Ok, did not know that. Still, 6% is far away from that of e.g. solar power towers. And as I said, you could still add plants with 6% efficiency underneath.

Also, what exactly is your argument about high-tech? I definitely don't call a bunch of mirrors on pillars and a brick tower with some water tube and steam turbines "high tech". It's less technology than the tractor, fertilizer machine, plant grinder, countless other agricultural machinery and chemical plant that biofuel requires.
Also, it takes less space, and it can be built in 100% dead desert where not even bacteria can survive.

I have the feeling that you have a strong emotional drive in defending this, that in not built on reason.

I'm an apple you insensitive clod!
And what the fuck is this?

Correct. What we need for mobile phones, is the same modular flexibility as for desktop PCs. So everyone can get into it, offering parts. But hopefully without the ugly generic gray cases. ;)

Otherwise I can just think of cars as an example. Luckily, there you can still "mod" your cars, no matter what the vendor expects. You'll only lose your guarantee. But modders offer you a new one. So other companies can make spare parts.
With phones that is obviously also true, no matter how much Apple would like to to think it's not.

If someone would create such a open modular phone, and get the Chinese/Taiwanese/Japanese/... on board, they'd flood the market with parts until the coolness of what phone you could get that way would crush the lock-in companies. (At least so I hope.)

May I add that the same thing happened in the hardware sector too. IBM-compatible PCs prevailed, because everybody could do with it whatever he wanted.
Interestingly, fragmentation was prevented, because if your hardware wasn't really 100% compatible, nobody liked it, for that exact reason. :)

I just hope there will be no incompatible fragmentation in Android after the initial “I’m the dominating standard” struggle.
Oh well... as long as MS doesn't get into it... ;)

I'm sorry, but I have to pull you back to reality, from media distribution mafia world. (Can't let a fellow Slashdotter die in there. ;)

They both had not a single sale. Since all that software was actually licensed.
The reason is (I think you already know this, but just to clear the head...), that they can't sell you something that can't be owned, now can they? ;)
So they write a contract that you will not pass on their valuable secret.
But since physically and morally, nothing is stopping you from doing it anyway,
they make up this elaborate world about how you still "buy" it, but yet they "own" it anyway.

Anyway: I wouldn't give more value to app licensing numbers in a market than to lines of code in a program. Because honestly, most of those apps are so worthless that not only are they not a valuable secret, but you wouldn’t even value them high enough to pass them on at all. ;)
As a prime example, I raise the app that costs $1000, whose sole "function" it is, to display that you paid $1000 for the app, so you can brag about your money bags. ;))

Not to kill your happiness, but do you mean other than NASA putting a man on the moon? ;)

Let's be honest: Over the lies and deceptions that is politics, businesses and laws, we often forget, that there are really a lot of awesome people out there, that we can be mighty proud of.

The sheer fact that we can predict nearly all the world around us from nanoseconds after the big bang to the far future in such precision, that we haven't yet invented a measuring instrument exact enough to show its error (quantum electrodynamics, last time I checked), removes all doubt about that.

Well, I changed the e-mail address to a random Mailinator one, changed the password to a scrambled one, and logged out, so I would never ever get dragged in here again.
Then years later, I tried the same with my... second account.

Now I'm back. So I guess I must be some kind of leader since /. will follow me to the grave.
Go figure.

Been there, done that.

Cheers,
Eli Lilly

You’re right. Above 5-6 MP, the more there are, the worse the image will look.
What I really want to know about cameras, is the size of the chip.

Then again, what is a article about a phone of a company that employs totalitarian control doing on a website of a open source network? Selling your soul for a shiny shiny glass bead much?

And you didn't get the memo of those plants having 0.1% efficiency in transforming sunlight to energy. of which only a fraction ends up being fuel.

While concentrated solar power plants have at least 100 times higher efficiency, and in deserts catch air humidity, which allows life in the humid shaded ground below them, where you could still grow those very same plants without problems (assuming you put the mirrors on pillars with big enough spacing to farm the plants). <Ricky Gervais>In the desert!! How cool is that?!</Ricky Gervais> And without the power plant causing any carbon dioxide or other toxins.

I am absolutely sure, that it's physically impossible to not think that’s cool. ;))

And make the choices the viewpoints of all directions of extreme viewpoints.
While the default stays the writer’s viewpoint.

Then let us set our viewpoint in the settings.
And we call all happily live in our own egocentric world that we live in anyway. ;)

(Bonus points for making the moderation’s effect relative to the relationship between your viewpoint and that of the moderator. :)

And I thought the current mystical beast would be "terrorists".
Or is it "radical atheistsâ already? (As Newt Gingrich put it.)

It's like putting a sign next to your sheep herd, telling the wolves to please no kill your sheep.
It’s like having a firewall, that sends “Please would you be so kind, dear haxxor, to not wreck my system” packets out to the sources of incoming connection requests.

Smart move, genius.

Biofuels are about the most retarded thing, since a tricycle with four-wheel drive or a water-tight sun dial.
Let's... now sit down and prepare yourself for that level of stupidity... take our food... put it through a expensive resource-eating process... and burn the result into highly toxic environmental pollution.
Whoever came up with that fuckin' great idea?? It’s like a joke in which Dick Cheney is told to come up with a system that's even more stupid and evil than using fossil fuels.
Cause you got to literally have a empty hole in your chest where your heart should be, to come up with that level of evilness!

</Lewis Black>

But it’s the best. Beats the rest.
Cellular, modular, interactivodular...