Nope. Every single nuclear reactor now operating had to be fueled from the ground it was built on. It was even harder for missiles and bombs; they had to be built in border states so that the material could leave the country directly without being flown over another state. Also, all of those previous space probes and rovers with RTGs had to have the plutonium produced right in Florida where they could be launched.
</sarcasm>
Yes, of course it's legal. It requires permits, just like it required permits to even possess enriched uranium, but the stuff has legit civilian uses and transporting it can be legitimately arranged.
Only critical if combined. If the rocket breaks apart or the engines explode, the core would fall apart; it lacks the explosives necessary to bring the Uranium to super-criticality. Worst likely case would be that the control rod gets jammed but the housing stays intact, but the cooling system is destroyed, leaving the core at critical and causing a meltdown. The odds of that seem extremely low, though.
It'd be a very nasty "dirty bomb" if it blew up in the atmosphere, but no more than that, and a slug of Plutonium hot enough to run a spacecraft for a few years or even decades is a nasty thing to blow up in the atmosphere too. We've been launching those for decades, though.
It's probably less the number of probes we're sending, and more the general decrease in amount of Plutonium. PU hasn't been manufactured much since the end of the cold war; everybody is busy stepping down their weapon programs instead. Now, some of that former-warhead material is great for RTGs, but the stuff degrades. It has a moderately short half-life (it has to, or it wouldn't be active enough to passively generate the heat needed for an RTG) and a lot of the stuff that was viable for spacecraft 30 years ago is pretty cold now (see the Voyager probes, for example, which are running on extremely low power).
They can't just fix the problem by sending more, either; not only is it in short supply in general, but it's too heavy to send much on a spacecraft. Instead, they send enough to run the mission at full capacity for a few years, scaling back over time. That requires a supply of pretty fresh / pure Plutonium though, and that means making and separating more of it... except doing runs into a serious political problem. We *could* keep using RTGs (although they aren't perfect by any means, they get the job done) if we could convince people to let us manufacture their fuel source...
It wasn't in the kernel even back in IE6. Even MS has never done something so batshit insane as to run a web browser in kernel mode. Yes, some of the stuff the browser does goes through the kernel (like fonts) but that's true of most apps on most platforms.
The "IE is a system component" thing was due to the shell (Explorer) basically using IE for everything from buttons that looked like hyperlinks to JPEG rendering. You could disable or remove the iexplore.exe binary if you wanted to, although it would make some stuff screw up a little, but you couldn't remove the IE rendering engine at all. It was so integrated that the main difference between Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer was that one of them defaulted to a local path when opened, and the other defaulted to a web address. However, you could use either to handle either task (to be fair, this is not a completely hopelessly bad idea; Konqueror does the same thing more-or-less and it works well).
Recent versions of Windows have separated the OS's HTML/JS engine from the IE rendering engine, moved a bunch of the formerly IE-dependent features (like GIF/JPEG image rendering...) into core libraries, and deprecated then removed the "Active Desktop" feature that boiled down to "your wallpaper is a web page!"
Actually, Win8 isn't even that much like WP7 from a purely interaction-based viewpoint. Sure, it looks similar, and the features are similar, and some of the core mechanics (such as the side-panning panoramas in apps) are implemented in more-or-les identical manner (accounting for the change in screen size, aspect ratios, etc.). However, a lot of other stuff is also quite new:
WP7 (and probably 8 as well) make pretty heavy use of tap-and-hold for context options. At some point, MS decided this was a bad thing, and therefore tap-and-hold is used very little on the "Metro" interface in Win8 (although it's still used on the Desktop). Instead, flicks or short swipes are used, or sometimes something that would (on WP7) invoke a default action if simply tapped instead opens a menu when tapped.
WP7 had a dedicated Back button (on the hardware), used both for navigating within an app and across apps. Win8 has no such button. Intra-app navigation is handled in basically the same way that existing MS software has been doing (the app templates put a round Back button in the upper left of the screen when there's backward navigation possible within the app), but inter-app navigation is completely new. For touch, the new gesture is a slide inward from the left edge of the screen. It's extremely simple and logical (although the fact that you can swipe in and then out again without releasing to open an app switcher instead of simply paging through the apps takes some discovery) and I find myself trying to use it both on non-touch devices and on other touch OSes because it's so damn convenient and logical. However, it is *not* based on anything from a prior Windows version.
