You might be right. I thought I had seem something somewhere about T-Mobile operating in Canada, but I may have been mistaken. It might just be roaming packages they offer for U.S. customers.
I don't really know what kind of deal you might be able to get with T-Mobile, but I'd check with them. They are in both the US and Canada, so you might be able to get a decent deal with them. Since you are in Canada more months of the year, if you have to choose a 'home country' for the phone, it might make more sense to make Canada the 'home', and the US the 'roaming' option.
No law has actually been created yet. Some *idiot* proposed a stupid, stupid idea. It *might* become law, but I highly doubt it (though, I'm not so sure that I would wager any meaningful stakes on it, to be fair).
The thing is, if this were enacted into law, it will most likely *kill* dining in New York City. I suspect that the entire hospitality and tourism industry in NYC will lobby against this bill. If I were in any tourism related business in NYC, I sure would (because, let's face it, eating is a huge part of tourism - if people can't stand the food, they might avoid NYC altogether, and choose to go other places, like Vegas, LA, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, etc).
Oh, don't get me wrong. I don't think monopolies are a good thing. I rather detest them, and so to that extent, I do agree with you. But, my point was that a lot of the 'wealth' of the people on the Forbes' list is *completely imaginary* stock-wealth. It's not like Carlos Slim has actually extracted $53 Billion of money from Mexico and other Latin-American countries, and has it sitting in bank vaults.
Again, I'm not saying it's *right* for him to over-charge people with his monopoly rents, but my point is that if he takes whatever real money he does get and re-invests it in companies operating in Mexico and the other nations where he originally extracted wealth, then it's not hurting those economies quite as much as people make out. Again, it's still not right - those other people should be able to keep a little more of their own money for their own benefit, but in the general case, there's nothing wrong with someone taking money from one business and investing it in another line of business - that is actually *very productive* in terms of helping the economy.
I just have to ask. . . generally speaking, the wealth of people on the Forbes' list is comprised *mostly* of equity holdings in companies (that is, Bill Gates is worth 53 Billion, but he doesn't have that in cash - most of it is stock in Microsoft and other companies).
Is that not true of Carlos Slim, too? If that is true, is it really so aweful that the man has built up his companies? Is he NOT helping the economies of those nations by providing them with critical telecoms?
"Instead, Carlos uses the money to expand into banking and other areas to make even more money for himself."
How is building up more companies not beneficial to the economies of those nations? If he makes even more money for himself, and then turns around and yet again invests it into *more* businesses, is that not helping the countries where those businesses operate?
I'm not saying I necessarily think the guy is a Saint. But, I've come to believe that in the world of economics, there's basically no such thing as a company which *only* benefits its owners. That said, I suppose it is possible that if the guy is price gouging people, he might be hurting more than he is helping - but I honestly don't know that is the case.
You can't just say that because someone is very rich, that they are hurting the economy that they are getting rich as part of. That strikes me as a bit of an oversimplification.
"While otherwise we other enjoy the games while you can't put up with $10 a month which you probably spend on a few beers for 1 hour."
$10/mo? Really? What game are you playing? Last time I saw an MMO with a $10/mo subscription, it was Ultima Online in 1999. $15/mo seems to be about the average, near as I can tell. Although, I do still agree with your point that MMO's are still a fairly 'cheap' entertainment. Movie at a first-run cinema, plus drink and a snack, will probably cost you more than $15 for 2 hours entertainment. Dinner out with friends, plus drinks, will *definitely* cost you more than $15.
But, I've personally quit playing MMOGs. I had played them pretty much continuously from about 1999-2009, then decided it was just time to quit. They really are too much of a time sink, and I've decided I want to do other things with the rest of my life.
"In short, imagine your home flooded to the roof with mud and contaminated, radioactive ash." (There, fixed it for you.;-)
Ok, to be fair, it's not very radioactive, but it's still an important thing to consider - coal ash is slightly radioactive.
But, I think it's gonna be a long time before we can get away from coal completely. Still, it's important that we start now, if we want to be coal-free in maybe 100-200 years (hey, I can hope).
"Drive past a coal burning plant. It's a crime they are allowed to use the air we breath as a landfill for dumping their waste and I don't just mean CO2. The sulphur[sic] and mercury and other toxins released are frightening."
I thought that a decade or two ago, the EPA implemented rules requiring most U.S. coal plants to install smoke stack scrubbers that captured all that stuff before it exited into the environment? I was under the impression that mostly what came out of the stacks now is CO2 and water? (I realize this doesn't necessarily apply to the rest of the world; but since you seem to be talking mostly about the U.S., that is the context I'm discussing this in).
