Reading the article, it seems like most of their "horsepower" statements were just backed up with the clock rate of each systems CPU and GPU. That, really, doesn't mean anything at all. Who cares if the Revolution's CPU is clocked twice as fast as the GameCube's? That doesn't really mean anything at all, unless they're both running exactly the same chip just clocked at different rates. The same thing is true of comparing the XBox 360's 3.2 GHz chip to the Revolution's 750-ish MHz CPU. Does that really tell us anything at all? Not really.
The article is mostly crap. It's just telling us that the clock speed of Nintendo's apples isn't as fast as Microsoft's oranges.
These numbers are almost certainly very sketchy. They list piracy and stock manipulation as part of the total funds brought in by cybercrime. If they just mean people selling pirated software that's one thing, but if they mean people downloading MP3's, then that's different; nobody makes a dime when someone downloads the newest pop hit off the internet, as much as the record companies would like you to think someone just pocketed $15 of their money.
With the stock manipulation, this is also a pretty nebulous number. Did they include only verified cases of people doing this? What did they consider manipulation? The article is very thin.
While the current extensions are being written by an open source, open standard consortium, that still doesn't solve the problem of a possible standards war.
The problem, as I see it, is rather that once these standards become, well, standard, MS will pull out it's old standby, embrace and extend. We'll see a system compatible to Dashboard and it's Opera and Mozilla equivelents, but extended so that new MS Dashboard widgets are not compatible with the others.
The hope, I guess, is that the combination of the huge security problems with IE and these new features will allow Safari, Opera, and Mozilla to hold a plurality of the browser market, so that MS won't be able to use their market dominance to embrace and extend. It should be pretty interesting to see what happens.
"What is your position on the free coffee and donuts issue?"
On the other hand, if you want to ask *good* questions, think about what topics you and your current boss deal with, and ask about those questions. If it's a management job, then think about what managers can be bad at. Ask about their previous management history (are they a good leader?), ask about how well they understand the technology (are they the quentessential pointy hair?), and ask about how they view the postion from the point of view of being the interface between the techs and the upper management (are they there to keep you down, or to make things go smoothly?).
Also, think about what might happen a year or five down the line that will piss you off, and ask questions relating to that.
Actually, he wasn't a junkie, he was accused of dealing cocain but was aquitted on all charges because he was entrapped.
IMHO, the real shame is that such a great designer didn't pair up with a great business manager who could make his ideas successful rather than a footnote in automotive history.
NASA and it's foreign counterparts seem to have taken this whole life thing altogether too far. We've now sent many missions to Mars, and have yet to find any evidence whatsoever that there was at any point in time life there. We've found only scant evidence of liquid water, which although it's widely believed is necessary for life, it certainly doesn't gaurantee it's existence.
Although the conditions possibly could have been right for life to develop on Mars at some point in it's history, that is no reason to believe it did. At what point do we decide that we've done our best to look for it, but that life just never existed on Mars?
One Government/Country, or a respected body encompassing more than 380,000 individual members
Well, according to the BBC, there are currently 1,260,000,000 people in China. Last I checked, that's a much larger market that the 380,000 members of the IEEE, and comperable, if not more than, the markets of all those 150 countries combined.
If the Chinese get pretty serious about rolling out computing equipment to their people (and stuff like this new standard suggests that they will), the more than a billion people in China are going to be a much larger market than pretty much anyone else, or any combination of industrialized anyone else.
The article only talks about sales of singles on CD. This is not really the same thing as surpassing CDs in general, since singles really aren't a very popular way of purchasing music these days.
Not that it's not a big deal, just not as big a deal as the poster says. The big question I would have is, at the current rate of growth, how long until online sales surpass the number of tracks sold on CD in general?
This seems like a bad idea, at least in some cases, for the trademark holder. There are many cases where you *want* other companies to have access to your trademarks for advertising purposes.
As an example, I recently bought a Kawasaki motorcycle. It's a great bike, but there are some extra things I want, and so I went to google and searched for Kawasaki aftermarket parts. Now, every one of the advertisers was using the Kawasaki name, but without a healthy aftermarket presence, Kawasaki would sell a heck of a lot less of their product -- people are a whole lot more willing to buy a motorcycle if they know they can get performance parts for the bike without doing a whole lot of digging.
