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Comment Re:CAFE Kills (Score 1) 1184

by kalbzayn (#41168939) Attached to: White House Finalizes 54.5 MPG Fuel Efficiency Standard
You probably aren't using a good viewing spot to determine how many people use their SUVs to transport more than just the driver. If people were using their SUVs to drop off the kids on the way to school, then I would imagine that when the driver got to their final destination the odds of being the only person in the car would be pretty high. Most teachers/adult students, probably wouldn't actually bringing their kids to the university with them, right? My wife frequently goes to the gym after dropping off the kids at school. A lot of people see her with only one person in the car but that one spot doesn't really show all of the ways the car is getting used.

Comment Easy decision (Score 2) 1025

by kalbzayn (#41109475) Attached to: Study Finds Unvaccinated Students Putting Other Students At Risk
Our son has autism and was about 4 1/2 when his younger sister was born (his twin sister does not). Our doctor congratulated us when we "decided" to vaccinate our youngest daughter because a lot of parents of a child with autism either are not or have to think about it a lot more than they should. It still makes me mad when I see the Jenny McCarthy types making their money promoting their anti-vax books and then I have to spend time explaining to relatives and friends that Jenny McCarthy doesn't have any real knowledge of science and is probably pretty useless source of information about anything except what kinds of bikinis are popular these days.

Comment Macmillan HAS been charging more than $9.99 (Score 1) 437

by kalbzayn (#30996036) Attached to: Amazon Surrenders To Macmillan On eBook Pricing
I thought the publishers had been setting their prices all along and Amazon was buying them at one price and selling them at a cheaper one. Doesn't that mean that Macmillan will make the same amount per ebook since the price Amazon pays isn't changing but that they don't want readers to get used to "only" paying $9.99. http://www.teleread.org/2009/05/13/amazon-losing-money-on-999-e-books/
Role Playing (Games)

Final Fantasy I and II Are Coming To the iPhone and iPod Touch 142

Posted by Soulskill from the go-red-wings dept.
jonasvdc tips an announcement by Square Enix that Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II are being developed for the iPhone and the iPod touch. The graphics and UI have been modified to look and run better on the touchscreen devices, but everything from Cecil to the classic Black Mage is clearly recognizable. The announcement did not include any information on a price or release date.
Image

Own Your Own Fighter Jet 222

Posted by samzenpus from the only-one-on-the-block dept.
gimmebeer writes "The Russian Sukhoi SU-27 has a top speed of Mach 1.8 (more than 1,300 mph) and has a thrust to weight ratio greater than 1 to 1. That means it can accelerate while climbing straight up. It was designed to fight against the best the US had to offer, and now it can be yours for the price of a mediocre used business jet."
Piracy

App Store Piracy Losses Estimated At $459 Million 202

Posted by Soulskill from the arrr-me-hearties dept.
An anonymous reader passes along this quote from a report at 24/7 Wall St.: "There have been over 3 billion downloads since the inception of the App Store. Assuming the proportion of those that are paid apps falls in the middle of the Bernstein estimate, 17% or 510 million of these were paid applications. Based on our review of current information, paid applications have a piracy rate of around 75%. That supports the figure that for every paid download, there have been 3 pirated downloads. That puts the number of pirate downloads at 1.53 billion. If the average price of a paid application is $3, that is $4.59 billion dollars in losses split between Apple and the application developers. That is, of course, assuming that all of those pirates would have made purchases had the application not been available to them for free. This is almost certainly not the case. A fair estimate of the proportion of people who would have used the App Store if they did not use pirated applications is about 10%. This estimate yields about $459 million in lost revenue for Apple and application developers." A response posted at Mashable takes issue with some of the figures, particularly the 75% piracy rate. While such rates have been seen with game apps, it's unclear whether non-game apps suffer the same fate.
Businesses

