I like the idea in principle. I do think it's really useful to customize a few specific parts - one person might want a high-performance (and large, and expensive)) camera module both front anb back; another prefers just a minimal camera and gets a larger battery instead; a third has a job where cameras are banned and opts to get none at all. A fingerprint reader, a headphone jack, or an SD card slot are other options people may want to add or skip.

But I do not think upgradeable phones are meaningful. After 2-3 years with a phone, it's pretty beat up. Screen is scratched and dimming, the case is scuffed and creaky, buttons don't quite work, connectors are getting glitchy, the battery is dying and both CPU and memory are getting old. I'd want to upgrade all of it - I want a new phone, not throw money at the old one.

Your servers are already pwned.

Become the sole developer for Blackberry app!

How expensive it really is? or how much they've decided each procedure can net?

The list of charges if you pay cash-in-advance on the wall at the Los Angeles County clinic in Lancaster CA. The most expensive item is:

Any surgery: $400.

Yep, four hundred dollars. Someone else the counter asked the desk nurse how they could do surgery for that price, and she said that's what it actually costs the clinic, and that pay-later get billed at a rate 3x higher, to make up for the large number of deadbeats and the difficulty collecting at all.

"Blade Runner" one of the very few instances were the movie is better than the book it's based on, but it still owes a lot to the book.

Google "slit scan". It was an amazing process used to create the Stargate sequence, especially amazing because of the crazy amounts of manual work it took. Another iconic example of slit scan filming is the old opening sequence for "Doctor Who".

This forensic reconstruction of the original gels used in "2001" is a fascinating bit of movie archaeology: http://seriss.com/people/erco/...

I'm not one of these purists who thinks only practical effects are good, but "Blade Runner" is one of those movies that shows you don't need CGI to make a visually stunning movie. The only good CGI is CGI that doesn't look like CGI, or when you say, "I only know this is CGI because that can't be done in real life."

I just remembered that "District 9" was a good recent SF movie, and I thought the effects in that movie were excellent. Just enough to make it believable, not enough to look like you're watching someone playing a video game.

Yeah, I think the terms are used interchangeably these days.

There was, for all intents and purposes, no CGI in 1981. Computer effects at the time of Blade Runner were negligible and amounted mostly to wireframe 3D in computer displays. I mean "Tron" was was watershed of computer effects, and 95% its effects were hand-drawn animation and a crazy amount of compositing. It was an amazing triumph of visual effects, but it owes much more to the ground-breaking art direction than to the actual use of computers.

It's a shame the same can't be said of the sequel, which minus a couple of short scenes had absolutely nothing of interest to look at. OK, Olivia Wilde and absolutely nothing of interest to look at. In my house, we joke that the Futurama spoof of "Tron: Legacy" had better effects than the movie, and we're only half joking. It seems Big Hollywood has reached the limit of what can be done with CGI, not the limit of what can actually be done, but what their narrow tunnel vision and arrested creativity can provide.

I'm glad the men in charge of ending the world have such unflinching ethical standards.

Just use the Google public DNS. Also, Windows 7 can have intermittent DNS issues like that when waking up from hibernation. It can ping fine by IP, just not domain name. So if the problem keeps happening after you switch to Google, that's probably why. From poking around on the Internet, Microsoft's answer to that seems to be "Try another network card." Mine is, "The problem doesn't happen with Linux."

Considering that wild mice who live in proximity to humans markedly prefer to eat stuff humans have touched ... I imagine you'd have to find wilderness mice to study!

Zoo primates could be 'contaminated' as well.

Looks like some future researcher is in for a long tramp through the back of beyond. :)

I hadn't thought of it in those terms, but... yeah. Until the people who want to live their lives without having to worry about exploding on a daily basis stand up and fuck some assholes, the situation is going to remain the same in that area of the world.

I very rarely run into ads that are aggressive enough to get through AdBlock.

Since you posted anonymously, it is sufficient to declare that almost everything you are stating is false.

If you consider this a disproportionate response, consider two things. First, one side is deliberately targeting civilians. The other side does everything it can to use its own civilians as shields. The fact that there is any debate about this after 70 years of this nonsense goes to show how effective it is to callously sacrifice the lives of your own people for the purposes of propaganda.

If no rockets had been launched in the first place then those 1000 Palestinians would still be alive. Period.