Even more simply, what if someone is using their name to say that their company is retailing the products of the trademark holder? Then they'd be cutting into their own visibility in the market place, and lowering their own sales.
It seems to me that this is not the most intellegent move on the part of the trademark holder. If you protect your trademark so passionately that you hurt your own product sales, what the hell was the trademark for in the first place?
Well, not *all* U.S. military personnel get the smallpox vaccine. How do I know? I'm one of the ones who hasn't recieved it yet.
The official line is that people get the vaccine if they are deployed in an area in which smallpox is "endemic". I put quotes around it because obviously it's not endemic to anywhere anymore, but the general wisdom is that that means anywhere they're likely to drop it on us.
So, if you're in Iraq you get it, obviously. If you're in San Diego and are unlikely to get deployed elsewhere any time soon, you don't. I'm not sure about places like Germany or Japan, where there are large U.S. installations but not a huge risk of biological attack.
A lot of people are getting it, though. The study you suggest would almost certainly be worthwhile.
I just checked out the EFF's website, and they have a page where you can read a letter they've prepared about the security of electronic voting systems and the need for open source in that area, sign a copy electronically, and have it sent to your representative. Personally, I'm going to send paper copies, but I can damn well gauruntee that all my representatives in both the House and Senate will be getting copies.
The page is right here. Let the people who can make changes in this area know that this is important!
The article doesn't say you get a shot of dopamine when you connect, it just quotes some psycologist saying it's *like* a dopamine squirt. Nowhere do they site research backing up that claim.
The whole article is really just a set of case studies of people who do many things at once all the time, and who find that makes them unhappy for one reason or another. Throw in a few off the cuff, baseless statements by shrinks, and the NYT has made a roll-your-own disorder: pseudo-ADD. It's not even it's own disorder, just a fake version of another hotly debated syndrome.
When I see real scientific data showing that A) there is an actual neurochemical response to data that can lead to addiction, B) that this addiction can and has happened in real people, and C) that it has caused these people's quality of life to be reduced, I'll believe it's a disorder. Right now, though, all we've got is some unhappy businessmen and a few shrinks looking to make a name for themselves.
I hope europe, asia, and the US will working together more than they are today
Actually, I think the lesson here is that we need to hope that they don't work together. Why did the space race in the middle of the 20th century accomplish so much? Because the US and the Russians were competing. Why is this talk of Indian and Chinese space programs spurring discussion and worry about the space program in the US? Because they signify new competition when we haven't had any in so long. What we need is competition, not cooperation; just like in business, the best situation is when there are lots of fairly equal players all at each other's throats, and monopolies (either through a single country dominating, or multiple countries working as a team) kills progress.
Even the store clerks at Vons seemed taken with the little melons.
"Those are the cutest baby watermelons," one said on a pass through the produce section. "Aren't those like little babies?" said another.
The real news here is the shocking news that Vons employees like to eat babies. Compared to the image of grocery store checkout workers huddled around cute little baby-sized spheres, cracking them open and eating the sweet, sweet red insides, tiny watermellons just doesn't sound all that disturbing.
Of course, maybe you think tiny watermellons aren't supposed to be disturbing, but that's just because you're tiny fruit desensitized.
At least with U.S. currency, there are more issues than just he appearence of the bill. A big one, for example, is the material. If you printed out a set of nice new bills on standard copier paper, nobody would believe for a second that it was a real bill, low lights or no. There have been counterfiters who have bleached out low value bills, such as ones, and printed higher values onto them, like twenties, but I'm not sure how well your average inkjet printer would feed the cottony paper used for bills.
I'm no currency expert, but I would imagine there are a lot of issues like this that aren't effected by the gross appearence of the bill for both U.S. and other bills.
All a solution like this would do is protect large companies like Disney which have the money to pay for copyright extention. Frankly, Disney can also afford to compete in the public domain, and I don't think they are the people copyright really needs to protect.
The folks I worry about with copyright are small artists who either themselves make a living off of their work, or who have living relatives who do so. These are the people that copyright needs to protect, and these are the same people who cannot afford to pay to extend that protection.