Exiting apps is similar. It's actually extremely easy, just drag from the top of the screen to the bottom... but aside from a slight resemblance to WebOS, this is again a new thing to people. For the record, Alt+F4 still works, or you can open the switcher view as described above and close apps from there. Unlike on WP7, you can't just "back" out of an app; the Back button is provided by the app, not by the OS, and tends to disappear when at the base of the app's navigation.
Things like the Settings and Search charms have no equivalent on WP7, either for built-in apps (where Settings may be either a system-wide tool or an app-specific item or both, and Search within an app must be implemented by the app because the hardware Search button is global search, always) or for third-party apps (which can implement settings as an in-app button, an in-app menu item, a "pivot" you can pan to, or just about anything else). The WP8 model, where every app has a Settings sidebar accessed the same way and there's a universal mechanism for search (which can be used even while out of the app, if the developer implements the Search contract) makes a lot of sense, but it's new and will therefore confuse people.
The "app bar" (context-sensitive menu/toolbar that each app can implement) on Win8 Store apps is very similar to WP7's App Bar in usage, but invoking it is a bit different. Where WP7 typically provided a visual clue of the app bar's presence and simply disabled options when not appropriate, Win8 instead hides the app bar completely until either some action in the app (such as flicking an item to select it) raises the bar, or the user makes a top-downward or bottom-upward swipe.
Similarly, top-downward on WP7 displays the status bar, which if you want to see it on Win8, you can either use the Charms bar (particularly Settings) for basic stuff like time, battery estimate, and WiFi status, or switch to the Desktop or new Notifications area for app events.
WP7 has no equivalent of the Desktop. Win8 (and even Windows RT, contrary to what some people think) has the full Windows desktop experience even if getting third-party desktop code to run on RT is tricky (we're improving on that...). The touch interface on the desktop is (by some necessity, desktop apps being written with the expectation of "right click" being a thing) somewhat differen
Given its popularity, I'm surprised there hasn't been an AC2. The Civ games keep rolling on, and a number of the changes they made in the more recent editions could stand to be added to, or at least adapted into, a new Alpha Centauri game (I'm thinking of things like allies pooling research progress and hexagonal tiles and global happiness in addition to local happiness, here) while a number of the things I loved about AC (customizable units, psi combat, xenofungus starting as a problematic tile-wasting nuisance and become one of the best tile improvements in the course of a long game, etc.) have never brought to the Civ games.
I think that, after the lessons learned (both good and bad) about Civ5 and its expansion, it's high time to make a new AC game that incorporates the best lessons from AC (and its expansion) and the last few Civ releases. Of course, given the popularity of Civ, it doesn't seem likely that this would need to be a kickstarter game, but I'd fund it if I could.
Just... PLEASE don't make it Steam exclusive, OK? Distributing on there is fine. Using is as a method for joining games is cool, as long as I can also direct connect. But requiring a moderately resource-hungry and mildly buggy DRM client be running when I want to play the game is not cool, and prohibiting any possibility of gifting or re-selling the game after installing it once (even if I uninstall it) is much less so.
The last two Windows releases have run better on the same hardware than their immediate predecessor did. Vista was the last time the requirements increased, and even that I was able to run on a three year old (at Vista's release time) mid-end (~$700) laptop
Wine running on (Linux) tablets is actually quite easy. The problem is that Wine Is Not an Emulator. Tablets (in the modern "vaguely resembles an iPad" sense) run on ARM chips. ARM is not instruction-set compatible with x86, which is what all those games were written for. You can compile Wine for ARM, and in theory it will even execute Windows apps that were also compiled for ARM, but there just aren't that many of those. I suppose you could run the Windows RT build of cmd.exe or notepad.exe if you wanted to... Of course, there are a *ton* of WinCE / WinMo apps written for ARM, but I don't know whether Wine can handle CE binaries at all. The API is similar (they still call it Win32, but there are non-trivial differences) and the binary file format is the same (though some flags are different) so maybe it could, but I'd be surprised.
DVD video actually has plenty of DRM (both content scrambling to prevent unlicensed playback and region coding to prevent geographic redistribution). The "problem" is that they're both trivial to bypass. DeCSS doesn't bother to pretend to be legit; it simply brute-forces the scramble. Region unlocking has existed for over a decade.
