However, the average phone user is not so virus savvy as the average computer user. To wit, a semi-quoted example from an article from earlier - may have been slashdot, probably wired magazine or similar though.
User gets notification on phone. Accept or reject? Reject. User gets notification on phone again. Accept or reject? Reject. Repeat line above a few times. A virus doesn't care about the user rejecting it, and will keep trying to give it. User (hooray for the general public, sigh) eventually presses accept. Granted, this doesn't happen every time... but I bet you know a fair number of people who would, even out of curiosity.
And there's your issue. If this thing keeps popping up on someone's phone - especially if they're trying to do something else, like dial a number - there's a good chance that they'll get irritated enough before moving out of range.
Haven't you noticed what google does in the past 7 years of its existence? It provides a free service, which people use. Because it's free (and works nicely, etc etc), more people use it. Google then get large amounts of money from advertising revenue.
Even a program like google maps - which doesn't even have adverts - helps. Take a look at google maps - they spent a while making it (cost, wages), the API is provided (free), anyone can use it (free), no adverts (All the pizza places get listed when you search, or whatever; so no revenue there). So that project, looked at from a narrow and constricted viewpoint, is a pure loss. Stupid google? I don't think so. Because it makes people a little more likely to use google search, which makes google inc. more advertising revenue.
If you as a company can provide wifi access, you have complete ability to add, for example, a google ad block on every single page. It's not terribly invasive (it's the least invasive of all the ad blocks I've seen, and in my experience turns up far more interesting (i.e. relevant) stuff. If you're a hardcore user who doesn't want ads, you ignore it. Or block it. Whatever -- BUT there will always be those who are attracted to the ads, and so google will get revenue. I don't believe for a second that it's expensive to run this - and the installation cost will be amortised rapidly by the potential extra advertising revenue. Your 'thousands or millions on hardware' vanishes in the blink of an eye in the face of the fact that by advertising alone (and those same free services) google inc is currently worth over $81 billion (July 2005 figure).
THIS is interesting. If I don't have to take out my card, but DO still have to type in a pin (which takes around a second) then so long as that typing is shielded then it's a huge lump more secure than most of the posts in this thread so far are complaining about. Personally, I would prefer a pin that isn't simply 4 characters long - if someone vaguely sees the pattern or directional movements of your hands, they've got a huge chance of being able to guess your pin in a few tries. Even if that few tries > card lock, there's still a bunch of other typing patterns just about to happen. For those of us who type at speed, a pass phrase would take somewhere near that second for a normal pin - and would be a heck of a lot less easy to recognise and copy. Granted, people with bags in one hand and non-fast typers etc etc etc will disagree - but they should then be able to choose their system. If it's a 4-key PIN, then they've got the same security they had before.
So: I agree with still putting in your private key (as noted by parent), and suggest as corrollary an option to have a longer key if you want to have more security. Even if I'm restricted to the numpad, I can still think of a whole bunch of memorable ways of generating long sequences. Anyone who's played tekken/etc will surely be able to splay a rapid-fire combo move. Anyone can think up their own memorable combo; if they can't, there's always the default 4-key.
The 44 to 88 pounds of stuff is the stuff you need to carry around anyway. It's a well-thought out solution; using waste energy for something useful.
As this is now.. it is doomed for the land of the lost and forgotten. We'll see. Depending on the price tag on it, I'd be happy to get one of these in the form it is (As this is now) already.
charges will apply to anything you do Just like Google currently charges for its multiple services?
No. *Everything* Google provides to the general public has been free. It's their business model. It gives them more clients, which generates more advertising business for them. Remember that they're now worth more than Time Warner and the likes, having only been an upstart company in 1998; all without charging us a penny.
Your point on monopoly is invalid anyway - there's already a huge market (equal to the number of connections on the internet at the moment) in net access; Google joining in won't destroy that. Sure, some companies may go out of business - but there's too many telecoms involved for a monopoly to happen in the foreseeable future.