But, I agree with your main point about off-shore Wind. As long as we can do it in a way that doesn't too adversely affect marine life, or maritime navigation, then I'm all for it. You probably can generate a lot of very cheap power that way. Doesn't help us folks in Ohio too much, but we can probably turn some corn or pig farms into wind farms, or maybe put some out in Lake Erie (but I'm not sure there's any place in Ohio as consistently windy as those coastal areas).
"I doubt most developers are going to do both Windows and OS X."
I generally agree, but, I seriously doubt the existence of a Mac version of Steam is going to *hurt* PC gaming. Developers that are only interested in Consoles will likely to continue to be. Developers that have decided to support both PC and Console probably won't suddenly be in a worse position than they currently were just because there is a Mac version of Steam and they aren't releasing for it. *But*, for developers who *are* interested in developing for Mac, anyhow, Steam now gives them another option for how to get distribution.
In Portal, there is only one material 'texture' that you can open portals on - something resembling concrete.
We don't really know for sure if you can open a portal on anything else. . . wood? Ice? Natural rock? Crystal? Does the surface have to be perfectly smooth?
Can anyone who has read the journal paper comment on what kind of thermal/electric conversion efficiency they saw in this process? Did they provide any information as to whether the efficiency was proportional to temperature (i.e. with heat engines, we have the Carnot Efficiency theorem which shows that the maximum theoretical efficiency is proportional to the difference between the maximum and minimum temperatures - do these nanotubes conform to the same, or similar, principle)?
How hot can nanotubes get before breaking down? Could these carbon nanotubes be used with a heat source like coal or nuclear fission or fusion, to generate electricity more efficiently than a steam turbine? (I suppose the tricky part there is that the article describes using a 'thermal wave' to generate the electrical current, and coal/nuclear generally produce a pretty constant heat source, instead of a cyclical heat source, but I suppose there might be some clever way to produce thermal waves from a constant heat source)?
If they couldn't be used to replace a steam turbine, could they somehow be setup as a 'secondary stage' to produce more electricity from the 'waste heat' from the steam turbine?
Since the 'size' of a Kelvin and a degree Celsius are the same, I've noticed it seems to be common practice in science that when dealing with any values larger than about 1000 deg. C, to just use Kelvins. As the parent points out, all the physics equations are based on Kelvin anyhow (since Kelvin 0 == absolute Zero), but there's also the fact that, when dealing with 'large' temperatures, the difference between Kelvin and Celsius is basically negligible.
Kelvin is the 'more correct' scale to use for science, and if you want to know what that temperature is in terms of the more 'familiar' Celsius, it's sufficient for us laymen to know that, except at temperatures less than 1000k, we can basically just say K and C are the same thing.
This is particularly true when dealing with temperatures in things like nuclear fission or fusion, stars, supernovae, etc. The difference between 10 Million K and 10 Million C is only 0.0027315 percent, so at that point, it's convenient to just view them as the same.
Even in the context of a discussion like these nanotube thermoelectric generators, if you say the temperature is above 3000K, I generally understand what that is - really darn hot, but not fission/fusion hot.
Thank you for bravely taking it upon yourself to speak for everyone else. . .
"The people have spoken, we do not want ads."
I do. No, seriously, I do. I don't want ads that infect me with spyware, or play a sound or video clip (unless I specifically click a play button). I don't want ads that break the website, or contain content which is inapprorpriate (e.g., unless I'm browsing a porno site, I don't want ads for porno, or even ads for anything else that contain inappropriately clothed people - I mean, I might be surfing at work, or in a public place, or I might have friends or family over). I don't want ads that try to trick me into installing software with ominous looking fake "system warning" messages, or any other form of impersonation or fraud.
Also, I don't want a page where > 33% of the page area is covered in ads.
But, in the general case, I don't mind ads. I know that they help pay for content so I don't have to. They sometimes are entertaining, and sometimes let me know about products, events, or services I didn't previously know about.
I do wish I had more control over what ads I see, though. I don't particularly like seeing the same ad 50 times. I'm a single, 30-40 year old male, and don't really want to see ads for feminine hygiene or beauty products, or women's clothes, for example.
But, I don't mind *some* advertising. Sure, you and many others like you don't want any ads. But don't speak for me, please.
"Sorry you companies, businesses, and corporations havent figured it out yet, but ads dont work!"
Are you serious? You don't think ads work? The companies paying for advertising do so ONLY because it DOES WORK. Sure, for some companies it doesn't work, but for most co.s it does. Just ask Ford, Pizza Hut, Coke, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch, Miller Brewing, Proctor and Gamble, Unilever, Con-Agra, Gillete, Frito-Lay, or any one of hundreds of other very large businesses that spend a lot of money on advertising, and have for around 100 years (maybe longer, not sure).