Actually, the older Blizz games (WC2:BNE, SC1, WC3, possibly some of the others) have official NoCD patches. It took them a while to come out (~10 years after SC's release, in fact), but then, running SC using a copied CD was easy; when my official CD started getting thrashed, I borrowed a friend's and burned a copy for myself, and used that for another five years. WC2 (I think including BtDP; it's been a while) and SC1 (but not BW, sadly) also supported "spawn" installs, which were multi-player only (and somebody had to have the full copy) but didn't require the CD. WC3 / TFT did away with spawn installs, but the entire game was installed to HDD; the CD was only checked at game start, so you could start the game on any number of computers in a LAN environment using a single disc (this also made the NoCD patch really small). Hell, WC1 (possibly dating myself here...) could be installed entirely to HDD, if you had the whopping 90MB of space it required, and never need the disc again (if you didn't need the movies, the game files alone were much smaller; 22MB or so).
It's only in the last decade or so that Blizzard started screwing over its customer base with always-online DRM and such bullshit. Coincidentally, WC3 TFT is the latest Blizzard game I own. I played the SC2 beta, and it's a good game, but I'm not willing to commercially support the direction they're going. I'll buy it in a moment if they patch out that BS, though.
You don't even need to use a corner. Win+C opens the Charms bar. You can (still) use the keyboard to do anything you want in Windows, and while some things take longer than before (the change to Start search, where "Settings" now require an extra action, annoys me), others take the same amount or less (try managing WiFi or volume on Win7 using the keyboard...).
Wait, how is rebooting being that hard? The "normal" approach is to go to one of the right corners with the mouse (bottom will be closer), then move up to the Settings button, click it, click Power, and click the option you want. That's a gesture and three clicks - not ideal, but a hell of a long way from the claimed level. If you like keyboard shortcuts, you can open the Charms bar (what the gesture does) using the chord Win+C, reducing it to a key chord and three clicks.
Locking the screen can be done using Win+L, as it always has been, or by clicking your name/icon in the upper right of the Start screen, and then choosing Lock. Logging off can be done using the same click on the Start screen, but choosing "Sign Out" instead. Counting opening the Start screen, that's three clicks either way (or one keyboard chord).
There are other approaches, too, including a bunch of old ones that have been around for literally over a decade:
* Put one or more shortcuts / scripts to shutdown.exe on the desktop (with command line specifying the desired options for rebooting or whatever).
* While the Desktop is selected (press Win+D if you have a maximized app open), hit Alt+F4. This will bring up an (circa Win2k) old-style shutdown option list.
* Actually just run shutdown.exe with parameters (from any command line or the Run dialog, which can still be accessed anywhere using Win+R).
* Ctrl+Alt+Del, then click the Power button in the lower right and select your shutdown option.
* Win+L (to lock the session), then click once (to dismiss the lock screen) and click the Power button in the lower right. Only works if using a password.
I'm sure there are some that I'm missing. You can also find scripts and such that will add the power "buttons" to the Start screen as tiles, including some from Microsoft themselves.
I'm not aware of any major countries that *lack* patent systems - even China has one, though it's remarkably friendlier toward patents from internal companies - but there are definitely a lot of countries with more *sane* patent laws which are doing just fine.
To take the smartphone example, the majority of cellular phone technology patents appear to be owned by Motorola (now Google), Samsung, HTC, Nokia, Ericsson (who manufactures phones in cooperation with Sony), and a handful of companies that just make the radios, not complete devices. Of those, only Motorola is a US company.
it's fun to speculate on how things would have worked out if cold-cathode valves remained the dominant storage technology
Well, for one thing, you probably wouldn't be reading this site. Just downloading this webpage takes more resources than a lot of those early computers had, never mind rendering it. Valve-based systems don't scale it a way even remotely close to Moore's Law, and their lack of reliability meant that making the machine with too many of them just meant shorter mean time between failure and more time and expense spent on maintenance. The Internet as we think of it today would probably never have existed, much less reached anything close to its current scale. Too expensive, too little utility for the number of nodes that could be connected to it. There would have been a network of some kind, and by now it probably would have spread to home units (though certainly not to anything like smartphones), but it would have simple and low-bandwidth, designed for consuming information rather than communicating. Think gopher more than the web, and newspapers (which might include a personal ads section) rather than Skype.