While at the moment this is spawning a handful of standard amusing slashdot responses, you miss a more useful application - that of field operatives. And you can take 'field operatives' to mean soldiers and the like - being able to use all kinds of equipment that would normally require more power than is available should improve things, although bear in mind they already carry heavy packs so it wouldn't be one per person. The other kind is the more normal field operative - anyone who goes exploring/researching/hiking/prospecting... if you don't have to carry samples back to base camp for analysis, or can power *anything* enabling, then you're ddoing well with one of these. Remember that most people don't need the long list of things mentioned in the post; but for enabling people who are away from home, this looks like it could be really handy.
Uncle Sam's checkbook is only infinite when tax becomes infinite. It's called balancing the budget, and it's what causes the US national debt.
Oh, and if you think the US Govt can just print another bunch of money (or arbitrary creation of funds in other ways, eg electronically) then I suggest you talk to an economist and find out how that can cripple a country.
This doesn't change the fact that hydrogen is only a storage medium - you have to spend energy creating it, and you lose a little energy when you change it back again. All in all, we're currently looking at spending 2.5 times as much energy as you get out.
Thing is, this hydrogen is currently derived from... you guessed it, petroleum. So essentially, you're burning 125 litres or gallons of fuel to get 50 litres or gallons' worth of car movement.
It's not all bad - you can make hydrogen from any power source, so you can have a fully environment-friendly hydroelectric hydrogen generator. However, that's less efficient than burning up petroleum to make the hydrogen, so for the moment hydrogen is worse for the environment than simply burning fuel; the only 'plus' side is that the dirty waste products are released away from your car and from town, so the pollution is moved away from cities to specific fuel burning areas. We can only hope that it's easier to clean up there.
Macintosh has never been accepted on corporate desktops
It hasn't?
*looks around the office*
Then what are all these white computers with apple logos on them?
Seriously - this is complete and utter rubbish. Try using 'Machines running windows are still significantly ahead in numbers compared to Apple computers'. A large number of graphics/film companies work on Apple computers, because that was the industry standard ten, five, years ago - and in a way this is a mirror of the home environment, where the evening-out of platforms and their performances fail to have significant effect on the number of X Y or Z machines, because of the status quo.
If you have detectors 5 miles apart, you could easily get interference to both from a satellite in LEO. If you have detectors 5000 miles apart, any data seen by one detector but not the other can be completely ignored, because it isn't from what you are looking at - the signal from a star thousands of light years away isn't changed by the mere 5000 miles at this end. Your point is good for optics and cameras - but the detectors we're looking at here are detecting what the signal from an effective point source is, across a range of frequencies (check out fourier transforms to understand how they get data from it); imaging isn't part of the project.
Radiations from a star or other source can be detected by a single detector; it's just that the bigger the aperture of the detector is (whether a physically single object, or multiple dispersed objects) the better the signal to noise ratio gets.
You can bet that the spammers will look for ways to improve their standing. Being able to use a compromised computer to rank a page with positive points/karma/rating etc seems like a significant problem. If it's a negative-only system then those same compromised computers can blacklist IPs that aren't compromised, effectively reducing the 'average' past their own, leading to their own standing out as relatively whiter.
Hopefully CipherTrust will have a look at (for example) things Google has done with pagerank, and be able to address a problem that is significantly tied in with the problem it is trying to help with.
Ooh, unless you gave it depth. Depth would allow you to work out the direction of the wave, which would allow you to work out how much to shift it by. There's a bit of a paradox here in that you need to know the direction of a signal to be able to correspond one bit to another, but presumably starting a communication with a standard byte/word for triangulation would make that easier.
The arrays mentioned here are a nifty piece of lateral thinking. Compare them to the giant detector arrays on earth; if you have two detectors a large distance apart, you effectively increase the aperture size to that large.
There's similar projects widely spread around the globe; by combining information from a wide array of detectors, you can eliminate significant swathes of atmospheric noise, and since you know which direction the arrays are pointing in, you can correct for depth errors electronically (ie if one detector is 90 round the earth from another, any signal that comes from that sector of sky will reach the two detectors at slightly different times (unless they happen to be at 45 either side of the signal) and the two signals can be shifted correspondingly to align the actual signal, whether it be emission from a star or the next wow signal.)
