artistic skins of the same basic gameplay? So "importing" the pets into farmville or whatever with a new art theme doesn't strike me as technically challenging. So your doghouse because a farm barn in the database, but if you want, you can use the same internationalization engine that changes the name from "barn" to "agricola" or WTF to now change "barn" to "doghouse".
It would be like a game company with 50 WWII FPS sequel games "shutting down" one by rolling it into another. Not apparently a major technical achievement.
1) "A financial product is about as conceptual as you can get,” says Wilson Ervin, a senior adviser at Credit Suisse. “You just need paper and ink.”-- The Economist magazine [economist.com]
2) "In an even more blunt description, Tourre calls the CDOs he produced "intellectual masturbation" and likens himself to Dr. Frankenstein.
Another funny similarity is that sounds a heck of a lot like academia / PHD thesis time.
Physics grad students moving to wall street as quants get all the blame, but the problem goes a lot deeper into academia than just the F=ma guys.
Investment implies some form of return.
Great quote. Hundreds of years of economic history show that's literally a unthinkable concept during a bubble run-up, but around the peak / after the pop everyone agrees it was of course self evident in retrospect. Happens every time, doesn't matter if its tulips, dotcoms, real estate, or, apparently, MMOs / social networking.
This historical comparison has certain negative implications for the near and medium term future of MMOs and "social networking".
There isn't much of a gaming element in Transport Tycoon or SimCity either
LOL what? Learned skills combine with an element of randomness in a competition to maximize an arbitrary numerical metric? When did they take that outta TT or SC?
teaching our children and teenagers (the main market for Zynga games), and to a lesser extent young adults, the harsh reality of capitalism by inflicting emotional pain is not socially acceptable
So... what would be an improvement? I think this is better than having a unemployed family member live under a highway overpass, or parents get downsized lose medical coverage and die, kicked out of house in foreclosure, watching grannie eat alpo because she has no income anymore, or about 80 bazillion other ways to teach kids about the realities of capitalism... Killing off some kids virtual pet is fairly compassionate in comparison to any other teachable moment...
First they came for my pet and I said nothing
Then they came for my fish and I still said nothing
etc
Just wait for the delicious tears when someday WoW shuts down
Why only EU?
Its just a EU court. Only the US empire considers the whole world its jurisdiction.
what is the difference between red cross and mafia?
One gives you money before your business burns down, the other gives you money after your business burns down. Or something similar WRT broken kneecaps.
I'm pretty sure any religion you'd look at, with exception maybe of pastafarians (yum noodly appendages!) would have huge recent skeletons in their closets
Buddhism? I think not.
Paganism? I think not.
Unitarian universalists? I think not.
No its pretty much JUST the mainline judeo-christians and fringe cults that misbehave.
affect the ability of authors to make a living from their work.
This is the mistake. In 1991 I helped change the contaminated hydraulic oil in an industrial cardboard bailer/press. It was a 100% success. No one thinks it unusual that I was paid up front in one lump sum for my labor at that time of dumping in uncountable bottles of hyd oil rather than 10 cents every time someone uses that cardboard bailer for the remainder of my life plus the next 74 years, or whatever it is.
If you shrunk the copyright duration down to roughly how long it took the author to write a book, it would hardly result in the downfall of western civ. Lets give them a decade. That sounds realistically fair. For example, I'm going to cough up $15 for Stross's next book, not wait ten years. In fact I buy all his books on the day of release, so a 1 day copyright wouldn't realistically affect his income from me.
If you eliminated it completely, Stross would either have to live on a pre-order bounty system (no more laundry series until he gets $50K in the bank!) or speeches / book signings, or just apathy. Most likely it would result in the death of the middlemen. Yes I could buy a copy from a cheater of the equivalence of those shady copied DVD sellers, but in the modern internet era its no challenge anymore for anyone in the world to buy a copy of the book directly from Stross. In fact I'd throw in an extra $20 for a personally autographed copy, which under the current middleman system, my extra $20 probably represents his share of about 1K sales.
Would I buy a copy of HP Lovecrafts work from one of his heirs? Hmm hard question. God knows they don't deserve the money merely for having the luck of being born to the author. On the other hand if they guilt tripped me by maintaining an museum or using the money for a touring exhibition of artifacts or even something like a tuition scholarship for young wannabe authors, well, yeah, they'd be doing enough good work to deserve my cash.
The agency has no proof that electronic devices can harm a plane's avionics
That's weird. Just ask an A+P mechanic who's had to track down weird interference problems on a plane.