Last I checked (admittedly, over a year ago), EVE ran great in Wine. They actually had a Linux client for a while, and eventually discontinued it because it was easier to just provide people info on how to run it in Wine, and the end result was better performance and graphics.
For what it's worth, Heroes of Newerth (much more DotA-like than LoL, but same basic genre) is also free to play (*without* making you buy or slowly unlock things in order to play the game fully) and has a native Linux client.
Can't help you with the others, and - as somebody who tried LoL a couple times and then wondered why I was doing this to myself - I'll grant that it's *not* exactly the same, but then, IMO it's better. The Linux client is just icing on the cake.
Media Center is available for free for now. They'll start charging for it later, but it'll still be available unless you're running Enterprise edition.
Also, if you upgrade a Win7 install, all the features that you had there (such as Media Center) come along for the ride. I don't generally recommend in-place upgrades, but on a completely clean system it should work fine.
Client Hyper-V is a huge deal for some. The lower RAM usage of the OS (partially due to page combining, which benefits user apps as well) is also a big deal in some sectors, such as netbooks and gamers and anybody else pushing the limits of their hardware. The new Task Manager and file operation interfaces are well designed. For anybody with a touch- or stylus-enabled Windows machine (they do exist!), Win8 is a huge upgrade. For anybody using multiple monitors, Win8 is a huge upgrade.
Then there's people who actually like the "Metro" stuff. The "at a glance" view that live tiles afford of the state of apps, even when they aren't running, is great. The inclusion of an Exchange ActiveSync-capable mail app without needing to buy Outlook is great for some home users who want to be able to connect to their work email systems (sadly, that's one of only bright points of that email client, but it gets the job done most of the time). There are a few "apps" that are actually either offering cool features not found in desktop Windows software, and also the ability of the store to automatically update your apps, and to have your app purchases follow you from PC to PC... that's very convenient. Perhaps most importantly, there's the security aspect; Windows Store apps run in a very restrictive sandbox and the use can view (and revoke) the app's permissions.
I don't know about ME, but from the perspective of almost any conventional measure, Vista was a huge success. At the time Win7 went RTM, there were apparently 400 million Vista users online. The Windows division remained highly profitable throughout the product's timeline.
Correct. Additionally, you can use Win + D (the "Show Desktop" shortcut) to open the Desktop from anywhere, whether it's in the "Metro" app stack or not. When already on the desktop, it retains its legacy behavior (toggling the "show desktop" state wherein all windows are minimized/hidden).
What makes you think SpaceX is planning on going public, or that if they do Musk would release enough shares? I expect that even if they do go on the public market, he'll hold onto a controlling interest. Money isn't his goal; he's got tons of that. Space is his goal. Read the stuff he writes; SpaceX is less a company to him, than the vehicle to fulfill his dreams of spaceflight and interplanetary travel. No way he's giving that up while he's still young enough that such flight is even a remote possibility for him.
Also, given their record, I suspect that a controlling interest in such a company would be pretty damn expensive.
A good point. I hate PayPal and avoid using it whenever possible, but when Musk was focused on that project, he basically made possible the entire concept of small online payments to individuals who don't have the time or resources to set up PCI themselves, but want to conduct business or accept donations over the Internet.
I don't like what it's turned into over time, and I'd like it if Musk (or somebody) were to slap it around a bit and make it behave more properly, but I don't fault him for creating it, or for moving on to other (IMO, far more interesting) projects since.
It brings it from the price range of "ultra-rich only" to the price range of "very well off", and that's important. Every additional person who can afford to purchase such a vehicle is simultaneously a reduction in fuel consumption, a reduction in emissions, and (this is the big one) an improvement in the economies of scale necessary to reduce the cost of such cars. The mid-range Model S is about 10% cheaper thanks to the tax credit. The base model is 14% cheaper. That doesn't magically move it into the price range of a Mazda or Toyota or Ford, but it does mean that somebody who might otherwise buy a Lexus or Audi (expensive cars, but not really targeted at the 1%) may now see the Model S as being feasible. It's still more expensive, but the difference - the marginal cost - is a lot lower.