On the other hand, a satellite array would probably be non-directional - can't figure off the top of my head how a signal would currently directed from a satellite, since they'd be serving multiple devices at once.... hmm. Seems like with an array you'd have better scope for having a bigger aperture; though you'd get more chance for errors if the signal was coming from a direction further away from the vertical. Comments?
The problem with garbage is that unless it's big enough to show up on radar you don't know where it is. The handy thing about satellites is that firstly you've launched them into an orbit that's planned not to interfere with other orbits, and secondly you know where they are.
(Note to parent - this isn't directly aimed at you as an argument, you just had handy comments to reply to:)
if you are suddenly suspected of being a terrorist under the patriot act or whatever, the Gov can find out your entire life from one court order to google
Why do you seem to consider this a bad thing? Don't you want terrorists to get caught?
I agree with the thought that if a company handles personal info (contact details, browsing habits, etc etc) maliciously - either sending fleets of spam your way, or identity theft, or whatever - is a bad thing. Also if someone malicious accessed the google datastore on people, or accessed the google cookie and extracted information from it, then problems stem again from there.
Presenting the argument that google cookies may stop terrorists doesn't work. Even looking at it from a less strong point of view: If You Have Done A Bad Thing, The Rest Of Us Want You To Get Caught.
I doubt the govt or cia or authorities of that ilk care whether person X likes gambling, or is looking for a house in tuscany, or needs viagra supplements, or whatever. If it's not illegal, then why should they care?
IF google can stick to their public business plan - making finding things easier, trying to help with relevant ads without being intrusive - AND have security of information, then WHY do you, or anyone, care if the information exists?
Your comment of I don't think Google actually cares stands out from the crowd - hooray! Someone else who realises that among however many (tens of?) millions of people they might have information on, if you're not being malicious yourself, then the good guys are on your side.
A SKU is a stock-keeping unit - essentially, it's what a barcode represents. A first gen xbox is one sku; a special edition xbox is another sku; an xbox 360 is a sku; a package bundle is also a sku.
A single barcode can represent anything - including a compilation of other barcodes - and the blanket term for 'thing that can be represented' is SKU.
HTH.
Since ZDnet removed the article... find a mirror
on
10 Computer Mishaps
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· Score: 1
I had to look up Machinima. Essentially, they're recording an in-game scene, and using that as part of a sequence.
Do the people in the shot know they're being filmed? Technically you'd expect people to misbehave either way; some react specifically to the camera, and some just react to being in a crowd. I'll bet this takes a large number of shots...
You can bet that if people knew they were being filmed they'd want to be paid though; on the other hand, the privilege of being in the film (as mentioned in the article) might be payment enough.
It's certainly an interesting concept, and may in a way be more natural than animation or real actors, though you've always got the problem of people moving around in imperfect directions (not being in line with a wall, bumping off things a lot more - simply because it's a game with restricted movement control) and movements that are restricted to that of the game engine. For example - if you get a bunch of people in WoW to/dance, you'll start seeing 'mimicry' and repetition fairly rapidly.
The two factors looked at for launching things into orbit are the latitude and altitude. Latitude because the spin gives you a little bit of extra kick; altitude because you don't have to go as far. With LEO being 124 miles minimum above the earth, and Everest being 5.5 miles tall, you can see that if good elevation might be able to help - problem is, at that altitude the weather and accessibility (and politics of getting there in the first place) are usually pretty awful. You still need a hecka boost of power to get up there too; and spin wins out, which is why NASA launches from Florida rather than the Rockies.
Some of the sci-fi authors reckon that places like the Deccan Plateau - large flat area at 1-1.5 mile altitude in India (wikipedia reckons it's one of the most stable land masses in the world too); follow that up with the mountain range that bounds it on one side and you've got a perfect area for a tube launcher. At the moment the political climate makes it edgy, notwithstanding that no-one has done significant work on tube launches (technically the knowledge is there - railgun launch, magnetic boosting (see maglev trains); it all helps get the craft seriously moving *before* you have to start using the expensive rocket fuel, though there's issues if you reach the end of the launch tube and fail to fire, which aren't there if you fire from a pad...) now where was that sentence going before getting bracketed? Oh yeah. Deccan Plateau is close enough to the equator to be able to use a bit of spin to help there too, though I don't know whether the spin is with or against the plateau-tube launch.
