What does Tizen do that Android doesn't? Or Windows Phone for that matter? It's just another software stack running over a kernel. Performance and battery life is likely to be little different.

The only reason it exists at all is because Samsung sees Google taking 30% off of app sales and services and it wants that 30% for itself. That might be a wonderful motivating factor for Samsung to push this thing. For everyone else... not so much. Consumers will just see a new platform which has doesn't have the apps they want to use. App developers will just see yet another lame duck platform that they must spend inordinate effort to support or ignore completely.

Unless Samsung money hats devs and hand out free phones like candy, they're not going to get the buy-in to their platform. And even if they do it's no guarantee - Nokia and Blackberry both went down that route trying to buy devs and it didn't pay off.

My point is all those ms add up, especially since there is still terrestrial on the other end. Until it's put into practice I have no idea of knowing which way it'll go and I'm enthusiastic but it's not hard to see possible issues - price of service, price of kit, capacity, download / upload limits, reliability, latency etc.

Sounds more like Stardock's Galactic Civilizations although that was influenced by MOO too but with more emphasis on the AI. Anyway FTL is owes more than a little to Sundog which was an ancient top down spaceship sim/rpg from... FTL Games.

Or perhaps they got the info through other means but thought they'd troll North Korea - make them disrupt their own network looking for the compromise which wasn't there to begin with.

You mean like if a villain plotted to kill the queen at a baseball game with hypnotised assassins with all kinds of hilarious pratfalls along the way?

I suspect the reason it doesn't happen more often is due to legal issues, audience reception (and therefore box office) and the fear of repercussions of pissing off the people whose good graces they want to be in. It doesn't stop one book, movie and TV show after another putting fictional heads of state in perilous situations and occasionally bumping them off.

And if North Korea did some movie about whacking Obama, it's likely it might generate some media noise but I doubt it would do much else.

Oh so it was a noble cause all along. Pull the other one.

I won't be happy until there are tabs on EVERY side at once. And nested as well. How is Chrome supposed to be CUA compatible on OS/2 otherwise?

Geosynchronous orbit being around 23,000 miles away vs 750.

At one time I was semi considering a satellite internet system because of problems getting decent broadband where I lived but I was put off by the horrific latencies (500-1000ms) and the equally horrific costs of using the system. It all looked quite Heath Robinson with the upload being via ISDN / ADSL and the download via a satellite and some kind of kludge in the middle to reconcile the two halves. I bet anyone using satellite internet has to tweak their browsers to max out concurrent requests to reduce the lag and suffers all kinds of frustrations (e.g. no games, no public servers etc.).

Anyway 2-way satellite to 750 miles is obviously better but there would be lag there too - at least 2*750 miles for a message to go up and straight back down. Except of course it's more likely the packet goes up, gets routed to one or more satellites in the constellation (e.g. by using geo IP or some heuristic), down, across a terrestrial network and then the reverse trip. In some scenarios it might be faster than land based solutions but it could well be slower over all especially if the satellites are under heavy load.

Still, if I had really bad internet I would be seriously interested in this solution provided it was affordable. But what's affordable to me might not be affordable even for an entire village in some places in the world, so it has issues unrelated to technology to work out too.

The upside of doing this is it would speed up certain kinds of trial where the alternative is to spend months or years in trial because the matters are so complex and the possibility of mistrial increases as jurors drop out.

Tor works via a series of tubes.

Most countries would have the powers against unlicenced taxi operators to fine them, impound their vehicle, ban drivers, even hand out custodial sentences if the offence merited it. I'm sure Australia is no exception and if people are stupid enough to operate an unlicenced taxi service (which is what Uber is), then they can enjoy whatever delights the courts throw at them.

As for Uber, actively impeding the government might please libertarian nitwits (like Roman Mir), but I expect the courts would take an extremely dim view of such actions since it demonstrates intent to break the law.

Yeah how dare the government impose standards on public transportation like taxis to ensure the next car you step into is roadworthy and isn't driven by a rapist and holding Uber to those standards. The monsters.

The biggest issue with VR is it's extremely limited what kinds of games you could play with it. Racing games - yes. Spaceship / fighter games - yes. Some sedentary sports simulations - yes. First person shooter games - yes but now the cracks start to appear - how to reconcile actions like crouching, running, turning, looking between the virtual world and the real one. Basically the further you go from a seated experience, the worse it's going to become. I also expect that holds for the amount of nausea inducing too.

Node.js is just a JS engine executable, a bunch of APIs and a package manager. It can be used server side but I use it mostly on command line for grunt, less, typescript, coffeescript, phantom etc - basically using node and npm as a convenient way to install and manage build dependencies. Some of these tools aren't written in JS but they are wrapped by modules. Of course someone could compile most C++/C code into JS these days via Emscripten.

And yes it can be used to serve up content from a server although I wonder how much overlap it actually has with PHP. PHP is the P in LAMP and would suit data driven requests - where a server does database queries to produce the output. It's the database that determines how scalable the server is and whoever sets up the server would set their max clients accordingly.

Node.js is event driven and could potentially server hundreds or thousands of concurrent requests assuming they had little overhead in and of themselves. But if you bound it to a backend database then chances are performance is no better than LAMP with its max clients.

So I doubt the two would find themselves competing as solutions to the same problems. Either could serve out a basic website but beyond that it really depends what the site is doing which dictates the solution. Not that PHP or Node.js are the only solutions to problems by any stretch.

The price of oil is low because the US & Saudi Arabia are letting it below - probably as a means to fuck with Russia. It doesn't mean it's a permanent thing and it will rise by the simple expedient of scaling back production.

Secondly, I think everyone recognises that electric vehicles are still relatively expensive but that doesn't mean they are without merit. They cost more upfront but significantly less to operate. In certain locations they also qualify for grants and reduced road charges / taxse. e.g. the London congestion charge doesn't apply to electric vehicles and there is no road tax for pure EVs in the UK. So it may well pay for itself as-is and as production quantities expand and infrastructure develops it is likely that the cost will reduce further.