Would you say the awkward attempt was... awkward?

They had sufficient passengers to make operation viable until all the airlines were squeezed post-9/11.

It was that coupled with the increasing costs of maintaining the aging Concorde fleet that doomed them.

I believe there is plenty of demand for faster air travel. My brother lives in Dallas, I live in Scotland, and the thing I hate most about visiting him (insert Texas joke here) is the 10-11 hour flight between Heathrow and DFW.

If I could pay a bit more and shave several hours off that time, I would do it in a heartbeat.

...exist.

So Samsung finally release a phone that hits all the marks, that reviewers and consumers go crazy for, that actually has decent software on it.

So OBVIOUSLY to maintain this level of success they should go and fork Android and create a crappy customized version that nobody wants... yeah, that makes PERFECT sense.

I think Samsung (and TFA's author) are seriously overestimating the appeal of Samsung's own apps. I've got an S3 (the first smartphone I've owned, because it's the first one I've ever really wanted) and the Samsung apps and features are just bloatware:

• AllShare Play seems to be a cloud storage service for media files, with the curious limitation that it can only be used on the S3 and Windows computers. So in other words, it sucks. Dropbox or a similar service would seem to be a far better option.
• ChatOn is one of the stronger apps that Samsung bundle with the S3. It's a chat/messaging service that works cross-platform (it's available for Android, iOS, Blackberry and Windows Phone) and it's actually not too bad at what it does. Still, there are lots of other communications apps out there, so it's not exactly a killer app.
• S Memo is a simple note/sketch app with sync capabilities. It can sync up nicely with...
• S Planner is a decent calendar app, and it can import/export and sync with most calendar sources (Exchange, Google, Samsung account, etc.). It's not too bad. Shame the default (perhaps only?) skin is a brown/beige colour scheme that really doesn't fit with the rest of the phone. Again, there are LOADS of good calendar/task planning apps out there.
• S Suggest is like a social frontend to an app store. It integrates with Facebook (though I haven't tried that feature) and lets you see what apps your friends download and recommends new apps based on your preferences. I looked at a bunch of featured apps, and none of them had any comments whatsoever, so perhaps without FB integration enabled it's useless. I wouldn't go near this app, tbh.
• I haven't used S Voice. It certainly looks like a ghetto Siri, but I don't know how functional it is. Personally, I think Siri on iOS is a gimmick, which would make this a knock-off of a gimmick. I have no desire to use it.

What I actually love about the S3 is that it runs ICS like a dream, has a nice large, bright, vibrant screen, lots of connectivity options and a reasonable battery life. That, and the best content of the Google Play store are what attracted me, not Samsung's own apps which range in quality from "ok" to "why even bother?".

Kimble, aka Kim Dotcom is a total asshat.

He is a narcissistic fantasist, and nothing would give me more pleasure than seeing him in prison.

I remember him from back in the Quake days, when he used to hang out in the #quake.uk IRC channel and talk about how awesome he was.

He sucked at Quake tho, and spent far more time on IRC boasting about his lifestyle, being a "security expert" and claiming he could basically hack anything. He was insufferable, and I'm sure he hasn't changed.

There was a particularly good photo of him standing in his office back in 1997, surrounded by computer monitors. An enterprising photoshopper wasted no time in replacing the contents of the monitors with swastikas. Kimble didn't care, he just liked attention. Sadly, it seems this image has been lost in the mists of time.

I'm all for copyright reform, but the Megaupload case is not the way to fight for it. Kimble needs to go. The guy is a total douche.

Obvious troll is obvious.

Then again, I'm reading Slashdot at work, so you're "potentially" correct.

If they're "currently dead", am I supposed to infer that at some point we'll be able to resurrect them?

Are "currently alive" inventors working on this problem?

In fact most modern console games don't even run at 720p internally.

Games on both 360 and PS3 are rendered at lower resolutions internally and upscaled to 720p/1080p/whatever for display.

Halo 3 was the first 360 game (that I know of) to render below 720p (just 1152x640 before upscaling).

Microsoft has since relaxed its requirements for developers, so they're free to render at even lower resolutions now.

CoD: Black Ops ran at 1040x600 on the 360 and just 960x544 on the PS3. MW3 then brought the consoles back into parity, with both rendering at 1040x600.

Also, 1080p isn't the "highest possible resolution". 4K displays are coming... maybe not on the next gen of consoles, but perhaps the one after that.

I'm all for protecting our civil liberties, but I'm perfectly fine bending over and letting the government cram its fat bureaucratic cock up my ass anytime it pleases.

FTFY

Surely, once you'd figured out that the C64 had vastly superior sound and graphics capabilities (that, admittedly, weren't exposed through Commodore's shitty, ancient on-board BASIC) you were less disappointed?

I mean, consider the Spectrum's shitty single channel "beeper" vs. the magnificence of the SID chip.... or the Spectrum's solution to squeezing full colour screens into as small a memory area as possible, leading to the Spectrum's famous (and much-derided) attribute clash. Don't even get me started on the Spectrum's so-called keyboard.

The boy in the store steered you in the right direction. The C64 was a bit more expensive, but the hardware inside was well worth the extra money.

All of which isn't to say that the Spectrum sucked; it didn't. Considering the year, the price and the target market, it was a decent machine.. but the C64 was better, in almost every measurable way.

...the teens of today I doubt will get a love of tinkering and tweaking that we got from our little guys.

I'm pretty sure teens will always have a love of tinkering and tweaking their "little guys".

The VIC chip (as opposed to the VIC-II in the C64) was far less flexible and capable. Also, the SID chip far exceeded the abilities of the sound synthesis capabilities of the VIC.

It's fair to say that both machines had a similar heritage, and similar design philosophy, but to say that the C64 is just a Vic-20 with a memory expansion isn't fair to the engineers and designers at Commodore. The VIC-II and the SID were a substantial leap forward, while maintaining the price-point that made the C64 so popular.

The C64 was my 2nd computer (first was an Acorn Electron) and it's still my favourite computer of all time.

I still have a C128 with several disk drives, cartridges and other peripherals. I've even got a couple of flashable carts and an SD-card based reader with an ethernet port, so I guess I'd be classed as a Commodore enthusiast :P

Commodore were amazing. They should have remained on top, but a confluence of a factors drove them from the market.

I strongly recommend this book for anyone with fond memories of Commodore machines.

...it seems the tone of religious arguments on Slashdot shifts dramatically as the US wakes up.

Really, the vast majority of fervent Christians start popping out of the woodwork here as morning rolls around in the Land of the Free.