Also its just gossip but most pilot lounges have had an informal conversation or two along the lines of "fly over that tower and your avionics get weird"
The killer is stuff like ancient NDB/ADF radios... as long as there's a published ILS NDB approach in the entire USA airspace, you'll be stuck with what amounts to AM radio avionics on planes which are pretty good at hearing interference. Its possible, although hard, to mess up a VOR rx. I'm guessing VHF FM land mobile hand held radios (like, police and fire radios) are never going to be permitted on flying aircraft unless permanently installed and tested. GPS seems pretty hard to jam, but now you've got a single point of failure. Maybe a GPS, glosnass, and galileo triple stack of satnav would be approved, in a couple decades. Maybe.
The FCC is uninterested in REALLY enforcing unintentional radiator regulations. Once in a while for a political stunt. The most /. famous story I can think of was the original class A rated TRS-80 model I being sold to class B residential users, that thing was so electrically noisy that the 'Shack gave up and released the model III instead of trying to patch up the model I. If they really enforced standards, then maybe the FAA could do some EMC/EMI work to prove a VOR rx cannot be interfered with, etc. But they don't, and there's a world full of noisy junk as any HF ham radio operator will attest, so...
The US military has been shaped by paranoia about a preemptive strike ever since Pearl Harbor. They don't want to be caught a decade behind and short on forces ever again
Aka sept 11th 2001
Enough money has been spent that we can't ack or recognize a failure without really bad things happening to the messenger. But it seems to be true, however much of a thoughtcrime it may be to consider it. You could ague the same idea WRT the recent unpleasantness with the dead ambassador.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could just give him that endurance and strength
Bio is risky but we have centuries long tradition of war profiteering by manufacturing all manner of APCs, tanks, traditional aircraft, attack choppers, etc.
Its not the Spartan 300 anymore.
"hmm the C.O. isn't strong enough to fire an arrow beyond 100 yards... could use a magic potion to make him a SuperArcher... nah F it issue him a M16 and be done with it"
"hmm the C.O. is getting tired out on long pack marches.... we could bioengineer the 6 million dollar man's legs on to him... nah F it issue him a HMMVW with command radios and be done with it."
Kind of not really
The speed thing is for aircraft pilots "as necessary" only. Never heard of your average grunt getting stimulants beyond coffee and retail energy drinks (monster, red bull, etc)
The suppressant is a joke that went out of style around the time of coed army units, I'm guessing 70s / post vietnam era. Other than wedding cake, no scientifically proven substance like that exists, and you don't want to know the details but rest assured there was absolutely no suppression of that type going on in the 90s, not the recruits, not the drill instructors, not in the regular units, absolutely not. Anyone claiming that obviously was at the wrong bases in the 90s.
You can get kicked out by failing PT, and I knew guys during the drawdown in the 90s who got kicked out (if they need warm bodies, there's a lot of "look the other way", but if they need to kick 2 guys out for every slot due to the drawdown, well, things get a little more strict). What I'd like to know is the obvious solution to failing PT seems to be roids plus a little exercise, so does .mil test for roids in addition to the random drug tests (and note that I was in .mil in the 90s and never got random tested, I wonder if its as rare now or more common or ?)
Ah my mistake... I only have and use amazon instant prime because it comes with the "free 2-day shipping" thing. Once I saved enough on "free shipping" to pay for the prime subscription, I started saving my free shipping toward some roku hardware. I didn't take long, due to buying a lot of stuff from amazon. The roku does have apps for netflix, hulu plus, pandora, vudu, hbo to go, and a ton of sports stuff, none of which I subscribe to or have any interest in.
I do have extensive personal experience that on the roku, the tunein radio streamer, the amazon video player, and the plex media player work perfectly. I would guess the netflix and hundreds of other player / streamer apps should work equally well, although I've never used any of them.
I'm not sure if the other boxes do anything that the roku doesn't. The next step after that is, 98% of what the roku can do, I don't care about, so a new box that I 99% don't care about, would not be much of an improvement.
I only use itunes to sync apps with my ipad, not for media. I would guess streaming itunes media is the only thing a apple TV could do that my roku can't. It would cost an extra $50 over the cost of my roku to be able to do something I'm not interested in doing, so...
Also you have to be careful with vaporware. "Maybe an intel thing might someday stream XYZ" is quite a bit different from "I can buy a box off the shelf at Target for $50 that streams XYZ, today, as in this afternoon"
Roku will be dead soon
Its very cheap... As a dedicated amazon instant prime device its hard/impossible to beat. When the latest mythtv version pretty much ruined the music app into something too complicated for endusers, plex on the roku to listen to music works pretty well.