That, in turn, helps Tesla bring the price down further on current and future models, and also funds their R&D which currently looks like one of the best approaches to weaning the USA (and eventually the world) off its dependency on gasoline.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. Every single nuclear reactor now operating had to be fueled from the ground it was built on. It was even harder for missiles and bombs; they had to be built in border states so that the material could leave the country directly without being flown over another state. Also, all of those previous space probes and rovers with RTGs had to have the plutonium produced right in Florida where they could be launched.
</sarcasm>
Yes, of course it's legal. It requires permits, just like it required permits to even possess enriched uranium, but the stuff has legit civilian uses and transporting it can be legitimately arranged.
Only critical if combined. If the rocket breaks apart or the engines explode, the core would fall apart; it lacks the explosives necessary to bring the Uranium to super-criticality. Worst likely case would be that the control rod gets jammed but the housing stays intact, but the cooling system is destroyed, leaving the core at critical and causing a meltdown. The odds of that seem extremely low, though.
It'd be a very nasty "dirty bomb" if it blew up in the atmosphere, but no more than that, and a slug of Plutonium hot enough to run a spacecraft for a few years or even decades is a nasty thing to blow up in the atmosphere too. We've been launching those for decades, though.
It's probably less the number of probes we're sending, and more the general decrease in amount of Plutonium. PU hasn't been manufactured much since the end of the cold war; everybody is busy stepping down their weapon programs instead. Now, some of that former-warhead material is great for RTGs, but the stuff degrades. It has a moderately short half-life (it has to, or it wouldn't be active enough to passively generate the heat needed for an RTG) and a lot of the stuff that was viable for spacecraft 30 years ago is pretty cold now (see the Voyager probes, for example, which are running on extremely low power).
They can't just fix the problem by sending more, either; not only is it in short supply in general, but it's too heavy to send much on a spacecraft. Instead, they send enough to run the mission at full capacity for a few years, scaling back over time. That requires a supply of pretty fresh / pure Plutonium though, and that means making and separating more of it... except doing runs into a serious political problem. We *could* keep using RTGs (although they aren't perfect by any means, they get the job done) if we could convince people to let us manufacture their fuel source...
It wasn't in the kernel even back in IE6. Even MS has never done something so batshit insane as to run a web browser in kernel mode. Yes, some of the stuff the browser does goes through the kernel (like fonts) but that's true of most apps on most platforms.
The "IE is a system component" thing was due to the shell (Explorer) basically using IE for everything from buttons that looked like hyperlinks to JPEG rendering. You could disable or remove the iexplore.exe binary if you wanted to, although it would make some stuff screw up a little, but you couldn't remove the IE rendering engine at all. It was so integrated that the main difference between Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer was that one of them defaulted to a local path when opened, and the other defaulted to a web address. However, you could use either to handle either task (to be fair, this is not a completely hopelessly bad idea; Konqueror does the same thing more-or-less and it works well).
Recent versions of Windows have separated the OS's HTML/JS engine from the IE rendering engine, moved a bunch of the formerly IE-dependent features (like GIF/JPEG image rendering...) into core libraries, and deprecated then removed the "Active Desktop" feature that boiled down to "your wallpaper is a web page!"
Actually, Win8 isn't even that much like WP7 from a purely interaction-based viewpoint. Sure, it looks similar, and the features are similar, and some of the core mechanics (such as the side-panning panoramas in apps) are implemented in more-or-les identical manner (accounting for the change in screen size, aspect ratios, etc.). However, a lot of other stuff is also quite new:
WP7 (and probably 8 as well) make pretty heavy use of tap-and-hold for context options. At some point, MS decided this was a bad thing, and therefore tap-and-hold is used very little on the "Metro" interface in Win8 (although it's still used on the Desktop). Instead, flicks or short swipes are used, or sometimes something that would (on WP7) invoke a default action if simply tapped instead opens a menu when tapped.
WP7 had a dedicated Back button (on the hardware), used both for navigating within an app and across apps. Win8 has no such button. Intra-app navigation is handled in basically the same way that existing MS software has been doing (the app templates put a round Back button in the upper left of the screen when there's backward navigation possible within the app), but inter-app navigation is completely new. For touch, the new gesture is a slide inward from the left edge of the screen. It's extremely simple and logical (although the fact that you can swipe in and then out again without releasing to open an app switcher instead of simply paging through the apps takes some discovery) and I find myself trying to use it both on non-touch devices and on other touch OSes because it's so damn convenient and logical. However, it is *not* based on anything from a prior Windows version.