Law, in general, should help those who cannot help themselves. In my view, large corporations have the ability to compete successfully in a free, public domain market. Unless the sums required to extend copyright are tiny (and therefore useless), the people who need protection won't be able to get it. For the most part, Forbes' solution would just maintain the status quo.
Why doesn't stuff of this nature happen more often? Why can't this same logic be applied (through different, although possibly similar means) to other Bad Things that happen on the internet? What could stop Adobe suing Russian hackers? What would put an end to bad patents? What could even stop the application of the DMCA? Large scale, cooperative denial of service (in this case denying to serve them, not flooding their lines) of the institutions which do these things.
As an interesting sidenote, Katz specifically talked about applying this to Australian ISPs in the above linked/. discussion.
You're assuming that record companies have some need to put out 12 songs on each album under a per-song download system. The only reason that 1 or 2 song albums are mearly singles right now is that they've got to put more than 10 songs on the CD to charge what they do for it. If we're paying by the song, then they'll just stop spending money on the tracks that currently just take up space on the disk, as we'll have moved from an album driven system to a single driven one.
On the other hand, there are a lot of bands out there (even many pretty popular ones) that record their own songs (for less money) and are actually emotionally tied to their own music. Those artists will keep putting out whatever they want, because it'll mean that people hear their music. There will be some pressure to cover recording costs, but if they just put it up and don't heavily promote it, that won't be too hard.
I love cats too, but whenever I hear about some crazy procedure being done to extend the life of the cat, it worries me on the issue of consent. Well, sorta.
Consent isn't exactly the right word, really, but it describes a similar situation. You can't explain to a cat (or dog, or rat, or snake, or whatever) why it is going through all this pain. You can't say "just deal with the pain for a while, and in the long run it'll be for the best." From their point of view, it just looks like people are hurting them. Think about it: you don't mind the doctor giving you a pill to take, but you would be really disturbed and unhappy if the doctor tried to choke you. To a cat, there is no difference, because they don't know that the pill is for their own good.
So, when I see something like kidney transplants, where a cat who is usually old and has lived a good life goes through a bunch of nasty surgury and is forced to go on anti-rejection drugs (which are notorious for their nasty side effects), I think it's time to deal with it and put the poor animal down. Do you really want your loved pet's last years to be lived in confused misery? Do you want then to be convinced that whole time that it is you who is hurting them, and for no reason?
And George Washingon used to work for the British! The whole revolutionary war was really engineered by the British for some nafarious reason we've yet to discover.
Especially in this day and age, I think it should suprise no one that people change jobs periodically. Doesn't mean that they're really working for their first employer at the costs of their current one.
Why does the US have so many? Well, I wouldn't be suprised if many of them were first graded and paved back between the World Wars, when there were large numbers of trained pilots from the first war, and the FAA hadn't yet legislated flying into a game for the rich and large corporations. Odds are that when they founded these airstrips, all you had to do was grade it correctly, and then mail a letter to the FAA letting them know that it was there.
Nowadays, you'd have to implement truly horrificly expensive security, pay god only knows how many expensive FAA fees, and anyone who flies out of your field would have to have either learned to fly in the military or done on the order of $10,000 worth of training to be able to fly a plane legally. So, basically, there's nobody in most local areas who can fly a plane, even if there are people with the time an the intrest.
If it cost that much money to drive a car, we'd be reading an article about the suprising number of abandoned interstate highways. If you want to know what happened to the 'golden age' of aviation, the FAA killed it.
The important question here, at least for me, is: is the beta test single- or multi-player? Personally, I hold my own against the bots, but any attempt to even try out battlenet play, and I get completely stomped. The dregs of battlenet are far too good for me (and most other people I've talked to who've tried this).
Are they using battlenet mearly as a way of letting people play the beta for a temporary period (keeping all of the maps and scenarios on the server), or are they letting people play battlenet games using the new units?
It's not a totally new idea. I remember being told in Israel that they taxed water as a state resource because it was in such short supply. Even nomadic folks living out in the desert had to carry little water meters, and pour all the water they use through it. That's a little different, though, since they're using a whole lot larger percentage of the water in the country than California is the sunlight that falls in the whole state.
