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Comment Re:Think of your paying customers foremost (Score 1) 687

I'd like to add an addendum to this.

While for a small utility like this, I agree with what the parent said. It's perfectly reasonable, and easy to record.

For expensive, specialized utilities I actually prefer key-server type systems. Why? Because there are many applications that many people need, but only just once in a while. I can't tell you how many times that we have seen a application we liked, sometimes into the thousands of dollars, but more then one person needed to use it to make it worthwhile. Even though only one person at a time would be using it, we needed it on multiple computers and there was no way to afford enough copies. So instead, we just skipped it and found another way around it with our workflow on what could have been a sale.

Comment Re:If you want updates, buy Nexus (Score 1) 505

But the service prices don't change without big additional limitations, too.

I have a Virgin Mobile account and it's OK, but they keep it locked down to a handful of older phones. No iPhone 5 still, no Galaxy S3 still and certainly no Nexus. So yeah, you can buy your phone, but you have to buy a phone that's already out of date.

If there are discount carriers or plans that are open to other phones and actually a reduced price, I would like to hear about them.

Comment Google Voice (Score 2) 383

It might not be officially dead, but it may as well be. I would have paid money for it, but it's been unreliable, flaky with getting texts to other carriers, and hasn't been updated in years now. I can't even make IP voice calls from voice.google.com, I have to go to gmail.com to make a call from my Google voice number. There is no way that I would use my google voice number as my main number with it's issues, and it doesn't look like that is ever going to change now. It's a shame, it was the product for me, and I would be recommending it to all my friends and coworkers who travel internationally.

Comment Re:It's the future... (Score 1) 418

Considering these parts include fans, which cleaning are a part of regular maintenance, it's bordering on obscene that one would be expected to have to take your computer in for what would become a fairly expensive repair just to keep the machine from overheating.

Earth

Ancestor of All Placental Mammals Revealed 123

sciencehabit writes "The ancestor of all placental mammals—the diverse lineage that includes almost all species of mammals living today, including humans—was a tiny, furry-tailed creature that evolved shortly after the dinosaurs disappeared, a new study suggests. The hypothetical creature, not found in the fossil record but inferred from it, probably was a tree-climbing, insect-eating mammal that weighed between 6 and 245 grams—somewhere between a small shrew and a mid-sized rat. It was furry, had a long tail, gave birth to a single young, and had a complex brain with a large lobe for interpreting smells and a corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The period following the dinosaur die-offs could be considered a 'big bang' of mammalian diversification, with species representing as many as 10 major groups of placentals appearing within a 200,000-year interval."

Comment Favorate image, use or convenience? (Score 2) 316

Because all three have different answers. I enjoy using a digital SLR camera the most, I can do lots of inter sting things and get the best results from a situation. My favorite image quality still comes from large format conventional film, but cost of equipment and processing is a barrier. While of course my phone camera is the most convenient.

Broadly, my favorite camera is the one that gets me the picture I want. Sometimes that just means being "the one I have with me", but sometimes it takes good optics, pulling lots of light and having plenty of control.

Comment Re:New thing starts with one passionnate person. (Score 3, Insightful) 82

Bullshit

Just off the top of my head: Teflon (dupont), the transistor (Bell Labs), the GUI (Xerox Parc), the blue LED (Nichia). The list goes on and on of things that have been major game changers that came from a group of smart people getting a paycheck putting their heads together or building on each other's work on something new.

That's not to say that there aren't impediments to innovation today, be it short sighted investors or patent issues, but a great deal of big innovations, if not many of the biggest in the last 100 years have come from academics on grants and guys on salaries. What seems to be special about SpaceX is that those are the guys that seem to be the focus in the company rather then much larger (less flat) companies that are mostly about managing management and pleasing investors.

Comment Re:How do they do it? (Score 1) 80

IANAAEE (I am not an aeronautical EE?) but from my understanding, the FAA requires stringent testing of their equipment before it's allowed to be used below 10,000, where above, after takeoff and landing it is a bit more lax, on top of slow rule changes by the FAA such as allowing wi-fi to be used (which was likely the result of some lobbying by the industry). Most consumer electronics manufacturers don't want to bother with such testing for under 10k feet use, and even if they did airlines don't want to have to try to determine which are approved and which are not, so just have a blanket 'no electronic devices' policy. Gogo doesn't operate below 10k feet for one, but also, they do go through all that testing that allows them to operate in an aviation environment (they used to be aircell, which made inflight phones and such).

