Author: Deano

There's been progress, but there's a long way to go.

It is possible to get a smoke-free hotel room/suite pretty easily, but unless you know your hotel tower was built within the last 5 years, it's likely that even the smoke-free rooms will have been retrofitted/renovated, and the most sensitive noses will still twinge a bit. Look for the newer towers at established greats like the Venetian's Palazzo towers.

Since passage of a clean air act in 2006, Vegas has been slowly coming into line – you cannot smoke indoors at the airport anymore, and any bar that serves food, and all restaurants, needs to be smoke-free. The show rooms and theaters are also smoke free (though there may be exceptions here).

The casinos, as far as I can tell, all still allow smoking, from wispy anorexic Capri slims, to fat Cuban stogies (shhh!). I cannot recall ever seeing a pipe smoker, if that's any consolation?

Your best bet for 100% smoke free is a hotel just-off-strip that doesn't have its own Casino.

Personally, I think a single on-Strip hotel going 100% smoke free would be a HUGE selling point and differentiator (kinda like universal free wifi)… But thus far, pretty much no one who owns or operates such establishments seems to agree with me, and it's more likely we'll just see a more natural transition to smoke free as the older generation of visitors dies off from a variety of nicotine-related illnesses.

How smoky is Las Vegas?

Be very certain of your rationale for declaring this kind of thing… If you're just going off IP addresses, I know more than a few (creepy) married couples who can't get enough of playing Farmville and Mafia Wars together in bed.

Unless what the players are doing upsets some world-level game mechanic, like the amount of currency in the economy, it's just a lot of hassle to police them, and given the likelihood of false positives, can do a lot more marketing/community harm than good.

If your game requires a great deal of fair play, then you'll want to try filtering for what sort of players never cheat the system, then perhaps "shard" the bad players off to their own parallel game world, and set up a system that vets players for the "clean" world somehow. Even that will be gameable… But most other solutions are some level of annoying to the honest players, and should be avoided.

You'd also do well to read up on mmo/facebook game design post-mortems and interviews with the creators of similar games, and see how they dealt with issues like the one you're facing.

What should we do about obvious Facebook users who are exploiting our social game by playing with multiple accounts?

Facebook wants to claim that all relationships on Facebook are bidirectional friendships… In reality, what you're seeing is simply the semi-accidental "follow-only" model that Facebook enables through a chain of circumstance:

• You request friendship
• The recipient ignores or hides your request, instead of refusing/blocking it

Okay, it's a two-link chain, but the third "result" link is that you will then see all their updates, and they will see none of yours.

The idea is, it's a "soft landing rejection" – it's not so bad if you can see my updates (even if you can't comment on them)… Since more FB users are very passive anyway, many of them won't even notice this issue. And if you ever ask me about it, I can say it got lost in the mess, and add you reluctantly later.

Overall, the idea is that it's harder on both of you if you need to face up to the fact that you're not really friends… But it's definitely more of a benefit for the person ignoring you, isn't it? Just another reflection of the wobbly moral-ethical DNA of the company, if you ask me… But honestly, I don't really mind – I have enough people I interact with, and sometimes just knowing someone is alive and posting (and now, reachable via email at username@facebook.com) is enough for me.

Oh yeah, and of course, they're the ones missing out on all my great posts, so who gets the short end of the stick is totally debatable. 😉

A friend request on Facebook is still pending, yet the person is appearing in my News Feed… when she edits her interests, etc. Why is this?

AT&T specifically prohibits iPhone service plans without data.

That said, if you are able to unlock your phone "illegally", then you could just swap SIM cards with a non-iphone, and associate your iphone to a new plan, even prepaid if you like, with no data requirement.

Can iPhones function without a data plan for the sole purpose of placing and receiving phone calls, as well as using some features that don't require internet (i.e., calculator, clock, listening to music)?

You remember how long it took for native SE Asian Android phones to emerge? Not long. It may be best to wait until local Chromebooks are tested in the market… It probably won't be too long, the price point, battery life, and functionality seem to be appealing for a variety of educational and professional uses.

Failing that, the best option will be to buy a USA Chromebook, and then use wifi hotspot/tethering to provide it with network access.

As you surmise, the CDMA data used in the Chromebooks is USA-only (more or less), and limited to the carrier Verizon. It's unlikely that, even if the hardware was upgradeable, that drivers would already exist that could control the modem/carrier combo you have.

Simply put, if you can't wait, try to leverage your cellphone's mobile data.

Will Google Chromebook work in other countries?