Exiting apps is similar. It's actually extremely easy, just drag from the top of the screen to the bottom... but aside from a slight resemblance to WebOS, this is again a new thing to people. For the record, Alt+F4 still works, or you can open the switcher view as described above and close apps from there. Unlike on WP7, you can't just "back" out of an app; the Back button is provided by the app, not by the OS, and tends to disappear when at the base of the app's navigation.
Things like the Settings and Search charms have no equivalent on WP7, either for built-in apps (where Settings may be either a system-wide tool or an app-specific item or both, and Search within an app must be implemented by the app because the hardware Search button is global search, always) or for third-party apps (which can implement settings as an in-app button, an in-app menu item, a "pivot" you can pan to, or just about anything else). The WP8 model, where every app has a Settings sidebar accessed the same way and there's a universal mechanism for search (which can be used even while out of the app, if the developer implements the Search contract) makes a lot of sense, but it's new and will therefore confuse people.
The "app bar" (context-sensitive menu/toolbar that each app can implement) on Win8 Store apps is very similar to WP7's App Bar in usage, but invoking it is a bit different. Where WP7 typically provided a visual clue of the app bar's presence and simply disabled options when not appropriate, Win8 instead hides the app bar completely until either some action in the app (such as flicking an item to select it) raises the bar, or the user makes a top-downward or bottom-upward swipe.
Similarly, top-downward on WP7 displays the status bar, which if you want to see it on Win8, you can either use the Charms bar (particularly Settings) for basic stuff like time, battery estimate, and WiFi status, or switch to the Desktop or new Notifications area for app events.
WP7 has no equivalent of the Desktop. Win8 (and even Windows RT, contrary to what some people think) has the full Windows desktop experience even if getting third-party desktop code to run on RT is tricky (we're improving on that...). The touch interface on the desktop is (by some necessity, desktop apps being written with the expectation of "right click" being a thing) somewhat differen
Given its popularity, I'm surprised there hasn't been an AC2. The Civ games keep rolling on, and a number of the changes they made in the more recent editions could stand to be added to, or at least adapted into, a new Alpha Centauri game (I'm thinking of things like allies pooling research progress and hexagonal tiles and global happiness in addition to local happiness, here) while a number of the things I loved about AC (customizable units, psi combat, xenofungus starting as a problematic tile-wasting nuisance and become one of the best tile improvements in the course of a long game, etc.) have never brought to the Civ games.
I think that, after the lessons learned (both good and bad) about Civ5 and its expansion, it's high time to make a new AC game that incorporates the best lessons from AC (and its expansion) and the last few Civ releases. Of course, given the popularity of Civ, it doesn't seem likely that this would need to be a kickstarter game, but I'd fund it if I could.
Just... PLEASE don't make it Steam exclusive, OK? Distributing on there is fine. Using is as a method for joining games is cool, as long as I can also direct connect. But requiring a moderately resource-hungry and mildly buggy DRM client be running when I want to play the game is not cool, and prohibiting any possibility of gifting or re-selling the game after installing it once (even if I uninstall it) is much less so.
The last two Windows releases have run better on the same hardware than their immediate predecessor did. Vista was the last time the requirements increased, and even that I was able to run on a three year old (at Vista's release time) mid-end (~$700) laptop
Wine running on (Linux) tablets is actually quite easy. The problem is that Wine Is Not an Emulator. Tablets (in the modern "vaguely resembles an iPad" sense) run on ARM chips. ARM is not instruction-set compatible with x86, which is what all those games were written for. You can compile Wine for ARM, and in theory it will even execute Windows apps that were also compiled for ARM, but there just aren't that many of those. I suppose you could run the Windows RT build of cmd.exe or notepad.exe if you wanted to... Of course, there are a *ton* of WinCE / WinMo apps written for ARM, but I don't know whether Wine can handle CE binaries at all. The API is similar (they still call it Win32, but there are non-trivial differences) and the binary file format is the same (though some flags are different) so maybe it could, but I'd be surprised.
DVD video actually has plenty of DRM (both content scrambling to prevent unlicensed playback and region coding to prevent geographic redistribution). The "problem" is that they're both trivial to bypass. DeCSS doesn't bother to pretend to be legit; it simply brute-forces the scramble. Region unlocking has existed for over a decade.