Actually, if you think about it, taxing real estate is sort of like taxing an 'unrefined, natural resource', and people have done that for a whole lot longer than they've taxed almost anything else.
Not that I think this new tax is a good idea, just that I don't think it's completely out of left field.
Have you seen one of these in a store? Have you seen the price? It's got the specs of a $500 emachine, with the exception of the folding keyboard and the big LCD screen (which, granted, looks really pretty). The form factor is cute, but not really a whole lot *better* than a whole lot of other stuff on the market. When you figure it costs $1000 more than a similarly decked out budget machine, it doesn't look to me like it panns out.
Now, this post is doubless going to attract some Apple iMac comparisons, but I think it won't apply. Why? Because I think with an iMac (which starts at around $200 less), you're getting a design that actually works better than the $500 emachine, not just that looks better. Just my opinion, though. I'm sure folks will disagree...
The idea that segways should have bike laws applied to them seems to be based on the idea that all wheeled vehicles are created equal. As someone who bikes on city streets a lot (mostly, actually, Oakland and San Francisco), this is not really true.
I bike in the street, and I have no problem with that. Why? Because except when I'm biking up a steep hill I usually am at a speed closer to that of the cars than pedestrians. I usually cruise somewhere between 15 and 20 miles per hour on flats, and about 5 miles slower or faster when going up or down hills.
It's my understanding that the very fastest a segway can to at all is 15 miles per hour, which can be very unsafe on a road where the speed limit is 30. I'd never ride one of these in the streets, and wouldn't think it was too dangerous to ride one on the sidewalk.
In my experience, the closer you are in speed to the other things around you (people or cars or whatever), the safer you are. As a result, I'd put these on the sidwalk. What's needed are rules governing what constitutes reckless segway use, along with ample leeway for a police officer to decide based on their own observation how those laws are applied. As someone else noted, bike enforcement is terrible, and bikers get away with a whole lot of stuff that should never happen, both for the safety of the biker as well as the drivers and pedestrians around them. Tighten up on enforcement of safety rules, and a lot of the problems we see with bikes today and people are worried about with segways in the future won't be as much of an issue.
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Reading the article, it seems like most of their "horsepower" statements were just backed up with the clock rate of each systems CPU and GPU. That, really, doesn't mean anything at all. Who cares if the Revolution's CPU is clocked twice as fast as the GameCube's? That doesn't really mean anything at all, unless they're both running exactly the same chip just clocked at different rates. The same thing is true of comparing the XBox 360's 3.2 GHz chip to the Revolution's 750-ish MHz CPU. Does that really tell us anything at all? Not really.
The article is mostly crap. It's just telling us that the clock speed of Nintendo's apples isn't as fast as Microsoft's oranges.
These numbers are almost certainly very sketchy. They list piracy and stock manipulation as part of the total funds brought in by cybercrime. If they just mean people selling pirated software that's one thing, but if they mean people downloading MP3's, then that's different; nobody makes a dime when someone downloads the newest pop hit off the internet, as much as the record companies would like you to think someone just pocketed $15 of their money.
With the stock manipulation, this is also a pretty nebulous number. Did they include only verified cases of people doing this? What did they consider manipulation? The article is very thin.
While the current extensions are being written by an open source, open standard consortium, that still doesn't solve the problem of a possible standards war.
The problem, as I see it, is rather that once these standards become, well, standard, MS will pull out it's old standby, embrace and extend. We'll see a system compatible to Dashboard and it's Opera and Mozilla equivelents, but extended so that new MS Dashboard widgets are not compatible with the others.
The hope, I guess, is that the combination of the huge security problems with IE and these new features will allow Safari, Opera, and Mozilla to hold a plurality of the browser market, so that MS won't be able to use their market dominance to embrace and extend. It should be pretty interesting to see what happens.
"What is your position on the free coffee and donuts issue?"
On the other hand, if you want to ask *good* questions, think about what topics you and your current boss deal with, and ask about those questions. If it's a management job, then think about what managers can be bad at. Ask about their previous management history (are they a good leader?), ask about how well they understand the technology (are they the quentessential pointy hair?), and ask about how they view the postion from the point of view of being the interface between the techs and the upper management (are they there to keep you down, or to make things go smoothly?).