As for bandwidth, the fact of the mater is that domestic flights just are not that long (Gogo only covers domestic flights). Most people I have noticed don't feel inclined to pay $10 for a few hours of internet when they can just read a book, do a little off-line work, watch a movie, etc. That only leaves the hand full of people with an actual need, so it's just good old fashioned supply and demand. I fly between once and 4 times a month depending on work, and have only had to use it once, the speed was fine, certainly enough for the emails I need to do, but also for just browsing once I was done with work.

Security is of course as bad as any other public wi-fi (not very) so use a vpn or whatever usual security you would use.

Games

City of Heroes Reaches Sunset, NCsoft Paying the Price 290

KingSkippus writes "At midnight Pacific on Saturday, December 1, NCsoft shut down the City of Heroes servers for the final time. Since announcing the closure, a group of players has been working hard to revive the game by getting attention from the gaming press, recognition from celebrities such as Sean Astin, Neil Gaiman, and Felicia Day, and assistance from fantasy author Mercedes Lackey. Meanwhile, NCsoft has been drawing negative publicity, including a scathing article about the shutdown from local news site The Korea Times, noting that the game was earning $2.76 million per quarter and that 'it is hard to comprehend what NCsoft means when they say they closed it for strategic reasons.' NCsoft's stock price has fallen over 43% since the announcement in August, almost 30% below its previous 52-week low, right when investors were counting on the success of the recently launched Guild Wars 2 to help boost the company."

Comment Re:Thoughts (Score 1) 129

We spend almost as much on the NRO alone the NASA's whole budget and it only does one thing: spy satellites. NASA gets just a few billion more and does a whole range of things, rovers, space station, weather and aeronautics research, long term research in a verity of fields at what is suppose to be the vangaurd of US Science. So yes, I think there is something wrong with all this too.

National Reconnaissance Office Budget for 2010: ~$15 Billion
NASA Budget for 2010: $18.7 Billion

Comment Re:Love it, always fascinates me people who hate i (Score 1) 475

You raise an interesting point, in fact it's Standard Time and the change between I dislike. If we were a more rational race I think most people would prefer that normal business hours be 8-4, which is in essence all we do when we go to daylight savings time. Just dump the change and leave it that way through the winter.

Comment Exessive (Score 1) 259

But that's not why Sweden's being so tough on him in prison. Authorities believe he may have played a role in the hacking of Logica, a Swedish technology company with ties to the country's tax authorities.

What does it matter if there was another crime? Of course he should be tried and prosecuted if he committed a crime, but to give someone solitary confinement before he's even been charged for a non-violent crime seems completely excessive. If your justice system has people leaving it more dangerous and damaged when they came in, you are doing it wrong.

I suppose that not every country has an innocent until guilty system though, is this usual in Sweden?

Government

How We'll Get To 54.5 Mpg By 2025 717

concealment writes "At the end of August this year, the US Department of Transport's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced new standards to significantly improve the fuel economy of cars and light trucks by 2025. Last week, we took a look at a range of recent engine technologies that car companies have been deploying in aid of better fuel efficiency today. But what about the cars of tomorrow, or next week? What do Detroit, or Stuttgart, or Tokyo have waiting in the wings that will get to the Obama administration's target of 54.5 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2025?"
Education

Brown Signs California Bill For Free Textbooks 201

bcrowell writes "California Governor Jerry Brown has signed SB 1052 and 1053, authored by state senator Darrell Steinberg, to create free textbooks for 50 core lower-division college courses. SB 1052 creates a California Open Education Resources Council, made up of faculty from the UC, Cal State, and community college systems. The council is supposed to pick 50 core courses. They are then to establish a 'competitive request-for-proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties would apply for funds to produce, in 2013, 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials, meeting specified requirements.' The bill doesn't become operative unless the legislature funds it — a questionable process in California's current political situation. The books could be either newly produced (which seems unlikely, given the 1-year time frame stated) or existing ones that the state would buy or have free access to. Unlike former Gov. Schwarzenegger's failed K-12 free textbook program, this one specifically defines what it means by 'open source,' rather than using the term as a feel-good phrase; books have to be under a CC-BY (or CC-BY-SA?) license, in XML format. They're supposed to be modularized and conform to state and W3C accessibility guidelines. Faculty would not be required to use the free books."

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