Aaaanyway... having digressed significantly, I'll point out that the Earth's spin makes that much of a difference - because the equatorial circumference (hooray for wikipedia) is 40000km, and it goes round every 24h. That's 463 metres per second. Turns out after a bit of calculation that the acceleration you get is 0.03m2/s; granted that's only 0.3% of earth gravity, but when you're looking at the cost of a launch, saving the amount of fuel you need for that is likely to be a hefty cost saver!
Has no-one else noticed the release of cards in game and out of game in short order? The Elementals, Warlords, Portals, and Beasts cards - in game, Darkmoon Faire, combine the set to make a handin for which you get a funky trinket. What *I'm* interested in is (a) whether the CCG cards are related to the Darkmoon Faire cards and (b) how they're supposed to affect your ingame experience. I can think that the CCG cards may direct you to do something you wouldn't think of or find in game, or tell you other things like/chickening at chickens for the chicken egg quest; easter eggs (no pun intended) on the cards? THAT's what makes me curious.
What happens in a normal blackout currently? Surely the communications would be powered by relays, which would be powered by local electricity and so be affected by the blackout anyway?
That's the point - it's NOT randomly killing people. Nowhere in the policy does it say anything remotely like 'if you see someone you don't like the look of, shoot them dead.' It remains the case that this happens when people are being surveilled, under suspicion, with paper trails and proper intelligence; it can understandably be extended to if a policeman is confronted by someone who yells "I have a bomb and I'm about to blow up the station", if that could ever be expected to happen. There is no mention of shooting to kill on a whim.
I saw after my reply that you had posted your own replies to your posts as offtopic, and appreciate that it's a mistake - my own apologies for getting onto you about it, since your intended parent post was collapsed in my view.
Slashdot Mirror
However, the average phone user is not so virus savvy as the average computer user. To wit, a semi-quoted example from an article from earlier - may have been slashdot, probably wired magazine or similar though.
User gets notification on phone. Accept or reject? Reject.
User gets notification on phone again. Accept or reject? Reject.
Repeat line above a few times. A virus doesn't care about the user rejecting it, and will keep trying to give it. User (hooray for the general public, sigh) eventually presses accept. Granted, this doesn't happen every time... but I bet you know a fair number of people who would, even out of curiosity.
And there's your issue. If this thing keeps popping up on someone's phone - especially if they're trying to do something else, like dial a number - there's a good chance that they'll get irritated enough before moving out of range.
Haven't you noticed what google does in the past 7 years of its existence? It provides a free service, which people use. Because it's free (and works nicely, etc etc), more people use it. Google then get large amounts of money from advertising revenue.
Even a program like google maps - which doesn't even have adverts - helps. Take a look at google maps - they spent a while making it (cost, wages), the API is provided (free), anyone can use it (free), no adverts (All the pizza places get listed when you search, or whatever; so no revenue there). So that project, looked at from a narrow and constricted viewpoint, is a pure loss. Stupid google? I don't think so. Because it makes people a little more likely to use google search, which makes google inc. more advertising revenue.
If you as a company can provide wifi access, you have complete ability to add, for example, a google ad block on every single page. It's not terribly invasive (it's the least invasive of all the ad blocks I've seen, and in my experience turns up far more interesting (i.e. relevant) stuff. If you're a hardcore user who doesn't want ads, you ignore it. Or block it. Whatever -- BUT there will always be those who are attracted to the ads, and so google will get revenue. I don't believe for a second that it's expensive to run this - and the installation cost will be amortised rapidly by the potential extra advertising revenue. Your 'thousands or millions on hardware' vanishes in the blink of an eye in the face of the fact that by advertising alone (and those same free services) google inc is currently worth over $81 billion (July 2005 figure).