Also, think about what might happen a year or five down the line that will piss you off, and ask questions relating to that.
Shame the designer was a junkie ;[
Actually, he wasn't a junkie, he was accused of dealing cocain but was aquitted on all charges because he was entrapped.
IMHO, the real shame is that such a great designer didn't pair up with a great business manager who could make his ideas successful rather than a footnote in automotive history.
NASA and it's foreign counterparts seem to have taken this whole life thing altogether too far. We've now sent many missions to Mars, and have yet to find any evidence whatsoever that there was at any point in time life there. We've found only scant evidence of liquid water, which although it's widely believed is necessary for life, it certainly doesn't gaurantee it's existence.
Although the conditions possibly could have been right for life to develop on Mars at some point in it's history, that is no reason to believe it did. At what point do we decide that we've done our best to look for it, but that life just never existed on Mars?
One Government/Country, or a respected body encompassing more than 380,000 individual members
Well, according to the BBC, there are currently 1,260,000,000 people in China. Last I checked, that's a much larger market that the 380,000 members of the IEEE, and comperable, if not more than, the markets of all those 150 countries combined.
If the Chinese get pretty serious about rolling out computing equipment to their people (and stuff like this new standard suggests that they will), the more than a billion people in China are going to be a much larger market than pretty much anyone else, or any combination of industrialized anyone else.
The article only talks about sales of singles on CD. This is not really the same thing as surpassing CDs in general, since singles really aren't a very popular way of purchasing music these days.
Not that it's not a big deal, just not as big a deal as the poster says. The big question I would have is, at the current rate of growth, how long until online sales surpass the number of tracks sold on CD in general?
This seems like a bad idea, at least in some cases, for the trademark holder. There are many cases where you *want* other companies to have access to your trademarks for advertising purposes.
As an example, I recently bought a Kawasaki motorcycle. It's a great bike, but there are some extra things I want, and so I went to google and searched for Kawasaki aftermarket parts. Now, every one of the advertisers was using the Kawasaki name, but without a healthy aftermarket presence, Kawasaki would sell a heck of a lot less of their product -- people are a whole lot more willing to buy a motorcycle if they know they can get performance parts for the bike without doing a whole lot of digging.
Even more simply, what if someone is using their name to say that their company is retailing the products of the trademark holder? Then they'd be cutting into their own visibility in the market place, and lowering their own sales.
It seems to me that this is not the most intellegent move on the part of the trademark holder. If you protect your trademark so passionately that you hurt your own product sales, what the hell was the trademark for in the first place?
Well, not *all* U.S. military personnel get the smallpox vaccine. How do I know? I'm one of the ones who hasn't recieved it yet.
The official line is that people get the vaccine if they are deployed in an area in which smallpox is "endemic". I put quotes around it because obviously it's not endemic to anywhere anymore, but the general wisdom is that that means anywhere they're likely to drop it on us.
So, if you're in Iraq you get it, obviously. If you're in San Diego and are unlikely to get deployed elsewhere any time soon, you don't. I'm not sure about places like Germany or Japan, where there are large U.S. installations but not a huge risk of biological attack.
A lot of people are getting it, though. The study you suggest would almost certainly be worthwhile.
I just checked out the EFF's website, and they have a page where you can read a letter they've prepared about the security of electronic voting systems and the need for open source in that area, sign a copy electronically, and have it sent to your representative. Personally, I'm going to send paper copies, but I can damn well gauruntee that all my representatives in both the House and Senate will be getting copies.
The page is right here. Let the people who can make changes in this area know that this is important!
The article doesn't say you get a shot of dopamine when you connect, it just quotes some psycologist saying it's *like* a dopamine squirt. Nowhere do they site research backing up that claim.
The whole article is really just a set of case studies of people who do many things at once all the time, and who find that makes them unhappy for one reason or another. Throw in a few off the cuff, baseless statements by shrinks, and the NYT has made a roll-your-own disorder: pseudo-ADD. It's not even it's own disorder, just a fake version of another hotly debated syndrome.
When I see real scientific data showing that A) there is an actual neurochemical response to data that can lead to addiction, B) that this addiction can and has happened in real people, and C) that it has caused these people's quality of life to be reduced, I'll believe it's a disorder. Right now, though, all we've got is some unhappy businessmen and a few shrinks looking to make a name for themselves.