Former Exec Says Electronic Arts "Is In the Wrong Business" 180

Posted by Soulskill from the inspiring-internet-outrage-is-a-bad-business-model dept.
Mitch Lasky was the executive vice president of Mobile and Online at Electronic Arts until leaving the publisher to work at an investment firm. He now has some harsh things to say about how EA has been run over the past several years, in particular criticizing the decisions of CEO John Riccitiello. Quoting: "EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again. ... by far the greatest failure of Riccitiello's strategy has been the EA Games division. JR bet his tenure on EA's ability to 'grow their way through the transition' to digital/online with hit packaged goods titles. They honestly believed that they had a decade to make this transition (I think it's more like 2-3 years). Since the recurring-revenue sports titles were already 'booked' (i.e., fully accounted for in the Wall Street estimates) it fell to EA Games to make hits that could move the needle. It's been a very ugly scene, indeed. From Spore, to Dead Space, to Mirror's Edge, to Need for Speed: Undercover, it's been one expensive commercial disappointment for EA Games after another. Not to mention the shut-down of Pandemic, half of the justification for EA's $850MM acquisition of Bioware-Pandemic. And don't think that Dante's Inferno, or Knights of the Old Republic, is going to make it all better. It's a bankrupt strategy."
Wii

Wii Hardware Upgrade Won't Happen Soon 325

Posted by Soulskill from the can't-show-ugly-mario-in-hd dept.
As high-definition graphics become more and more entrenched in this generation of game consoles, Nintendo has had to deal with constant speculation about a new version of the Wii that would increase its capabilities. Today, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime bluntly denied that a hardware revision was imminent, saying, "We are confident the Wii home entertainment console has a very long life in front of it." He added, "In terms of what the future holds, we've gone on record to say that the next step for Nintendo in home consoles will not be to simply make it HD, but to add more and more capability, and we'll do that when we've totally tapped out all of the experiences for the existing Wii. And we're nowhere near doing that yet."
Mozilla

Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox 3.6 RC, Nears Final 145

Posted by Soulskill from the onwards-and-upwards dept.
CWmike writes "Mozilla has shipped a release candidate build of Firefox 3.6 that, barring problems, will become the final, finished version of the upgrade. Firefox 3.6 RC1, which followed a run of betas that started in early November, features nearly 100 bug fixes from the fifth beta that Mozilla issued Dec. 17. The fixes resolved numerous crash bugs, including one that brought down the browser when it was steered to Yahoo's front page. Another fix removed a small amount of code owned by Microsoft from Firefox. The code was pointed out by a Mozilla contributor, and after digging, another developer found the original Microsoft license agreement. 'Amusingly enough, it's actually really permissive. Really the only part that's problematic is the agreement to "include the copyright notice ... on your product label and as a part of the sign-on message for your software product,"' wrote Kyle Huey on Mozilla's Bugzilla. Even so, others working on the bug said the code needed to be replaced with Mozilla's own."

Comment Re:The problem with Google searches (Score 1) 82

by kalbzayn (#30678576) Attached to: More On enTourage's Dual-screen E-Book Reader
Our library lets us check out ebooks for free from My Media Mall (http://www.mymediamall.net/) using my library card. I just found out about it the other day and haven't had a chance to try it yet but I know a lot of public libraries have similar arrangements. Call your local librarian and ask them if they have something similar.
Security

Ubuntu Servers Hacked 330

Posted by CmdrTaco from the zomg-alert-the-media dept.
An anonymous reader noted that "Ubuntu had to shutdown 5 of 8 production servers that are sponsored by Canonical, when they started attacking other systems. Canonical blames the community, saying they were community hosted, and were poorly maintained. However, kernel upgrades couldn't be done because of poor backwards compatibility with the very hardware that Canonical had sponsored! While people point fingers at each other it is pretty clear that both sides are equally to blame, the community administrators for practicing bad security practices, such as using unencrypted FTP transfers with accounts, not properly maintaining the system. However Canonical should have been well aware of what they are hosting. The question remains, if any of the files distributed to users have been compromised. A major blow for Canonical though who are attempting to enter the business market with Ubuntu Server."

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