Comment Re:What is true value? (Score 1) 289
2 bucks for half an hour of entertainment? The average movie costs more to see, and the value of the entertainment is highly debatable.
Comment Re:Market share (Score 1) 289
Yes, that's basically the appeal. An appeal that only applies to geeks and like minded people, but that's basically the appeal. It's not "mainstream". It's not sleek, not trendy, not fancy or stylish, that's not the angle. If you want to make it stylish and trendy, market it under the aspect of ever increasing vendor lock-in and telcos that want to fetter you with endless contracts, and that this is the last bastion of freedom in telcoland. The amount of people who feel more and more under surveillance is increasing, and maybe a suitable market angle would be to sell the Android as the way to display that you don't want to be part of the surveillance crowd.
Before you answer, yes, I know it's simply marketing and has no real meaning. It's what style and fancyness is for the iPhone: A sales pitch.
Comment Re:God forbid (Score 1) 160
The problem with that line of reasoning is that when your main deterrent is a threat, that threat must never waver. If an enemy doubts your ability to carry out a threat, then the threat loses all credibility. Right now no country is willing to chance it, but if those warheads are just left to sit, then... eventually someone will take the gambit.
Comment Re:Cheaper = Worse? (Score 2) 264
Well, the placebo effect works without any drugs at all. Might as well package M&Ms as painkillers. Anyone who realises that the generic an the name brand are identical will have the same effect for either.
Comment Re:Seems pretty straight forward in the TOS (Score 1) 453
Seems pretty straight forward.
Comment Re:Still behind id (Score 1) 217
So Doom IV will be released December 2099 and Doom V will be released right before Duke Nukem Forever. Big deal.
There, fixed that for you.
Submission + - Sperm-Creation Paper Retracted for Plagiarism
Hugh Pickens writes: "Nature reports that a paper reporting the creation of sperm-like cells from human embryonic stem cells has been retracted by the editor of the journal Stem Cells and Development. The journal's editor-in-chief Graham Parker says he took the radical step because two paragraphs in the introduction of the paper had been plagiarized from a 2007 review published in another journal. The retraction has surprised even critics of the paper, who had complained that the work had been over-hyped. "If there is nothing else behind this, it seems a little harsh," says Harry Moore, co-director of the Centre for Stem Cell Biology at the University of Sheffield, UK. The article reported that sperm precursor cells could be derived from human embryonic stem cells in vitro. These derived cells were able to divide and generate cells with just one set of chromosomes, characteristic of sperm. Although the text of the article modestly refers to these as "sperm-like cells" with "tail-like structures", its title, and the press release which accompanied its publication, refer baldly to human sperm. "That raised hackles," says Moore. "With that claim the authors opened themselves to criticism, some of it unfair, because the paper did not in fact show that sperm had been derived." Experts said Parker was right to retract the paper. "This is clearly scientific misconduct," said Allan Pacey, secretary for the British Fertility Society. "I can understand why people might think, if they were sloppy here, maybe they were sloppy elsewhere.""
Comment Re:How much (Score 5, Informative) 436
From TFA, Tennessee has a shorter wait time than most states: 48 days, instead of 306 nationally. That would be my guess as to why Tennessee.
Comment Re:AM radio! (Score 1) 635
Then just transmit the derivative of your signal with an FM transmitter.
The result will be a phase modulated radio signal.
Submission + - Ultra-Efficient Organic LEDs (technologyreview.com)
pdragon04 writes: "An organic light-emitting diode (OLED) developed in Germany has the potential to produce the same quality of white light as incandescent bulbs but with power efficiencies considerably better than even fluorescent lighting ... with both fluorescent and LED lighting, the quality of white light produced has always left something to be desired ... In contrast, OLEDs can be made from a wide range of materials, so achieving good-quality white light is less challenging, says Reineke. It has not been the quality of light that has let OLEDs down but rather their efficiencies. "
Submission + - Sony PS3 Unit Sales Flat Lining and Trending Down (bnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The latest numbers from Sony show not only that the company's game division is losing money, but that the trend for PS3 unit sales is flattening and actually turning down through the rest of this year. Sony still loses money on every unit, and software sales aren't enough to push the division into profitability, as Sony projects another loss in games through the coming fiscal year that ends in March 2010. That raises the question of how long Sony can afford to stay in the game console business.
Submission + - Shuttle and Hubble passing in front of the Sun
GvG writes: "An incredible photo clearly showing the silhouette of Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope as they passed in front of the Sun was taken Wednesday, May 13, 2009, from west of Vero Beach, Florida. The two spaceships were at an altitude of 600 km and they zipped across the sun in only 0.8 seconds."
Comment Re:Mosaic (Score 1) 367
Actually, you would probably find Mosaic fairly slow these days, on the pages that would render acceptably. Mosaic had a poor threading model for the type of pages that you see today.
Submission + - Successful Launch of ESA's Herschel and Planck
rgarbacz writes: "Today at 13:12 GMT ESA launched successfully new and long awaiting spacecrafts: Herschel — the 3.5m mirror infrared telescope, and Planck — the CMB mapper. The spacecrafts were carried by Arian 5, which lifted off from Kourou in French Guiana. They will stay in L2 to perform the research. Herschel and Planck are one of the most expensive and important missions of the European Space Agency. They were built to perform measurements with an outstanding quality. Planck will measure CMB with accuracy below 1%, over 10 times better than the previous such mission (WMAP). Because of this high sensitivity both spacecrafts are cooled to temperatures close to the absolute zero by on board liquid helium, and staying in L2 is very helpful to maintain this state. Both spacecrafts are designed to observe the Universe at its infancy, Herschel — the first stars (those real ones), and galaxies (whichever came first), Planck — the first photons which were set free, the so called cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB).
This is a correction to my previous submission — please remove this line."
This is a correction to my previous submission — please remove this line."
Submission + - AMD Breaks 1GHz GPU Barrier With Radeon HD 4890 (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: "AMD announced today that they can lay claim to the
world's first 1GHz graphics processor with their ATI Radeon HD 4890 GPU. There's been no formal announcement made about what partners will be selling the 1GHz variant, but AMD does note that Asus, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GECUBE,
Gigabyte, HIS, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE, XFX and others are all aligning to release higher performance cards. The new
ATI Radeo HD 4890 utilizes advanced GDDR5 memory and a 1GHz core clock speed to deliver 1.6 TeraFLOPs of compute power."