Actually, the older Blizz games (WC2:BNE, SC1, WC3, possibly some of the others) have official NoCD patches. It took them a while to come out (~10 years after SC's release, in fact), but then, running SC using a copied CD was easy; when my official CD started getting thrashed, I borrowed a friend's and burned a copy for myself, and used that for another five years. WC2 (I think including BtDP; it's been a while) and SC1 (but not BW, sadly) also supported "spawn" installs, which were multi-player only (and somebody had to have the full copy) but didn't require the CD. WC3 / TFT did away with spawn installs, but the entire game was installed to HDD; the CD was only checked at game start, so you could start the game on any number of computers in a LAN environment using a single disc (this also made the NoCD patch really small). Hell, WC1 (possibly dating myself here...) could be installed entirely to HDD, if you had the whopping 90MB of space it required, and never need the disc again (if you didn't need the movies, the game files alone were much smaller; 22MB or so).
It's only in the last decade or so that Blizzard started screwing over its customer base with always-online DRM and such bullshit. Coincidentally, WC3 TFT is the latest Blizzard game I own. I played the SC2 beta, and it's a good game, but I'm not willing to commercially support the direction they're going. I'll buy it in a moment if they patch out that BS, though.
You don't even need to use a corner. Win+C opens the Charms bar. You can (still) use the keyboard to do anything you want in Windows, and while some things take longer than before (the change to Start search, where "Settings" now require an extra action, annoys me), others take the same amount or less (try managing WiFi or volume on Win7 using the keyboard...).
Wait, how is rebooting being that hard? The "normal" approach is to go to one of the right corners with the mouse (bottom will be closer), then move up to the Settings button, click it, click Power, and click the option you want. That's a gesture and three clicks - not ideal, but a hell of a long way from the claimed level. If you like keyboard shortcuts, you can open the Charms bar (what the gesture does) using the chord Win+C, reducing it to a key chord and three clicks.
Locking the screen can be done using Win+L, as it always has been, or by clicking your name/icon in the upper right of the Start screen, and then choosing Lock. Logging off can be done using the same click on the Start screen, but choosing "Sign Out" instead. Counting opening the Start screen, that's three clicks either way (or one keyboard chord).
There are other approaches, too, including a bunch of old ones that have been around for literally over a decade:
* Put one or more shortcuts / scripts to shutdown.exe on the desktop (with command line specifying the desired options for rebooting or whatever).
* While the Desktop is selected (press Win+D if you have a maximized app open), hit Alt+F4. This will bring up an (circa Win2k) old-style shutdown option list.
* Actually just run shutdown.exe with parameters (from any command line or the Run dialog, which can still be accessed anywhere using Win+R).
* Ctrl+Alt+Del, then click the Power button in the lower right and select your shutdown option.
* Win+L (to lock the session), then click once (to dismiss the lock screen) and click the Power button in the lower right. Only works if using a password.
I'm sure there are some that I'm missing. You can also find scripts and such that will add the power "buttons" to the Start screen as tiles, including some from Microsoft themselves.
My kingdom for a mod point!
I'm not aware of any major countries that *lack* patent systems - even China has one, though it's remarkably friendlier toward patents from internal companies - but there are definitely a lot of countries with more *sane* patent laws which are doing just fine.
To take the smartphone example, the majority of cellular phone technology patents appear to be owned by Motorola (now Google), Samsung, HTC, Nokia, Ericsson (who manufactures phones in cooperation with Sony), and a handful of companies that just make the radios, not complete devices. Of those, only Motorola is a US company.
Clearly, it's eezo.
it's fun to speculate on how things would have worked out if cold-cathode valves remained the dominant storage technology
Well, for one thing, you probably wouldn't be reading this site. Just downloading this webpage takes more resources than a lot of those early computers had, never mind rendering it. Valve-based systems don't scale it a way even remotely close to Moore's Law, and their lack of reliability meant that making the machine with too many of them just meant shorter mean time between failure and more time and expense spent on maintenance. The Internet as we think of it today would probably never have existed, much less reached anything close to its current scale. Too expensive, too little utility for the number of nodes that could be connected to it. There would have been a network of some kind, and by now it probably would have spread to home units (though certainly not to anything like smartphones), but it would have simple and low-bandwidth, designed for consuming information rather than communicating. Think gopher more than the web, and newspapers (which might include a personal ads section) rather than Skype.