THIS is interesting. If I don't have to take out my card, but DO still have to type in a pin (which takes around a second) then so long as that typing is shielded then it's a huge lump more secure than most of the posts in this thread so far are complaining about. Personally, I would prefer a pin that isn't simply 4 characters long - if someone vaguely sees the pattern or directional movements of your hands, they've got a huge chance of being able to guess your pin in a few tries. Even if that few tries > card lock, there's still a bunch of other typing patterns just about to happen. For those of us who type at speed, a pass phrase would take somewhere near that second for a normal pin - and would be a heck of a lot less easy to recognise and copy. Granted, people with bags in one hand and non-fast typers etc etc etc will disagree - but they should then be able to choose their system. If it's a 4-key PIN, then they've got the same security they had before.
So: I agree with still putting in your private key (as noted by parent), and suggest as corrollary an option to have a longer key if you want to have more security. Even if I'm restricted to the numpad, I can still think of a whole bunch of memorable ways of generating long sequences. Anyone who's played tekken/etc will surely be able to splay a rapid-fire combo move. Anyone can think up their own memorable combo; if they can't, there's always the default 4-key.
Like SimilarityEngine's response said, it weighs nearly diddly. Here's a picture.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7970
The 44 to 88 pounds of stuff is the stuff you need to carry around anyway. It's a well-thought out solution; using waste energy for something useful.
As this is now.. it is doomed for the land of the lost and forgotten.
We'll see. Depending on the price tag on it, I'd be happy to get one of these in the form it is (As this is now) already.
If you're just looking for enough power for a game boy, you might well be able to do it with a standard bag. 84lbs is the top end of the power range.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7970 has another viewpoint, and even a clear picture.
charges will apply to anything you do Just like Google currently charges for its multiple services?
No. *Everything* Google provides to the general public has been free. It's their business model. It gives them more clients, which generates more advertising business for them. Remember that they're now worth more than Time Warner and the likes, having only been an upstart company in 1998; all without charging us a penny.
Your point on monopoly is invalid anyway - there's already a huge market (equal to the number of connections on the internet at the moment) in net access; Google joining in won't destroy that. Sure, some companies may go out of business - but there's too many telecoms involved for a monopoly to happen in the foreseeable future.
While at the moment this is spawning a handful of standard amusing slashdot responses, you miss a more useful application - that of field operatives. And you can take 'field operatives' to mean soldiers and the like - being able to use all kinds of equipment that would normally require more power than is available should improve things, although bear in mind they already carry heavy packs so it wouldn't be one per person. The other kind is the more normal field operative - anyone who goes exploring/researching/hiking/prospecting... if you don't have to carry samples back to base camp for analysis, or can power *anything* enabling, then you're ddoing well with one of these. Remember that most people don't need the long list of things mentioned in the post; but for enabling people who are away from home, this looks like it could be really handy.
Uncle Sam's checkbook has no limits.
Uncle Sam's checkbook is only infinite when tax becomes infinite. It's called balancing the budget, and it's what causes the US national debt.
Oh, and if you think the US Govt can just print another bunch of money (or arbitrary creation of funds in other ways, eg electronically) then I suggest you talk to an economist and find out how that can cripple a country.
This doesn't change the fact that hydrogen is only a storage medium - you have to spend energy creating it, and you lose a little energy when you change it back again. All in all, we're currently looking at spending 2.5 times as much energy as you get out.
Thing is, this hydrogen is currently derived from... you guessed it, petroleum. So essentially, you're burning 125 litres or gallons of fuel to get 50 litres or gallons' worth of car movement.
It's not all bad - you can make hydrogen from any power source, so you can have a fully environment-friendly hydroelectric hydrogen generator. However, that's less efficient than burning up petroleum to make the hydrogen, so for the moment hydrogen is worse for the environment than simply burning fuel; the only 'plus' side is that the dirty waste products are released away from your car and from town, so the pollution is moved away from cities to specific fuel burning areas. We can only hope that it's easier to clean up there.
How can they claim monetary damages? Presumably they got complaints from their clients - but their clients would have footed the support bill.
Macintosh has never been accepted on corporate desktops
It hasn't?
*looks around the office*
Then what are all these white computers with apple logos on them?
Seriously - this is complete and utter rubbish. Try using 'Machines running windows are still significantly ahead in numbers compared to Apple computers'. A large number of graphics/film companies work on Apple computers, because that was the industry standard ten, five, years ago - and in a way this is a mirror of the home environment, where the evening-out of platforms and their performances fail to have significant effect on the number of X Y or Z machines, because of the status quo.
