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Comment Re:What is the ARM bringing? (Score 1) 230

For £300 I got an Atom-based netbook with an 80GB SSD, 4GB RAM, slightly smaller screen and 9 hour battery life. It can run Chrome, and a lot of other things. What's the ARM bringing to the Chromebook, if it can't give far better battery life?

£300 GBP are $482.
That's what ARM is bringing.
BTW where do you get a netbook with an 80 GB SSD?

Comment Re:No good news in that (Score 1) 350

They could go Android, sure, but Android phones are almost commodity phones, where the handset manufacturer isn't adding enough value to make them differentiators. That means as a customer, I could pick up an LG or HTC or Motorola or Samsung and get a pretty similar phone. And that means they all compete on price. That puts the Nokia phones up against the manufacturing might of China, which means that margins would start out razor thin and fade quickly to non-existent.

Well, that strategy worked for Samsung, so why shouldn't it work for Nokia, given that, at the time, Nokia had a better position than Samsung?

Comment Re:Great (Score 2) 291

In Portugal, locked phones are the norm, but according to a recent law (which i believe is an EU directive), the carriers must unlock the phone when the contract ends, free of charge. Furthermore, during the period of the contract the customer can request the unlock for a reasonable fee (which last time i looked was indeed reasonable).

I believe this is a fair state of affairs, as the phone are effectivly subsidized.

Comment Re:How long until... (Score 1) 185

As an example, this sentence in Portuguese: "Vamos evitar o uso de papel, gastar papel implica em gastar Ãrvores"

This sentence isn't correct Portuguese. It simply doesn't make sense in Portuguese. Maybe it makes sense in Brazilian Portuguese, but not in Portuguese.
So, i wouldn't expect Google Translate to get it right. But actually, translating it into:

"We avoid the use of paper, wasting paper implies spending trees"

is a better translation (of incorrect) Portuguese than:

"We avoid the use of paper, spending paper implies spending trees"

"Gastar" in the given context is better translated to "wasting" than "spending". At least in Portuguese.

Security

Submission + - Phone Hacking: Android and iPhone under threat (itjoblog.co.uk)

itjoblog writes: After several years of paranoid news articles, it seems as though the age of mobile phone hacking might finally be upon us.

As smartphones took off, anti-malware companies spent the last few years warning about the potential of smart phone Trojans and viruses. Some of them have even released products designed to protect these endpoints, but aside from a few proof of concept binaries, little seems to have happened...

Comment Amazon kicked wikileaks because of DDoS (Score 1) 392

Wasn't one of the reasons Amazon used to kick wikileaks the fact that they were getting DDoSed? And that it hurted their business?

So a DDoS directed at a site in EC2 is disruptive enough to kick them out, but a massive DDoS directed at Amazon is nothing special.

I think Anonymous at least proved that the real reason Amazon kicked wikileaks had nothing to do with DDoS.
Education

Monkeys Exhibit the Same Economic Irrationality As Us 254

grrlscientist writes "Laurie Santos is trying to find the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primates make decisions. This video documents a clever series of experiments in 'monkeynomics' and shows that some of the stupid decisions we make are made by our primate relatives too."

Comment Re:So Many Questions (Score 1) 303

I don't see how adding another dimension can magically allow two objects to become linked when they were unable to be linked in a lower dimension. Two circles on a piece of paper cannot physically merge with each other if you assume their boundaries are solid and cannot pass through each other.

You're right, they can't. But the video shows 2 rings in 3d. And those rings don't close on one of the dimensions.

In 2d, a circle is closed, spanning the 2 dimensions. In 3d, a ring is closed in 2 dimensions, but isn't "closed" in the other, so you can use the 4th dimension to link 2 rings.

So, to get an example similar to the video in 2d you might think of 2 (infinite) lines that you have to move past each other. Adding a 3rd dimension makes this trivial.

On the other hand, a circle in 2d is a sphere in 3d, so trying to link 2 circles in 2d is equivalent to trying to link 2 spheres in 3d, which isn't what the video shows.

PS. My manifold knowledge is very rusty, so what i'm saying might be totally wrong. It makes sense to me though.

Comment Re:More articles like this please (Score 1) 551

If the Fed engages in "open market operations" and buys newly issued T-Bills directly from the US Treasury then it absolutely does create new money. The Fed buys the IOUs from the US Treasury, writes the balance into the accounts of the Federal Government (the Federal Reserve keeps the accounts of the United States Government) and poof new money is created (an increased account balance in an electronic database).

The Fed doesn't buy T-Bills directly from the US Treasury. That's a deadly sin in monetary economics. That would be monetising debt, which any Central Bank is (explicitly or implicitly) forbidden.
What the Fed actually does is buy (junk?) assets from banks, who in turn, buy T-Bills from the US Treasury.
If you can't spot the difference you don't know how finance and politics work :)

Comment Re:personally (Score 1) 1721

The international community is in love with BO because of his constant apologies for how evil the USA was in the last decade and his meekness now. Personally, as an American citizen, I could give a rats fuck what the international community thinks about us. The sad thing is before his 1st term is over, we will be hardly distinguishable from most of the European countries in terms of economics and social and political policy.

Actually, i think you're hoping a bit too much :)

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