Last I checked (admittedly, over a year ago), EVE ran great in Wine. They actually had a Linux client for a while, and eventually discontinued it because it was easier to just provide people info on how to run it in Wine, and the end result was better performance and graphics.
For what it's worth, Heroes of Newerth (much more DotA-like than LoL, but same basic genre) is also free to play (*without* making you buy or slowly unlock things in order to play the game fully) and has a native Linux client.
Can't help you with the others, and - as somebody who tried LoL a couple times and then wondered why I was doing this to myself - I'll grant that it's *not* exactly the same, but then, IMO it's better. The Linux client is just icing on the cake.
Media Center is available for free for now. They'll start charging for it later, but it'll still be available unless you're running Enterprise edition.
Also, if you upgrade a Win7 install, all the features that you had there (such as Media Center) come along for the ride. I don't generally recommend in-place upgrades, but on a completely clean system it should work fine.
Client Hyper-V is a huge deal for some. The lower RAM usage of the OS (partially due to page combining, which benefits user apps as well) is also a big deal in some sectors, such as netbooks and gamers and anybody else pushing the limits of their hardware. The new Task Manager and file operation interfaces are well designed. For anybody with a touch- or stylus-enabled Windows machine (they do exist!), Win8 is a huge upgrade. For anybody using multiple monitors, Win8 is a huge upgrade.
Then there's people who actually like the "Metro" stuff. The "at a glance" view that live tiles afford of the state of apps, even when they aren't running, is great. The inclusion of an Exchange ActiveSync-capable mail app without needing to buy Outlook is great for some home users who want to be able to connect to their work email systems (sadly, that's one of only bright points of that email client, but it gets the job done most of the time). There are a few "apps" that are actually either offering cool features not found in desktop Windows software, and also the ability of the store to automatically update your apps, and to have your app purchases follow you from PC to PC... that's very convenient. Perhaps most importantly, there's the security aspect; Windows Store apps run in a very restrictive sandbox and the use can view (and revoke) the app's permissions.
I don't know about ME, but from the perspective of almost any conventional measure, Vista was a huge success. At the time Win7 went RTM, there were apparently 400 million Vista users online. The Windows division remained highly profitable throughout the product's timeline.
Correct. Additionally, you can use Win + D (the "Show Desktop" shortcut) to open the Desktop from anywhere, whether it's in the "Metro" app stack or not. When already on the desktop, it retains its legacy behavior (toggling the "show desktop" state wherein all windows are minimized/hidden).
What makes you think SpaceX is planning on going public, or that if they do Musk would release enough shares? I expect that even if they do go on the public market, he'll hold onto a controlling interest. Money isn't his goal; he's got tons of that. Space is his goal. Read the stuff he writes; SpaceX is less a company to him, than the vehicle to fulfill his dreams of spaceflight and interplanetary travel. No way he's giving that up while he's still young enough that such flight is even a remote possibility for him.
Also, given their record, I suspect that a controlling interest in such a company would be pretty damn expensive.
A good point. I hate PayPal and avoid using it whenever possible, but when Musk was focused on that project, he basically made possible the entire concept of small online payments to individuals who don't have the time or resources to set up PCI themselves, but want to conduct business or accept donations over the Internet.
I don't like what it's turned into over time, and I'd like it if Musk (or somebody) were to slap it around a bit and make it behave more properly, but I don't fault him for creating it, or for moving on to other (IMO, far more interesting) projects since.
It brings it from the price range of "ultra-rich only" to the price range of "very well off", and that's important. Every additional person who can afford to purchase such a vehicle is simultaneously a reduction in fuel consumption, a reduction in emissions, and (this is the big one) an improvement in the economies of scale necessary to reduce the cost of such cars. The mid-range Model S is about 10% cheaper thanks to the tax credit. The base model is 14% cheaper. That doesn't magically move it into the price range of a Mazda or Toyota or Ford, but it does mean that somebody who might otherwise buy a Lexus or Audi (expensive cars, but not really targeted at the 1%) may now see the Model S as being feasible. It's still more expensive, but the difference - the marginal cost - is a lot lower.
That, in turn, helps Tesla bring the price down further on current and future models, and also funds their R&D which currently looks like one of the best approaches to weaning the USA (and eventually the world) off its dependency on gasoline.