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Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 463

In the end, the developer gets paid exactly once for each player playing - so its not really a money grab, but which players pay for whose subscription exactly is a bit muddied by the economics of the tokens.

That isn't exactly true because EvE players usually have multiple accounts with various alts. At any given time a player might only have some of their alts active. When the market gets flooded with PLEX from other players rebuilding Titans, the free2play guys cash in and act like a sink for all the PLEX. Also you can train secondary characters simultaneously now if you spend a PLEX to activate that feature for a month.

So the amount of PLEX consumed in a month can indeed be more than the amount of subscribers, not to mention hoarders and ones that get destroyed.

Comment Casio fx-115ES Plus (Score 2) 328

I like calculators and picked one of these up for a spare. For a non-graphing, non-programmable, scientific calculator, it is pretty good. Input and output display are independent so you can use natural input and have decimal output. It is easy to use overall. Mine has no persistent state so if it times out and turns off it comes back cleared. These are neat calculators and very inexpensive.

Comment E-Cigs are great! Much better than smoking. (Score 1) 314

Aside from the fact that you never run out as long as you have a big bottle of juice and a couple charged batteries, you aren't inhaling thousands of carcinogenic combustion products with every puff.

The constituents of the juice are glycerine, propylene glycol (not the same as antifreeze), nicotine, and flavoring. The only unknowns really come from the flavoring but you can readily read their ingredients. E-cig flavorings are typically non-oil-based food grade flavors.

If you smoke, I encourage you to try this. Just get a disposable if you want to see what its like without investing a lot. Also, if you do decide to get a real setup, don't get one that looks like a cigarette, they are obsolete, get a bigger model with a larger or replaceable battery.

Comment Multi Emulator Super System ZX 80 (Score 1) 196

Old ZX 80 hardware is expensive and rare from what I have seen. You can use the MESS Sinclair ZX 80 target to relive those 8-bit days of yore without the fear of electrical or mechanical breakdowns associated with running on the actual hardware. A lot of early microcomputer equipment often had power supply or other problems which means that even if you can get your hands on the real hardware now, and it works, it may not run for long before things start breaking. I do not have any old ZX 80's and don't have a ROM so I'm not sure of the exact legality were I to acquire one from say Mega Upload or such, but I almost suspect that they might be drifting close to the abandonware status in some areas at least.

There are quite a lot of neat old systems that MESS can emulate. I've been trying to get NitrOS-9 working with a Motorola 6309 myself.

Patents

Submission + - No one expects the Apple inquisition (wordpress.com)

dell623 writes: "Apple's recent lawsuits against Samsung and HTC are based on patents that are considered trivial and obvious by most people with a working knowledge of software. Apple are not the only company using such patents, but they are doing it blatantly, publicly and dishonestly, and sadly, unlike common patent trolls, they have a unique history of innovation. Such lawsuits can have far reaching consequences. If such patent wars had happened in the last 30-40 years personal computing devices and the internet wouldn't exist as they do today, and similarly, these patent wars threaten to bring about a technological dark age of stagnation or decline, smothering a technological revolution that is still young. We have had an incredible, transformational period of around four decades where powerful computers started off powering expensive military systems and ended up as minuscule devices in our hands that can talk to each other across the world, and we have only begun to explain the possibilities this brings us. These patent wars threaten to brutally strangle a still young revolution that has possibilities we can only begin to imagine."

Comment Imaginary Mass! (Score 1) 412

Wow that's quite a concept. To me that idea smacks of some unknown type of energy which has the potential of being converted into regular mass. However, it would seem to me complex mass would be impossible because as the particle's mass oscillated between the real and complex states its speed would likewise be respectively slower and then faster than c. Heh, imagine the shock waves from something breaking the light barrier a couple billion times per second, and the energy dumped into entropy. I don't think a particle with complex mass would make it very far. More like a one way ride...

Pure imaginary mass (the tachyon) is pretty neat to think about though. What kind of state could mass be in its "potential" form? The old E=mc^2 certainly implies that you can convert energy into mass, but I'm not aware of anybody who has created mass out of pure energy yet.

Comment Re:Has Everyone Already Forgotten About the Netwin (Score 1) 332

I still have a Netwinder. I spent quite a bit of effort porting the system to Gentoo ARM softfloat, although at the end of the day, it really hasn't aged well. The 275MHz ARMv4l seems a bit pokey now but it can run a bare-bones xorg system with a lightweight window manager. Prior to my porting effort, you had to use hard-float glibc which would trigger an interrupt and the kernel fpu emulator would handle the call. I submitted some patches upstream vs gcc but I have no idea if anybody ever did anything with them, for all I know I have the only softfloat-linux Netwinder in existence.

Government

New FBI Operations Manual Increases Surveillance 189

betterunixthanunix writes "The New York Times is reporting that the new FBI operations manual suggests a broad increase in surveillance. Denoted the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, the manual officially lowers the bar of acceptability when it comes to engaging in surveillance activities, including allowing agents to perform such surveillance on people who are not suspected terrorists without opening an inquiry or officially recording their actions. The new manual also relaxes rules on administering lie detector tests, searching through a person's trash, and the use of teams to follow targeted individuals. It should be noted that these guidelines still fall within the general limits put in place by the attorney general."
Hardware

'Universal' Memory Aims To Replace Flash/DRAM 125

siliconbits writes "A single 'universal' memory technology that combines the speed of DRAM with the non-volatility and density of flash memory was recently invented at North Carolina State University, according to researchers. The new memory technology, which uses a double floating-gate field-effect-transistor, should enable computers to power down memories not currently being accessed, drastically cutting the energy consumed by computers of all types, from mobile and desktop computers to server farms and data centers, the researchers say."

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