That's the problem with the endless stream of newcomers. "We're going to do exactly what your $50 Roku does off the shelf, except we're vaporware and will cost $100 more! Hurrah for us!"
stomp around, slam into walls, and scream at random intervals.
Freshmen + alcohol = (see above, plus lots of vomiting)
19 yr olds pay good money for that experience. This may be a viable market niche.
maybe a spider is scary so make it a friendly octopus or something...
Bonus... if the company fails in industrial apps, its tentacle movies FTW
Lack of ventilation more so than too much insulation. New enough to have "advanced" insulation, too old for modern heat recovery ventilator machines in the HVAC.
There has been very few to look in to sub-surface building, such a shame.
I've looked into it. Sump pump / water leak costs / waterproofing attempts are extraordinarily expensive.
Also you are correct, dude in wifebeater tee shirt can dig a house basement sized hole in plain ole dirt for 3-figures... I'm guessing an entire basement can be completely built for only a couple thousand. Supposedly $5/sqft finished is reasonable. Don't confuse building a living space with shoving a basement full of $10K worth of HVAC gear... you can still build the raw empty basement for just a couple thousand. Also don't confuse confiscatory taxes and permit fees with the actual cost, in a civilized area most of the expense is the labor not permits.
The killer is I ran some numbers and digging the NYC 2nd ave subway is something like 37 million dollars every 10 feet. I'm guessing a skyscraper is less per 10ft.
It gets worse
Fiber optics relay daylight from the roof to stairwells and other non-window spaces that in conventional buildings would cost money to heat.
... cost money to light, during the day. At night you still need lights. Fiber is fairly IR transparent, even if they really did mean "heat", which I find unlikely, they still need heat during the night, especially long winter nights. I'm sure they'll have all the heat necessary during long summer days.
It'll be better than that, but not much. The killer problem is the average house would probably work pretty well WRT multipath distortion, but they don't need the bandwidth, and the office which needs the bandwidth is all steel framing and steel cubicles and steel beams and aluminum window frames which is going to multipath distort the signal into unusability. The TLDR is where its needed it won't work, and where it'll work its not needed. Whoops. Well back to selling kitty litter over the internet...
Another curious question is I wonder what the power budget is for this beast. If it makes a tablet too hot to touch or kills the battery in 30 minutes then I'm not too interested. Maybe a modern complicated wifi chipset uses less power than an ancient legacy chipset... but a modern simple slow chipset would surely use less. My point being I've never felt limited by a handheld device's LAN speed... battery life, sure
My somewhat extensive experience with mythtv and wireless is that you need speed to work around latency due to interference or random multipath or whatever it is that occasionally slows stuff down. If you've got 1000 mb to transfer over 1000 seconds then on average you only need average speed X. However if you need to transfer exactly 1 mb every second, or the picture breaks up, and you occasionally endure 9/10ths of a second interference/outages, then you need 10 times the average speed to deliver. Or a bigger buffer, which means a long spooling up delay.
A good IT analogy is its like the difference between batch processing and a realtime OS.
Or maybe a standard /. car analogy is something like if you've got a 200 mile range gas tank, it doesn't really matter where the gas station is as long as its less than 200 miles away when you have a full tank... but the instant that the closest open gas station is 201 miles away, you're all done. Maybe thats an awful analogy...
No wait I've got a better car analogy. My gas station can deliver something like 5 gallons per minute, which seems like gross overkill for my fuel injectors which barely burn 2 gallons per hour on the highway. However the key point is my fuel injectors do NOT use 2 gallons per hour, they really use a microscopic droplet 60 times per second. Or something like that. Too early in the morning...
Legos have been around for 40 or more years. I think Lego has proven they are not a fad.
I was brought up on generic sets some time ago. "This month's disney movie tie in" and "video game of the year" are much more faddish markets. Don't get me wrong, its a fun fad... but its still "just" a fad.
From memory I was brought up on the "city builder" sets which were approx 1 sq foot city blocks, sorta (like a fire house, etc), and I remember a very generic yet cool space ship series, and something like "expert builder" like a car with moving pistons, a working 2-speed transmission, and working rack and pinion steering. I'm sure they had faddish "original release of star wars" kits or board games that I don't remember... The danger is "investing" in something that only makes sense to a kid of 2012 and is destined for the recycle bin for a kid of 2022.