I hope europe, asia, and the US will working together more than they are today
Actually, I think the lesson here is that we need to hope that they don't work together. Why did the space race in the middle of the 20th century accomplish so much? Because the US and the Russians were competing. Why is this talk of Indian and Chinese space programs spurring discussion and worry about the space program in the US? Because they signify new competition when we haven't had any in so long. What we need is competition, not cooperation; just like in business, the best situation is when there are lots of fairly equal players all at each other's throats, and monopolies (either through a single country dominating, or multiple countries working as a team) kills progress.
Even the store clerks at Vons seemed taken with the little melons.
"Those are the cutest baby watermelons," one said on a pass through the produce section. "Aren't those like little babies?" said another.
The real news here is the shocking news that Vons employees like to eat babies. Compared to the image of grocery store checkout workers huddled around cute little baby-sized spheres, cracking them open and eating the sweet, sweet red insides, tiny watermellons just doesn't sound all that disturbing.
Of course, maybe you think tiny watermellons aren't supposed to be disturbing, but that's just because you're tiny fruit desensitized.
At least with U.S. currency, there are more issues than just he appearence of the bill. A big one, for example, is the material. If you printed out a set of nice new bills on standard copier paper, nobody would believe for a second that it was a real bill, low lights or no. There have been counterfiters who have bleached out low value bills, such as ones, and printed higher values onto them, like twenties, but I'm not sure how well your average inkjet printer would feed the cottony paper used for bills.
I'm no currency expert, but I would imagine there are a lot of issues like this that aren't effected by the gross appearence of the bill for both U.S. and other bills.
All a solution like this would do is protect large companies like Disney which have the money to pay for copyright extention. Frankly, Disney can also afford to compete in the public domain, and I don't think they are the people copyright really needs to protect.
The folks I worry about with copyright are small artists who either themselves make a living off of their work, or who have living relatives who do so. These are the people that copyright needs to protect, and these are the same people who cannot afford to pay to extend that protection.
Law, in general, should help those who cannot help themselves. In my view, large corporations have the ability to compete successfully in a free, public domain market. Unless the sums required to extend copyright are tiny (and therefore useless), the people who need protection won't be able to get it. For the most part, Forbes' solution would just maintain the status quo.
The Geek Union was stupid.
/. discussion.
Why doesn't stuff of this nature happen more often? Why can't this same logic be applied (through different, although possibly similar means) to other Bad Things that happen on the internet? What could stop Adobe suing Russian hackers? What would put an end to bad patents? What could even stop the application of the DMCA? Large scale, cooperative denial of service (in this case denying to serve them, not flooding their lines) of the institutions which do these things.
As an interesting sidenote, Katz specifically talked about applying this to Australian ISPs in the above linked
You're assuming that record companies have some need to put out 12 songs on each album under a per-song download system. The only reason that 1 or 2 song albums are mearly singles right now is that they've got to put more than 10 songs on the CD to charge what they do for it. If we're paying by the song, then they'll just stop spending money on the tracks that currently just take up space on the disk, as we'll have moved from an album driven system to a single driven one.
On the other hand, there are a lot of bands out there (even many pretty popular ones) that record their own songs (for less money) and are actually emotionally tied to their own music. Those artists will keep putting out whatever they want, because it'll mean that people hear their music. There will be some pressure to cover recording costs, but if they just put it up and don't heavily promote it, that won't be too hard.
I love cats too, but whenever I hear about some crazy procedure being done to extend the life of the cat, it worries me on the issue of consent. Well, sorta.
Consent isn't exactly the right word, really, but it describes a similar situation. You can't explain to a cat (or dog, or rat, or snake, or whatever) why it is going through all this pain. You can't say "just deal with the pain for a while, and in the long run it'll be for the best." From their point of view, it just looks like people are hurting them. Think about it: you don't mind the doctor giving you a pill to take, but you would be really disturbed and unhappy if the doctor tried to choke you. To a cat, there is no difference, because they don't know that the pill is for their own good.