I'm not sure I really see that as a third path. That's just another way of saying 'let the patient die instead of continuing to treat them'. Maybe it opens a possibility that at some time in the future, someone both figures out how to treat what was killing you, and how to reverse the cryonic death, but in the here and now, cryonic suspension basically equals death, from most people's standpoint.
I think the problem is that, unless you look to sources outside the original Portal, you never encounter that character's name. You logically know someone left all those scribbles for you, but you never really know who. (It might be that if you play through the game with the developer commentary, they might discuss that character; I tried, but since I had just played through the game, even though it's fairly short, I found it too boring to play through a second time trying to pay attention to the commentary track - I don't know that I made it very far at all with the commentary on; it's been long enough since I played that maybe it's time to try it again.)
If they do, I wonder if they will use a 'new, improved' version of the portal gun. What I mean is, in order to keep the puzzles in Portal interesting, the gun had a very serious limitation - it could only create portals on flat surfaces made out of a very specific material (not sure what it was, but it appeared to be some sort of ceramic tile, or something. Maybe it was just concrete, not sure.
Put another way, the Portal levels mostly had an 'over-designed' feel to them, but that was ok and made sense in the context of a game - after all, you *were* in a test course designed specifically to test/train users of the portal gun (must've been some military training program).
Half-life has certainly had it's share of very industrial areas, but in more recent entries in the series, we've been in the great outdoors, and in rather 'plain' buildings in the country-side. That means the gun would likely only be useful in a (kind-of) small number of environments/levels in the games, and those levels would probably end up feeling like they were designed specifically for the portal gun (which, of course, they would have been).
Of course, there's been plenty of examples of stuff in the Half-Life series where you could only use something for one or two levels specifically designed for that gameplay mechanic, like using one of 'barnacles' as a grappling hook to swing from place to place in only one or two levels in the original Half-Life, or in Half-Life 2, the level where you get the swarm of Ant Lions as 'pets', or the end of Half-Life where you get the 'energy orb gun', but at least those levels had this going for them: you never saw those things before, so it was a new and novel gameplay experience.
Since most people have already played Portal, not sure adding one level of portal puzzles would necessarily add that much in the way of novelty to HL2: Ep. 3.
Although. . . I suppose they could do new things with the portal gun. There were no monsters/enemies in Portal (except at the end). Might be kind of fun to put a blue portal somewhere bad, then shoot red portals under the feet of combine soldiers, then watch them fall 100 feet to their death, or drop into some sort of hazard.
I guess what I'm driving at is, sure, they could (and maybe even will), but if it'll only be for a small section of the game, not sure if that's really that important for it to be in the game.
How long will it stay 'stopped' if these guys are let out with a slap on the wrist? You don't think they'll just go right back to 'work'? What about deterrence of other 'would-be' identity thieves?
If someone is offered a 'gamble' with two possible outcomes, one of which is gaining something, and the other of which is just remaining at the same point (that is, no net gain or loss), then it is *irrational* not to participate in the gamble. Now, of course, we have this concept in human society called 'ethics' where we say that you shouldn't do something which hurts someone else, even if it profits you, but these guys have already shown that *they have no ethics*.
Some number of people will always ignore ethical 'rules', and for those people, you must fall back to simple, rational, economics. In this case, economics doesn't translate directly to money, but rather to the idea of incentives/disincentives.
Of course, some of those people will still gamble - even if their is a substantial risk of loss, because with online identity theft, fraud, etc, there is always the possibility of a very large payout, just like with drug dealing - you might wind up in jail, or full of bullets, or you might wind up rich. But, at least there is enough possibility of very negative consequences to put most people off from drug dealing.
Seems to me it's the same with cyber-fraud. Make sure there is the possibility of *very* negative consequences, to make it rational for people to avoid the gamble, even though they do have the possibility of becoming rich.
Plus, there is plain, simple justice - even if there is no deterrent effect, most of us feel that when someone decides to throw ethics by the wayside, and hurt others, there should be some kind of price to pay.
I think it has to do with the fact that true logical contradictions can't really exist in nature: the whole idea behind DRM is to try to give someone access to the software, but not give them access to the software. Because that is, at least seemingly, a logical contradiction, it's just about impossible to pull off.
In the end, every legitimate copy has to give the user access. Any system that gives 'authorized' access can be potentially exploited to grant 'unauthorized' access. As one example, let's consider a DRM system that consists of individually encrypting every 'authorized' copy of a game with a different crypto key, then requiring the user to download the key to decrypt that copy. Well, once the key is downloaded, the 'authorized' user can then use the key to decrypt the copy, then have unencrypted copies to share on the Internet.
