junklight

I can't help noticing that the natural tendency of the human species is to expand and adapt - that is what we are. I also notice that the various movements that advocate more basic living patterns have never really caught on.

So you are going to have two options:

1) Refuse to do anything about power, let it get more and more expensive until enough people die that you have a solvable problem

2) work on making it cheaper

I am sure the greens would say also:

3) everyone chooses to live a more basic quieter life against our natural instincts. Oh and all those nice rich and powerful people will also be joining in and not just taking advantage

and I will say

good luck with that (oh and if you try to achieve 3 without peoples buy in but rather through legislation you effectively are back to option 1)

it's 1 or 2 - and 1 is going to be f@#king awful so let's get working on cheap power

First one is along the lines of a tower defence but instead of attackers you have a crowd wanting to protest. The 'people' are quite good sim's in that they should behave according to research - lots of people crammed in are more violent than a widely spaced crowd. You, the player, will get different scenarios - protecting a visiting dignitary, policing a conference centre, a town square etc. etc. an obviously your level ups will be increasingly heavy duty riot control equipment: vans, water hoses, helicopters etc.

Second one was a sandbox type game like minecraft or dwarf fortress with the addition of seriously mega threats. For example a dragon living in an area that cannot be defeated without either building and planning serious defences (over a period of days or weeks) or massive co-operation. Games are either too formulaic or immediate - but there are lots of people prepared to work on long term construction projects in these kind of games, would be interesting to tap into that.

I still think execution is 90% of the battle with an idea and I am going to have a crack at both of these given half a chance. Don't think either of them are million sellers but far too many games are clones of one another and it's good to introduce new concepts

There is a certain amount of political capital in shouting loudly about thinking of the children, and the evils of the net. However, if Iran can't even turn it off because they rely on it for commerce and other key functions, How much worse would a lack of net hit the west?

Like the war on drugs the arising war on the net, driven in part by the death throws of big media, will be a lot more bluster, grandiose talk and rather lucrative funding of projects than effective action.

(you notice I've ignored spying. I reckon Google know more about me than the government does. My generation will flap about going "ooh ooh the privacy!". My children will grow in a world that has never been different and will find ways to adapt)

why aren't senators demanding the cell companies be explicit about what happens to data (who have the exact same information as iphones have for everyone on their servers already)

How do we know that Google doesn't already buy this information from Visa or from loyalty card schemes?

Personally I am less worried about google having this information because they explicitly use it to advertise at me. All the other organisations collecting my information - and lets be clear I use a cell phone and pay for things with cards so there is very little I do that is not known by someone somewhere - I am not at all clear where it goes.

If politicians and activists are demanding action - it should not be against any single company it should be that all companies have clear privacy/data usage policies and a lot of transparency (and no the idiots at the EU: I don't want to click lots of stupid dialog boxes saying that I understand - I'll opt out totally if I don't like it. But I would like to make an informed choice)

see how far you get with any investor if your plan involves changing the law to create more favourable conditions for your profit.

these business models will all eventually die and be replaced by younger people who grew up in this copy and copy alike world and will find new ways of making money but there might be a hell of a lot of collateral damage to the law as they go down.

I have to agree strongly with:

"You have to push yourself to get to work, and do good stuff everyday. Because your family depends on it. You don't settle for mediocrity.

- You get a counter-balance that keeps you in check. Especially when you are successful with doing something fun it is very easy to burn out. "

and

"You raise kids that get an entrepreneurial outlook on life. They think it is natural to have your own company, to be the boss of your own life"

made me smile. My daughter, now 5, was trying to sell me her drawings the other day.

My children are my counterbalance and my drive - there is nothing better than kicking back and talking nonsense with them or getting involved in their stuff. There is nothing more important than making sure they are fed and have a secure future (in which to make their own choices)

I noticed in a recent interview that when Tony Blair was the british PM his wife expected him to get up in the night to feed the baby still.

One of my girlfriends relatives says "if you want something doing ask a busy person." and I reckon that is spot on

One interesting feature I had which you don't is polyrythms http://code.google.com/p/drumscript/source/browse/PolyTest.p... which I found quite interesting. Would be cool to see them included in this.

Apple tend to be quite good at acting in their own interests.

What worries me more is that if I was Amazon I would be aiming to get my kindle app kicked off the store (by doing something that pissed Apple but not my customers off) about the time I launched my shiny new kindle tablet.....

ha ha

More seriously I can't believe anyone thinks this has some currency and its particularly depressing to see it on HN

The reason being is that we as a company need to know which bits are hard, which bits need fixing.

Quietly getting on with it doesn't scale.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2508174

Android may have lots of share but all the companies working on it are working on slim margins and don't have big resources to put into it. Amazon on the other hand have a big stake in the content too and can do a much better job IMO.