So, when I see something like kidney transplants, where a cat who is usually old and has lived a good life goes through a bunch of nasty surgury and is forced to go on anti-rejection drugs (which are notorious for their nasty side effects), I think it's time to deal with it and put the poor animal down. Do you really want your loved pet's last years to be lived in confused misery? Do you want then to be convinced that whole time that it is you who is hurting them, and for no reason?
And George Washingon used to work for the British! The whole revolutionary war was really engineered by the British for some nafarious reason we've yet to discover.
Especially in this day and age, I think it should suprise no one that people change jobs periodically. Doesn't mean that they're really working for their first employer at the costs of their current one.
Why does the US have so many? Well, I wouldn't be suprised if many of them were first graded and paved back between the World Wars, when there were large numbers of trained pilots from the first war, and the FAA hadn't yet legislated flying into a game for the rich and large corporations. Odds are that when they founded these airstrips, all you had to do was grade it correctly, and then mail a letter to the FAA letting them know that it was there.
Nowadays, you'd have to implement truly horrificly expensive security, pay god only knows how many expensive FAA fees, and anyone who flies out of your field would have to have either learned to fly in the military or done on the order of $10,000 worth of training to be able to fly a plane legally. So, basically, there's nobody in most local areas who can fly a plane, even if there are people with the time an the intrest.
If it cost that much money to drive a car, we'd be reading an article about the suprising number of abandoned interstate highways. If you want to know what happened to the 'golden age' of aviation, the FAA killed it.
The important question here, at least for me, is: is the beta test single- or multi-player? Personally, I hold my own against the bots, but any attempt to even try out battlenet play, and I get completely stomped. The dregs of battlenet are far too good for me (and most other people I've talked to who've tried this).
Are they using battlenet mearly as a way of letting people play the beta for a temporary period (keeping all of the maps and scenarios on the server), or are they letting people play battlenet games using the new units?
It's not a totally new idea. I remember being told in Israel that they taxed water as a state resource because it was in such short supply. Even nomadic folks living out in the desert had to carry little water meters, and pour all the water they use through it. That's a little different, though, since they're using a whole lot larger percentage of the water in the country than California is the sunlight that falls in the whole state.
Actually, if you think about it, taxing real estate is sort of like taxing an 'unrefined, natural resource', and people have done that for a whole lot longer than they've taxed almost anything else.
Not that I think this new tax is a good idea, just that I don't think it's completely out of left field.
Have you seen one of these in a store? Have you seen the price? It's got the specs of a $500 emachine, with the exception of the folding keyboard and the big LCD screen (which, granted, looks really pretty). The form factor is cute, but not really a whole lot *better* than a whole lot of other stuff on the market. When you figure it costs $1000 more than a similarly decked out budget machine, it doesn't look to me like it panns out.
Now, this post is doubless going to attract some Apple iMac comparisons, but I think it won't apply. Why? Because I think with an iMac (which starts at around $200 less), you're getting a design that actually works better than the $500 emachine, not just that looks better. Just my opinion, though. I'm sure folks will disagree...
The idea that segways should have bike laws applied to them seems to be based on the idea that all wheeled vehicles are created equal. As someone who bikes on city streets a lot (mostly, actually, Oakland and San Francisco), this is not really true.
I bike in the street, and I have no problem with that. Why? Because except when I'm biking up a steep hill I usually am at a speed closer to that of the cars than pedestrians. I usually cruise somewhere between 15 and 20 miles per hour on flats, and about 5 miles slower or faster when going up or down hills.
It's my understanding that the very fastest a segway can to at all is 15 miles per hour, which can be very unsafe on a road where the speed limit is 30. I'd never ride one of these in the streets, and wouldn't think it was too dangerous to ride one on the sidewalk.
In my experience, the closer you are in speed to the other things around you (people or cars or whatever), the safer you are. As a result, I'd put these on the sidwalk. What's needed are rules governing what constitutes reckless segway use, along with ample leeway for a police officer to decide based on their own observation how those laws are applied. As someone else noted, bike enforcement is terrible, and bikers get away with a whole lot of stuff that should never happen, both for the safety of the biker as well as the drivers and pedestrians around them. Tighten up on enforcement of safety rules, and a lot of the problems we see with bikes today and people are worried about with segways in the future won't be as much of an issue.