If you have detectors 5 miles apart, you could easily get interference to both from a satellite in LEO. If you have detectors 5000 miles apart, any data seen by one detector but not the other can be completely ignored, because it isn't from what you are looking at - the signal from a star thousands of light years away isn't changed by the mere 5000 miles at this end. Your point is good for optics and cameras - but the detectors we're looking at here are detecting what the signal from an effective point source is, across a range of frequencies (check out fourier transforms to understand how they get data from it); imaging isn't part of the project.
Radiations from a star or other source can be detected by a single detector; it's just that the bigger the aperture of the detector is (whether a physically single object, or multiple dispersed objects) the better the signal to noise ratio gets.
You can bet that the spammers will look for ways to improve their standing. Being able to use a compromised computer to rank a page with positive points/karma/rating etc seems like a significant problem. If it's a negative-only system then those same compromised computers can blacklist IPs that aren't compromised, effectively reducing the 'average' past their own, leading to their own standing out as relatively whiter.
Hopefully CipherTrust will have a look at (for example) things Google has done with pagerank, and be able to address a problem that is significantly tied in with the problem it is trying to help with.
Ooh, unless you gave it depth. Depth would allow you to work out the direction of the wave, which would allow you to work out how much to shift it by. There's a bit of a paradox here in that you need to know the direction of a signal to be able to correspond one bit to another, but presumably starting a communication with a standard byte/word for triangulation would make that easier.
The arrays mentioned here are a nifty piece of lateral thinking. Compare them to the giant detector arrays on earth; if you have two detectors a large distance apart, you effectively increase the aperture size to that large.
There's similar projects widely spread around the globe; by combining information from a wide array of detectors, you can eliminate significant swathes of atmospheric noise, and since you know which direction the arrays are pointing in, you can correct for depth errors electronically (ie if one detector is 90 round the earth from another, any signal that comes from that sector of sky will reach the two detectors at slightly different times (unless they happen to be at 45 either side of the signal) and the two signals can be shifted correspondingly to align the actual signal, whether it be emission from a star or the next wow signal.)
On the other hand, a satellite array would probably be non-directional - can't figure off the top of my head how a signal would currently directed from a satellite, since they'd be serving multiple devices at once.... hmm. Seems like with an array you'd have better scope for having a bigger aperture; though you'd get more chance for errors if the signal was coming from a direction further away from the vertical. Comments?
Read before you mod up. Parent has inserted multiple typos and errors into the text. This is not 'interesting'.
The problem with garbage is that unless it's big enough to show up on radar you don't know where it is. The handy thing about satellites is that firstly you've launched them into an orbit that's planned not to interfere with other orbits, and secondly you know where they are.
(Note to parent - this isn't directly aimed at you as an argument, you just had handy comments to reply to :)
if you are suddenly suspected of being a terrorist under the patriot act or whatever, the Gov can find out your entire life from one court order to google
Why do you seem to consider this a bad thing? Don't you want terrorists to get caught?
I agree with the thought that if a company handles personal info (contact details, browsing habits, etc etc) maliciously - either sending fleets of spam your way, or identity theft, or whatever - is a bad thing. Also if someone malicious accessed the google datastore on people, or accessed the google cookie and extracted information from it, then problems stem again from there.
Presenting the argument that google cookies may stop terrorists doesn't work. Even looking at it from a less strong point of view: If You Have Done A Bad Thing, The Rest Of Us Want You To Get Caught.
I doubt the govt or cia or authorities of that ilk care whether person X likes gambling, or is looking for a house in tuscany, or needs viagra supplements, or whatever. If it's not illegal, then why should they care?
IF google can stick to their public business plan - making finding things easier, trying to help with relevant ads without being intrusive - AND have security of information, then WHY do you, or anyone, care if the information exists?
Your comment of I don't think Google actually cares stands out from the crowd - hooray! Someone else who realises that among however many (tens of?) millions of people they might have information on, if you're not being malicious yourself, then the good guys are on your side.