Any system that relies on code inside of the executable itself to verify it's own authenticity is potentially subject to code patches that simply disable the verification step (or short-circuit it with the equivalent of replacing the authorization function with a function which just always returns the 'correct' value to get the rest of the code to continue).
Etc, etc.
The prevailing wisdom seems to be that to make a game 'crack-proof', you make an online game. Theoretically, with an online game, a determined enough person or group could reverse-engineer the protocol and server-side logic, and re-implement the server, although, admittedly, that is probably a very daunting undertaking.
That is the 'best' DRM simply because you are never granting the end-users direct access to the program - you are basically sending inputs over the network, and receiving the output of the program. It's sort of analogous to never having a copy of a word-processor on your computer, but only receiving pdf files of the final, finished product (ok, that might not be a perfect analogy, but I hope you can see what I mean).
But, for games which execute locally, I stand by my original assertion that trying to give someone access without giving them access is a logical contradiction, and so, fundamentally impossible. That's also true of audio and video, as we have seen over and over again.
That program doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me. According to the article you linked to, you have to have *alread* created an app, put it on the market, gotten a good rating, and a lot of downloads. Stands to reason that if you have already developed a popular android market app, you must already have an android phone to test your app on? Why would you give a free phone to someone who already has one? What business benefit does that provide?
That sounds kind of like offering a free knife or pot to a professional chef, or maybe a free drill or reciprocating saw to a professional carpenter. They would already have their tools.
Giving free phones to developers who are not *yet* developing for the Android platform might make sense - say, giving them to interested iPhone developers to try to get them to port their apps to Android. Or perhaps to college students or other new programmers who code up some sort of app using the SDK emulator, but don't have a phone to test it on yet.
"FAT32 or NT filesystems, which *would* make sense in the case of IO Data."
Why would that make sense? If IO Data makes Network Attached Storage, wouldn't you use either something like Samba or NFS (in which case, you would probably use Ext2/3/4, or maybe XFS or ZFS), or if you are talking about a lower level device, wouldn't you be using something like iSCSI or Fiber Channel where the device just looks like a hard drive attached to the network, and the Operating System on the other computer which is using it actually has the filesystem drivers? So, if the filesystem drivers are on a different server, how would the NAS device itself infringe?
I love how none of these articles include any info on which patents were licensed. If Microsoft has patents which cover algorithms in Linux, then there should be a list of patents numbers they can point to to say which patents are being covered in these License Agreements.
You know, back when Microsoft sued Tom-Tom, it came out that the patents in question covered certain features of the VFAT filesystem. I don't think that patent would affect Network Attached Storage. After all, if you're using Samba NFS, FTP or HTTP to access the files, it doesn't matter what filesystem is used on the NAS device. One would presume such a device would be using Ext3, Ext4, or maybe XFS or something.
Which makes me wonder, is Microsoft asserting patents which cover Samba, perhaps? The Linux kernel itself, even if you don't compile VFAT support into the kernel (or use the patched version which supposedly avoids the MS VFAT patents by removing some functionality)?
Sure seems that this is all a marketing driven FUD campaign, since no one is talking about what patents are in play here. If they have patents, they should come out and tell the Linux developers and the world which patents supposedly are infringing. If they won't tell anyone, then the courts should just put a stop to this crap - it's my understanding that there is a principle of law in many countries, including the U.S., where if you know someone is infringing your patent or copyright, and you don't take action to prevent further damages, you can't get the court to award you those damages. That is, you aren't allowed to 'run up the bill' by continuing to allow infringement to happen, just so you can sue for more money later?
I often wonder how many people made small fortunes on short-selling SCO stock. We're talking about a company that was, at one point, trading around $20/share. It's now worth like 50 *cents* per share or something. That's a long fall, there was plenty of potential for someone to make a lot of money shorting the stock.
I even thought about trying that game, but I was too poor to play a rich-man's sport. That is, even though I was convinced that SCO was a good long-term short sell, the problem with shorting is that you can't always decide when to cover the short, and if someone called your short at the wrong time, you might've lost money. Still, I suspect *someone* made money on shortselling SCO (probably Darl and his buddy Ralph Yarro).
Wait, you think Darl would let a silly little thing like *facts* (for example, that a given copyright or patent had expired) stop him from wasting millions of other peoples' money on a lawsuit? If Darl let the facts get in the way of his agenda, he'd have stopped these stupid lawsuits 6 *years* ago. No, total cremation is the only way to deal with this problem. . .
Oh, there's plenty of consulting companies you can apply with. Google is your friend. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Google was one of the companies whose 'cloud platform' will be making money off the government, so you could try there first.;-)
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You might be right. I thought I had seem something somewhere about T-Mobile operating in Canada, but I may have been mistaken. It might just be roaming packages they offer for U.S. customers.