Will we finally get to see a decent competitor to the ipad?

(and for those people who want a pad that's actually a netbook - you aren't the market and you don't want a pad either!. And no this won't be the 'ipad killer' because lets face it the concept of the X Killer is total rubbish - show me a market place where there is room for a single product and any other product will either take the whole market or non at all)

This has been bothering me for a bit in the "android takes the market share" reporting. It totally misses the point that Apple makes a ton of money off it's bit of the market but the android segment is full of lots of companies making low margins and not really doing that well.

Amazon is, on paper, brilliantly situated to do something really good in this space (including a fork of Android of their own perhaps - no idea if the licensing would allow that)

If they build a space ship, something that they are also "1 step" away from doing they can eat Virgins lunch too!

I can wipe my phone data, I know if someone has gotten a warrant to see it.

and lets face it if you use a phone and a credit card your broad movements (which is all you can tell from this data) can be worked out anyway. If you don't want someone to know your location then this is small potatoes in the ways you are going to need to change your behaviour

Logic would suggest that the positives of an early, not ready, release - say 100k sales would be totally outweighed by the negative: popular opinion saying "tablet X is rubbish" (no matter how much it improves the initial impression is the story that the media and popular opinion will stick with)

Why didn't they work on it for another 6 months and then release it because it sounds like it will be pretty nice when its finished.

Still - given Honeycomb is being touted as the "ipad killer", and ignoring the silliness of that concept, it is surprising that developers aren't seeing the xoom as a good way of getting ready for the flood of honeycomb devices that is apparently coming. It's hard to work out from the various trolling headlines about how iOs or Android has "won" something or other - but doesn't Android have quite a healthy developer base? are they making money?

+100 for a spot on idea.

(and no it's not just dropbox for photos - it should find and deduplicate and centralise them. Plus it should be able to read the libraries of all of the major photo organisation apps - iphoto and all the others)

My children inherit my old iphones (no sims) and I'm going to set them up - will be interesting to see the photostreams from round my house and the places we go... (and if you are wondering I'm from the Bill Joy school of privacy - there isn't any and I learn to live with it)

I can see it being quite cool for meeting people too - if you are in a space and someone else is making pictures there.

I can also see the potential for hidden artworks/performance

I hope it does take off - it's a new kind of thing and really does have the power to transform our physical spaces

looks at this succinct post that gets right to the point

learns a lesson

Someone who clearly wants a laptop and not an ipad?

For me it hasn't replaced my laptop - I moved to an 11" air for that. The ipad replaces all the other stuff that filled my office and my bags when traveling: a great big stack of books for pleasure, work and reference. It freed me from my desk for all that 'catch up' reading to keep on top of the things I need to know about. It provides some good casual games (I barely have time to become good at anything so "toys" are more what I am after). Its got some cool stuff to play with with my children. It has some great synths (most of my actual synths are now in storage pending sale). I do some work on it - writing presentations , ssh etc. It turns out that watching videos in bed in hotel rooms is use case i would never have imagined. it's great for showing other people my pictures and videos. It's a constantly present reference source: wikipedia and IMDb and a dictionary etc etc etc,

It's not a laptop it's an other thing.

Looking at the gnome 3 design can't help wondering if someone shouldn't be thinking of putting it on a tablet eventually (or rather working on a tablet directed branch) - might meet the "open" needs of hackers more than android.

If your round and the 500k are very close together the investors for the 500k may expect your terms to be the same as theirs.

also with the best will in the world their plan is just a plan and it won't pan out like that (speaking from very similar experience). Moving to SF is hard and expensive unless they already have visas or are US citizens, raising 500k is hit and miss (especially in the UK) and their hiring plans will take longer than they want.

Also from personal experience (on the other side of the coin ) I would suggest that you will mitigate your risk much better by finding someone else to come in with you now for say 60k which will keep them going much longer than the 4 months you will be buying them - because unless the 500k round is well advanced already 4 months is just long enough to make them desperate when negotiation time comes for the bigger round.

I can just pass things over to my colleagues by shoving them in a folder. For project documentation where ever I am I have the latest copies.

Access via my phone means I can usually pick up things I have forgotten easily as well.

I do have almost all the rest of my data in the cloud - but for stuff that is local Dropbox is the next best thing

does it support H.264? if not then play with flash.

which is easy.

Especially compared to - re-encode all my stuff and change complex encoding workflows.

The average user isn't even going to be able to tell the difference.

BTW Dear Authors, I appreciate that your site context means that "book.pdf" is meaningful on your site but when I download it.....

Phil Plaits debunking of it is much more entertaining though:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/12/27/gi...

(update: I see the pravda version has lots of extra stuff added like the HAARP bit. Would be interesting to track this story through the nutter sites to see if its just chinese whispers or if people are just manufacturing detail to make it sound more exciting)