A SKU is a stock-keeping unit - essentially, it's what a barcode represents. A first gen xbox is one sku; a special edition xbox is another sku; an xbox 360 is a sku; a package bundle is also a sku. A single barcode can represent anything - including a compilation of other barcodes - and the blanket term for 'thing that can be represented' is SKU. HTH.
No-one else seems to have done so, so here we go. http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/54e91e7a18ef63262 ebc47bb1defcf91/index.html
I had to look up Machinima. Essentially, they're recording an in-game scene, and using that as part of a sequence.
/dance, you'll start seeing 'mimicry' and repetition fairly rapidly.
Do the people in the shot know they're being filmed?
Technically you'd expect people to misbehave either way; some react specifically to the camera, and some just react to being in a crowd. I'll bet this takes a large number of shots...
You can bet that if people knew they were being filmed they'd want to be paid though; on the other hand, the privilege of being in the film (as mentioned in the article) might be payment enough.
It's certainly an interesting concept, and may in a way be more natural than animation or real actors, though you've always got the problem of people moving around in imperfect directions (not being in line with a wall, bumping off things a lot more - simply because it's a game with restricted movement control) and movements that are restricted to that of the game engine. For example - if you get a bunch of people in WoW to
The two factors looked at for launching things into orbit are the latitude and altitude. Latitude because the spin gives you a little bit of extra kick; altitude because you don't have to go as far. With LEO being 124 miles minimum above the earth, and Everest being 5.5 miles tall, you can see that if good elevation might be able to help - problem is, at that altitude the weather and accessibility (and politics of getting there in the first place) are usually pretty awful. You still need a hecka boost of power to get up there too; and spin wins out, which is why NASA launches from Florida rather than the Rockies.
Some of the sci-fi authors reckon that places like the Deccan Plateau - large flat area at 1-1.5 mile altitude in India (wikipedia reckons it's one of the most stable land masses in the world too); follow that up with the mountain range that bounds it on one side and you've got a perfect area for a tube launcher. At the moment the political climate makes it edgy, notwithstanding that no-one has done significant work on tube launches (technically the knowledge is there - railgun launch, magnetic boosting (see maglev trains); it all helps get the craft seriously moving *before* you have to start using the expensive rocket fuel, though there's issues if you reach the end of the launch tube and fail to fire, which aren't there if you fire from a pad...) now where was that sentence going before getting bracketed? Oh yeah. Deccan Plateau is close enough to the equator to be able to use a bit of spin to help there too, though I don't know whether the spin is with or against the plateau-tube launch.
Aaaanyway... having digressed significantly, I'll point out that the Earth's spin makes that much of a difference - because the equatorial circumference (hooray for wikipedia) is 40000km, and it goes round every 24h. That's 463 metres per second. Turns out after a bit of calculation that the acceleration you get is 0.03m2/s; granted that's only 0.3% of earth gravity, but when you're looking at the cost of a launch, saving the amount of fuel you need for that is likely to be a hefty cost saver!
Has no-one else noticed the release of cards in game and out of game in short order? The Elementals, Warlords, Portals, and Beasts cards - in game, Darkmoon Faire, combine the set to make a handin for which you get a funky trinket. What *I'm* interested in is (a) whether the CCG cards are related to the Darkmoon Faire cards and (b) how they're supposed to affect your ingame experience. I can think that the CCG cards may direct you to do something you wouldn't think of or find in game, or tell you other things like /chickening at chickens for the chicken egg quest; easter eggs (no pun intended) on the cards? THAT's what makes me curious.
What happens in a normal blackout currently? Surely the communications would be powered by relays, which would be powered by local electricity and so be affected by the blackout anyway?
That's the point - it's NOT randomly killing people. Nowhere in the policy does it say anything remotely like 'if you see someone you don't like the look of, shoot them dead.' It remains the case that this happens when people are being surveilled, under suspicion, with paper trails and proper intelligence; it can understandably be extended to if a policeman is confronted by someone who yells "I have a bomb and I'm about to blow up the station", if that could ever be expected to happen. There is no mention of shooting to kill on a whim.
I saw after my reply that you had posted your own replies to your posts as offtopic, and appreciate that it's a mistake - my own apologies for getting onto you about it, since your intended parent post was collapsed in my view.