I don't really know what kind of deal you might be able to get with T-Mobile, but I'd check with them. They are in both the US and Canada, so you might be able to get a decent deal with them. Since you are in Canada more months of the year, if you have to choose a 'home country' for the phone, it might make more sense to make Canada the 'home', and the US the 'roaming' option.
No law has actually been created yet. Some *idiot* proposed a stupid, stupid idea. It *might* become law, but I highly doubt it (though, I'm not so sure that I would wager any meaningful stakes on it, to be fair).
The thing is, if this were enacted into law, it will most likely *kill* dining in New York City. I suspect that the entire hospitality and tourism industry in NYC will lobby against this bill. If I were in any tourism related business in NYC, I sure would (because, let's face it, eating is a huge part of tourism - if people can't stand the food, they might avoid NYC altogether, and choose to go other places, like Vegas, LA, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, etc).
Oh, don't get me wrong. I don't think monopolies are a good thing. I rather detest them, and so to that extent, I do agree with you. But, my point was that a lot of the 'wealth' of the people on the Forbes' list is *completely imaginary* stock-wealth. It's not like Carlos Slim has actually extracted $53 Billion of money from Mexico and other Latin-American countries, and has it sitting in bank vaults.
Again, I'm not saying it's *right* for him to over-charge people with his monopoly rents, but my point is that if he takes whatever real money he does get and re-invests it in companies operating in Mexico and the other nations where he originally extracted wealth, then it's not hurting those economies quite as much as people make out. Again, it's still not right - those other people should be able to keep a little more of their own money for their own benefit, but in the general case, there's nothing wrong with someone taking money from one business and investing it in another line of business - that is actually *very productive* in terms of helping the economy.
I just have to ask. . . generally speaking, the wealth of people on the Forbes' list is comprised *mostly* of equity holdings in companies (that is, Bill Gates is worth 53 Billion, but he doesn't have that in cash - most of it is stock in Microsoft and other companies).
Is that not true of Carlos Slim, too? If that is true, is it really so aweful that the man has built up his companies? Is he NOT helping the economies of those nations by providing them with critical telecoms?
"Instead, Carlos uses the money to expand into banking and other areas to make even more money for himself."
How is building up more companies not beneficial to the economies of those nations? If he makes even more money for himself, and then turns around and yet again invests it into *more* businesses, is that not helping the countries where those businesses operate?
I'm not saying I necessarily think the guy is a Saint. But, I've come to believe that in the world of economics, there's basically no such thing as a company which *only* benefits its owners. That said, I suppose it is possible that if the guy is price gouging people, he might be hurting more than he is helping - but I honestly don't know that is the case.
You can't just say that because someone is very rich, that they are hurting the economy that they are getting rich as part of. That strikes me as a bit of an oversimplification.
"While otherwise we other enjoy the games while you can't put up with $10 a month which you probably spend on a few beers for 1 hour."
$10/mo? Really? What game are you playing? Last time I saw an MMO with a $10/mo subscription, it was Ultima Online in 1999. $15/mo seems to be about the average, near as I can tell. Although, I do still agree with your point that MMO's are still a fairly 'cheap' entertainment. Movie at a first-run cinema, plus drink and a snack, will probably cost you more than $15 for 2 hours entertainment. Dinner out with friends, plus drinks, will *definitely* cost you more than $15.
But, I've personally quit playing MMOGs. I had played them pretty much continuously from about 1999-2009, then decided it was just time to quit. They really are too much of a time sink, and I've decided I want to do other things with the rest of my life.
"In short, imagine your home flooded to the roof with mud and contaminated, radioactive ash." (There, fixed it for you. ;-)
Ok, to be fair, it's not very radioactive, but it's still an important thing to consider - coal ash is slightly radioactive.
But, I think it's gonna be a long time before we can get away from coal completely. Still, it's important that we start now, if we want to be coal-free in maybe 100-200 years (hey, I can hope).
"Drive past a coal burning plant. It's a crime they are allowed to use the air we breath as a landfill for dumping their waste and I don't just mean CO2. The sulphur[sic] and mercury and other toxins released are frightening."
I thought that a decade or two ago, the EPA implemented rules requiring most U.S. coal plants to install smoke stack scrubbers that captured all that stuff before it exited into the environment? I was under the impression that mostly what came out of the stacks now is CO2 and water? (I realize this doesn't necessarily apply to the rest of the world; but since you seem to be talking mostly about the U.S., that is the context I'm discussing this in).
