The reason for that is very likely Apple's practice of manufacturing a single hardware spec for all markets. Since Japan is nearly the only place where touch card tech is regularly integrated into phones, Apple hasn't considered it worth the cost of building it into the same phone they ship everywhere else.

Once they can get the cost down far enough to be negligible, though, they'll build it in. Who knows, it could even drive adoption outside Japan!

I thought from reading around on slashdot that Japanese phones were 10+ years ahead of American ones? How did we catch up so quickly?

We didn't. The average Japanese cell phone is still vastly higher-tech than the average US cell phone.

In terms of feature set, the iPhone isn't particularly remarkable compared to run-of-the-mill Japanese handsets. The reason it's become so popular is the same reason it's done so everywhere else: the quality of the UI and the gestalt user experience absolutely blow everything else away.

I think your balmy attempt at dry humor has unraveled and it's just about time to wrap it up before it elicits any more groans or curses.

For major releases, I think the market has actually adapted quite well. Consumers are given a pretty good tradeoff spectrum to decide how much a game is worth to them:

If a game looks to you like a good enough value proposition that you're willing to buy it at launch, you pay $60.

If a game looks worthwhile but you don't need it at launch, you can hold off for a few months and someone will have it for $40 (eventually MSRP reflects this).

If a game looks fun but you wouldn't pay more than a budget title for it (and it isn't a consistent bestseller), play other games for a few more months and you'll see it for $20.

The last game I paid $60 for was LittleBigPlanet, just over a year ago. I've played some other great games this year that I'd been looking forward to, but I haven't paid over $40 for a single one.

Now, download-based games are another story. Steam is getting it right on the PC with the frequent sale promotions and bundles, but Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo barely ever do it. They'll figure it out in time.

Normally I'm against captain-obvious troll-feeding, but this is one case where I think a response is merited.

ACTA awareness needs to reach as far as it possibly can. We are, quite literally, talking about the future of the world here: A global treaty that promises to have a profound effect upon the freedom of all of us is being negotiated in secret.

The maximum must be brought to light before the widest audience. If that means dupe stories, then I'm all for dupes.

This electricity you speak of is only being used for piracy of our content! People are staying up after dark, laboring by the light of these electrical lamps to copy down note-for-note the contents of our valuable original content!

What we propose is a law of three-strikes, not unlike that of baseball. Upon the third finding that a person has been engaged in illegal copying, their electricity is to be cut off forever, preventing their copying in the future.

It is of the utmost importance to our industry and culture that the use of electricity be carefully monitored and restricted, lest it be used illegally. With vigilance and diligence, we can combat the menace that electricity poses to the future of our nation.

The more I learn about this, the more it looks like one of those failed relationships where the guy thought things were getting serious and the girl was never looking for a long-term attachment.

Neither one can be blamed or absolved completely; they both were under the illusion that the other shared their view. Of course, the couple should have talked a little more about what they both wanted out of the relationship, as should Arrington and Fusion Garage have.

Love, or that dizzying sense that you're going to change an industry. Both serotonin.

If your image has a totally different shape (e.g. a few white patches on a black background), find a new image :P

Even then, you'd probably get something basically recognizable -- I'd imagine the error diffusion just puts a lot of noise in a black area that's too big. Heck, it may even run an unsharp mask over the image to exaggerate details when the predicted output noise reaches a certain threshold.

I bet the algorithms for this bear a number of similarities to photomosaic systems as they're both working with a known set of "subpixel units."

Mod parent up.

It's the gradients on the pieces, and the principles of human vision that JPEG takes advantage of, that give this puzzle its cool effect, creating the appearance of a much higher resolution than the 15x20 "pixels" everyone else is referring to.

You can't make a (easily) recognizable Mona Lisa in 15x20 pixels. You can in 15x20 cosine gradients.

I was attacked by a UFO once.

Then I identified the flying object. It was a stuffed animal thrown by my brother.

You don't seem to understand how Beacon worked. This wasn't some kind of cross-publishing of blog posts -- it was covert publishing of transactions you made in online stores!

That said, even if it were only covert cross-publishing of already public information such as blogs: Did it occur to you that perhaps people choose to publish some information under their real name and some under an alias? As a hypothetical, perhaps you would like to keep your posts on a sexual health message board separate from conversations with your boss? Or would you feel "entitled to some sense of privacy"?

Your best bet, if you must play FB games, is to maintain an entirely separate profile just for that purpose, and put nothing personally identifiable on it.
 

Maintaining multiple accounts, regardless of the purpose, is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use.

http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=721

In practice, this probably doesn't matter, as long as you don't spam or start making alts, but it's something that has thus far made me uneasy enough to not make that "work account" lest my primary account get banned.

TFA:

The A5/1 cracking project aims to compress the 128-petabyte A5/1 codebook -- which would require more than 100 000 years of computing by a single PC to crack--to around 2 or 3 terabytes of data, and a computing time of around three months, with the help of about 80 computers.

Any crypto experts want to take a stab at explaining, in lay geek terms, how this is even remotely possible? That's a ~50,000:1 compression ratio.