But, I agree with your main point about off-shore Wind. As long as we can do it in a way that doesn't too adversely affect marine life, or maritime navigation, then I'm all for it. You probably can generate a lot of very cheap power that way. Doesn't help us folks in Ohio too much, but we can probably turn some corn or pig farms into wind farms, or maybe put some out in Lake Erie (but I'm not sure there's any place in Ohio as consistently windy as those coastal areas).
"I doubt most developers are going to do both Windows and OS X."
I generally agree, but, I seriously doubt the existence of a Mac version of Steam is going to *hurt* PC gaming. Developers that are only interested in Consoles will likely to continue to be. Developers that have decided to support both PC and Console probably won't suddenly be in a worse position than they currently were just because there is a Mac version of Steam and they aren't releasing for it. *But*, for developers who *are* interested in developing for Mac, anyhow, Steam now gives them another option for how to get distribution.
Not glass.
Not water.
Not ????
In Portal, there is only one material 'texture' that you can open portals on - something resembling concrete.
We don't really know for sure if you can open a portal on anything else. . . wood? Ice? Natural rock? Crystal? Does the surface have to be perfectly smooth?
Can anyone who has read the journal paper comment on what kind of thermal/electric conversion efficiency they saw in this process? Did they provide any information as to whether the efficiency was proportional to temperature (i.e. with heat engines, we have the Carnot Efficiency theorem which shows that the maximum theoretical efficiency is proportional to the difference between the maximum and minimum temperatures - do these nanotubes conform to the same, or similar, principle)?
How hot can nanotubes get before breaking down? Could these carbon nanotubes be used with a heat source like coal or nuclear fission or fusion, to generate electricity more efficiently than a steam turbine? (I suppose the tricky part there is that the article describes using a 'thermal wave' to generate the electrical current, and coal/nuclear generally produce a pretty constant heat source, instead of a cyclical heat source, but I suppose there might be some clever way to produce thermal waves from a constant heat source)?
If they couldn't be used to replace a steam turbine, could they somehow be setup as a 'secondary stage' to produce more electricity from the 'waste heat' from the steam turbine?
Since the 'size' of a Kelvin and a degree Celsius are the same, I've noticed it seems to be common practice in science that when dealing with any values larger than about 1000 deg. C, to just use Kelvins. As the parent points out, all the physics equations are based on Kelvin anyhow (since Kelvin 0 == absolute Zero), but there's also the fact that, when dealing with 'large' temperatures, the difference between Kelvin and Celsius is basically negligible.
Kelvin is the 'more correct' scale to use for science, and if you want to know what that temperature is in terms of the more 'familiar' Celsius, it's sufficient for us laymen to know that, except at temperatures less than 1000k, we can basically just say K and C are the same thing.
This is particularly true when dealing with temperatures in things like nuclear fission or fusion, stars, supernovae, etc. The difference between 10 Million K and 10 Million C is only 0.0027315 percent, so at that point, it's convenient to just view them as the same.
Even in the context of a discussion like these nanotube thermoelectric generators, if you say the temperature is above 3000K, I generally understand what that is - really darn hot, but not fission/fusion hot.
Thank you for bravely taking it upon yourself to speak for everyone else. . .
"The people have spoken, we do not want ads."
I do. No, seriously, I do. I don't want ads that infect me with spyware, or play a sound or video clip (unless I specifically click a play button). I don't want ads that break the website, or contain content which is inapprorpriate (e.g., unless I'm browsing a porno site, I don't want ads for porno, or even ads for anything else that contain inappropriately clothed people - I mean, I might be surfing at work, or in a public place, or I might have friends or family over). I don't want ads that try to trick me into installing software with ominous looking fake "system warning" messages, or any other form of impersonation or fraud.
Also, I don't want a page where > 33% of the page area is covered in ads.
But, in the general case, I don't mind ads. I know that they help pay for content so I don't have to. They sometimes are entertaining, and sometimes let me know about products, events, or services I didn't previously know about.
I do wish I had more control over what ads I see, though. I don't particularly like seeing the same ad 50 times. I'm a single, 30-40 year old male, and don't really want to see ads for feminine hygiene or beauty products, or women's clothes, for example.
But, I don't mind *some* advertising. Sure, you and many others like you don't want any ads. But don't speak for me, please.
"Sorry you companies, businesses, and corporations havent figured it out yet, but ads dont work!"
Are you serious? You don't think ads work? The companies paying for advertising do so ONLY because it DOES WORK. Sure, for some companies it doesn't work, but for most co.s it does. Just ask Ford, Pizza Hut, Coke, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch, Miller Brewing, Proctor and Gamble, Unilever, Con-Agra, Gillete, Frito-Lay, or any one of hundreds of other very large businesses that spend a lot of money on advertising, and have for around 100 years (maybe longer, not sure).
I'm not sure I really see that as a third path. That's just another way of saying 'let the patient die instead of continuing to treat them'. Maybe it opens a possibility that at some time in the future, someone both figures out how to treat what was killing you, and how to reverse the cryonic death, but in the here and now, cryonic suspension basically equals death, from most people's standpoint.
I think the problem is that, unless you look to sources outside the original Portal, you never encounter that character's name. You logically know someone left all those scribbles for you, but you never really know who. (It might be that if you play through the game with the developer commentary, they might discuss that character; I tried, but since I had just played through the game, even though it's fairly short, I found it too boring to play through a second time trying to pay attention to the commentary track - I don't know that I made it very far at all with the commentary on; it's been long enough since I played that maybe it's time to try it again.)
If they do, I wonder if they will use a 'new, improved' version of the portal gun. What I mean is, in order to keep the puzzles in Portal interesting, the gun had a very serious limitation - it could only create portals on flat surfaces made out of a very specific material (not sure what it was, but it appeared to be some sort of ceramic tile, or something. Maybe it was just concrete, not sure.
Put another way, the Portal levels mostly had an 'over-designed' feel to them, but that was ok and made sense in the context of a game - after all, you *were* in a test course designed specifically to test/train users of the portal gun (must've been some military training program).
Half-life has certainly had it's share of very industrial areas, but in more recent entries in the series, we've been in the great outdoors, and in rather 'plain' buildings in the country-side. That means the gun would likely only be useful in a (kind-of) small number of environments/levels in the games, and those levels would probably end up feeling like they were designed specifically for the portal gun (which, of course, they would have been).
Of course, there's been plenty of examples of stuff in the Half-Life series where you could only use something for one or two levels specifically designed for that gameplay mechanic, like using one of 'barnacles' as a grappling hook to swing from place to place in only one or two levels in the original Half-Life, or in Half-Life 2, the level where you get the swarm of Ant Lions as 'pets', or the end of Half-Life where you get the 'energy orb gun', but at least those levels had this going for them: you never saw those things before, so it was a new and novel gameplay experience.
Since most people have already played Portal, not sure adding one level of portal puzzles would necessarily add that much in the way of novelty to HL2: Ep. 3.
Although. . . I suppose they could do new things with the portal gun. There were no monsters/enemies in Portal (except at the end). Might be kind of fun to put a blue portal somewhere bad, then shoot red portals under the feet of combine soldiers, then watch them fall 100 feet to their death, or drop into some sort of hazard.
I guess what I'm driving at is, sure, they could (and maybe even will), but if it'll only be for a small section of the game, not sure if that's really that important for it to be in the game.
"It's stopped now, isn't it?"
Is it, though?
How long will it stay 'stopped' if these guys are let out with a slap on the wrist? You don't think they'll just go right back to 'work'? What about deterrence of other 'would-be' identity thieves?
If someone is offered a 'gamble' with two possible outcomes, one of which is gaining something, and the other of which is just remaining at the same point (that is, no net gain or loss), then it is *irrational* not to participate in the gamble. Now, of course, we have this concept in human society called 'ethics' where we say that you shouldn't do something which hurts someone else, even if it profits you, but these guys have already shown that *they have no ethics*.
Some number of people will always ignore ethical 'rules', and for those people, you must fall back to simple, rational, economics. In this case, economics doesn't translate directly to money, but rather to the idea of incentives/disincentives.
Of course, some of those people will still gamble - even if their is a substantial risk of loss, because with online identity theft, fraud, etc, there is always the possibility of a very large payout, just like with drug dealing - you might wind up in jail, or full of bullets, or you might wind up rich. But, at least there is enough possibility of very negative consequences to put most people off from drug dealing.
Seems to me it's the same with cyber-fraud. Make sure there is the possibility of *very* negative consequences, to make it rational for people to avoid the gamble, even though they do have the possibility of becoming rich.
Plus, there is plain, simple justice - even if there is no deterrent effect, most of us feel that when someone decides to throw ethics by the wayside, and hurt others, there should be some kind of price to pay.
I think it has to do with the fact that true logical contradictions can't really exist in nature: the whole idea behind DRM is to try to give someone access to the software, but not give them access to the software. Because that is, at least seemingly, a logical contradiction, it's just about impossible to pull off.
In the end, every legitimate copy has to give the user access. Any system that gives 'authorized' access can be potentially exploited to grant 'unauthorized' access. As one example, let's consider a DRM system that consists of individually encrypting every 'authorized' copy of a game with a different crypto key, then requiring the user to download the key to decrypt that copy. Well, once the key is downloaded, the 'authorized' user can then use the key to decrypt the copy, then have unencrypted copies to share on the Internet.
Any system that relies on code inside of the executable itself to verify it's own authenticity is potentially subject to code patches that simply disable the verification step (or short-circuit it with the equivalent of replacing the authorization function with a function which just always returns the 'correct' value to get the rest of the code to continue).
Etc, etc.
The prevailing wisdom seems to be that to make a game 'crack-proof', you make an online game. Theoretically, with an online game, a determined enough person or group could reverse-engineer the protocol and server-side logic, and re-implement the server, although, admittedly, that is probably a very daunting undertaking.
That is the 'best' DRM simply because you are never granting the end-users direct access to the program - you are basically sending inputs over the network, and receiving the output of the program. It's sort of analogous to never having a copy of a word-processor on your computer, but only receiving pdf files of the final, finished product (ok, that might not be a perfect analogy, but I hope you can see what I mean).
But, for games which execute locally, I stand by my original assertion that trying to give someone access without giving them access is a logical contradiction, and so, fundamentally impossible. That's also true of audio and video, as we have seen over and over again.
That program doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me. According to the article you linked to, you have to have *alread* created an app, put it on the market, gotten a good rating, and a lot of downloads. Stands to reason that if you have already developed a popular android market app, you must already have an android phone to test your app on? Why would you give a free phone to someone who already has one? What business benefit does that provide?
That sounds kind of like offering a free knife or pot to a professional chef, or maybe a free drill or reciprocating saw to a professional carpenter. They would already have their tools.
Giving free phones to developers who are not *yet* developing for the Android platform might make sense - say, giving them to interested iPhone developers to try to get them to port their apps to Android. Or perhaps to college students or other new programmers who code up some sort of app using the SDK emulator, but don't have a phone to test it on yet.
Man, quiet down. Microsoft might be reading this!
Err, I mean, Microsoft should *definitely* send *thousands* of Ninjas.
"FAT32 or NT filesystems, which *would* make sense in the case of IO Data."
Why would that make sense? If IO Data makes Network Attached Storage, wouldn't you use either something like Samba or NFS (in which case, you would probably use Ext2/3/4, or maybe XFS or ZFS), or if you are talking about a lower level device, wouldn't you be using something like iSCSI or Fiber Channel where the device just looks like a hard drive attached to the network, and the Operating System on the other computer which is using it actually has the filesystem drivers? So, if the filesystem drivers are on a different server, how would the NAS device itself infringe?
I love how none of these articles include any info on which patents were licensed. If Microsoft has patents which cover algorithms in Linux, then there should be a list of patents numbers they can point to to say which patents are being covered in these License Agreements.
You know, back when Microsoft sued Tom-Tom, it came out that the patents in question covered certain features of the VFAT filesystem. I don't think that patent would affect Network Attached Storage. After all, if you're using Samba NFS, FTP or HTTP to access the files, it doesn't matter what filesystem is used on the NAS device. One would presume such a device would be using Ext3, Ext4, or maybe XFS or something.
Which makes me wonder, is Microsoft asserting patents which cover Samba, perhaps? The Linux kernel itself, even if you don't compile VFAT support into the kernel (or use the patched version which supposedly avoids the MS VFAT patents by removing some functionality)?
Sure seems that this is all a marketing driven FUD campaign, since no one is talking about what patents are in play here. If they have patents, they should come out and tell the Linux developers and the world which patents supposedly are infringing. If they won't tell anyone, then the courts should just put a stop to this crap - it's my understanding that there is a principle of law in many countries, including the U.S., where if you know someone is infringing your patent or copyright, and you don't take action to prevent further damages, you can't get the court to award you those damages. That is, you aren't allowed to 'run up the bill' by continuing to allow infringement to happen, just so you can sue for more money later?
I often wonder how many people made small fortunes on short-selling SCO stock. We're talking about a company that was, at one point, trading around $20/share. It's now worth like 50 *cents* per share or something. That's a long fall, there was plenty of potential for someone to make a lot of money shorting the stock.
I even thought about trying that game, but I was too poor to play a rich-man's sport. That is, even though I was convinced that SCO was a good long-term short sell, the problem with shorting is that you can't always decide when to cover the short, and if someone called your short at the wrong time, you might've lost money. Still, I suspect *someone* made money on shortselling SCO (probably Darl and his buddy Ralph Yarro).
Wait, you think Darl would let a silly little thing like *facts* (for example, that a given copyright or patent had expired) stop him from wasting millions of other peoples' money on a lawsuit? If Darl let the facts get in the way of his agenda, he'd have stopped these stupid lawsuits 6 *years* ago. No, total cremation is the only way to deal with this problem. . .
Oh, there's plenty of consulting companies you can apply with. Google is your friend. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Google was one of the companies whose 'cloud platform' will be making money off the government, so you could try there first. ;-)