Do the Lenovo-branded laptops really carry with them expectations of reliability in the same ballpark as the Thinkpads? It's not a rhetorical question; I don't know either way, but I've not heard that they do.
More to the general point, cheap and small aren't the major division in laptops. I see five: speed, size, cost, reliability/ruggedness, and battery life. I think that most laptops are going to be judged on the first three: price, size, and speed. At the moment, a laptop can hope to be be entirely successful in two of these three areas, but not all three, or it can be adequate in all three. The consumer then has to decide on his priorities.
For me, it's price and size. That's why my "laptop" is a Nokia 770 with a folding bluetooth keyboard!
I think that this doesn't really have anything to do with the Flores skeleton. TFA says that the bones would appear to be within the species Homo sapiens, and don't have the small brain size of the Flores find. There are oddities beyond the height (small eye sockets, some lack chins), but apparently nothing really out there. From TFA:
The early Palauans' limited diet, combined with a tropical climate, absence of predators, a small founding population, and genetic isolation, may have produced "these very odd features and very small body size," Berger said.
TFA also notes that there were no big animals to exploit on the island, and apparently no fishing until much later. So it really seems like just a regular human population that was small and isolated and changed in odd ways, rather than a distinct species or anything like that.
I like "Coins" in 2033. Do they mean physical money? Because governments would love to ditch paper money, which wears out and needs to be replaced really frequently, with coins. So I assume that the paper money would go earlier, or else they're just saying some random thing for no reason.
I think copyright (2020) would have to go before libraries (2019), because a lot of the point of libraries is getting physical copies of things you can't get electronically because of copyright.
And "Beyond 2050: Uglyness" is absurd, because a lot of the body mods and "improvements" people make tend to increase their ugliness. The more choices some people get, the uglier they get. "Bad taste" will have to go before "Uglyness" will!
Since I started my studies, I spent exactly 0 hours and 0 minutes in the university libraries. I access all the scientific material online, and even the books.
FWIW, your experience is not entirely typical right now, because the sciences are well ahead of the other fields of study in terms of online material. A lot of this is because there is so little use in most sciences for older material (i.e., an paper on Shakespeare from 1950 might still be relevant, a biology study from then almost definitely won't be). So if there are only the last 10 years online that's just great, especially to someone like a medical student who won't (or shouldn't) look at much with a copyright date more than 5 years old. Another factor is that science publishing has become extremely centralized, especially journals. So when Elsevier went online, a huge percentage of medical journals are suddenly electronic. Finally, the article really talks about public libraries, which don't really have the same function as a university library, and certainly don't have the same resources. A university library can pay licensing fees for it's 10-50,000 students and employees; the Chicago Public Library probably has less funding and potentially millions of people who could use it, making licenses much more difficult.
For antique books, sure, libraries will always exist, but even there I'd prefer to see them as conservation points where they are transferred into electronic format(s) made available online. Being an antique book collector myself, I would hate to know that precious antique books are being touched by people who don't wash their hands, or worse.
Ha! I work at an archive cataloging American books published between 1750 and 1920. I wash my hands regularly after handling them, but it's more to get me clean than the books, because 19th century texts, especially if they were bound in leather, just shed crap all over everything. As for storage and transfer, that clearly is the future. A lot of libraries will go from being what are called "dim" archives (with things physically accessible, but closely controlled) to being "dark" archives (things stored offsite, or at least away from patrons and accessible in a matter of days and not minutes), at least for older/rarer/valuable material.
BUT, and this is a big but, librarians will tell you that there is not yet a tried-and-true method for electronic storage. The world is full of old storage media that are basically unreadable. What can we put things on that will still be good in a few hundred years? Or will there be some sort of reliable upgrade method? And are we really going to trust someone like Google to effectively be the repository of the world's knowledge?
Another issue is that of storing physical things. Libraries work right now as basically distributed storage. No library is encyclopedic, but if you can look at all of them (through something like OCLC's WorldCat) then you can find most everything. If, as we assume, the number of libraries storing physical things goes down, then it becomes more likely that the last remaining copies of a lot of texts are going to disappear. We can argue if this is a bad thing or not, but it definitely needs to be considered.
The betta I had as a kid could recognize me. When I opened the lid to his little tank he would come to the surface on the right side, where I would drop food. He wouldn't come when my brother (who never fed him) did the same thing. We were both about the same height, same hair and skin coloring, etc., so that's pretty clever, at least for a fish. Hell, my own father still can't tell us apart. I suppose I should have fed him more often.
Anyway, the point is that fish aren't mindless automatons like everyone thinks. They have a (limited) ability to learn (simple) things.
If the time was reduced to 7-10 years this would surely promote creativity.
The first poem I published was in 1991. At the rate I publish maybe I'll have someone interested in putting out a chapbook by 2012 or so. At that point, under your scheme, my first poem has been out of copyright for 14 years -- before I've had a chance to make a dime on it, outside of the free contributor's copy of a now-extinct literary journal.
Maybe 7-10 years makes sense for pop albums, but for the low end of literary publication, the end where the money isn't and where people have always gotten noticed by publishing dribs and drabs here and there for little or no money at all, it just doesn't work.
As a poet I want what money I can squeeze out of it. Like the paperboy in Better Off Dead, I say: "I want my two dollars!"
Slashdot Mirror
More to the general point, cheap and small aren't the major division in laptops. I see five: speed, size, cost, reliability/ruggedness, and battery life. I think that most laptops are going to be judged on the first three: price, size, and speed. At the moment, a laptop can hope to be be entirely successful in two of these three areas, but not all three, or it can be adequate in all three. The consumer then has to decide on his priorities.
For me, it's price and size. That's why my "laptop" is a Nokia 770 with a folding bluetooth keyboard!
The early Palauans' limited diet, combined with a tropical climate, absence of predators, a small founding population, and genetic isolation, may have produced "these very odd features and very small body size," Berger said.
TFA also notes that there were no big animals to exploit on the island, and apparently no fishing until much later. So it really seems like just a regular human population that was small and isolated and changed in odd ways, rather than a distinct species or anything like that.
I like "Coins" in 2033. Do they mean physical money? Because governments would love to ditch paper money, which wears out and needs to be replaced really frequently, with coins. So I assume that the paper money would go earlier, or else they're just saying some random thing for no reason.
I think copyright (2020) would have to go before libraries (2019), because a lot of the point of libraries is getting physical copies of things you can't get electronically because of copyright.
And "Beyond 2050: Uglyness" is absurd, because a lot of the body mods and "improvements" people make tend to increase their ugliness. The more choices some people get, the uglier they get. "Bad taste" will have to go before "Uglyness" will!
Since I started my studies, I spent exactly 0 hours and 0 minutes in the university libraries. I access all the scientific material online, and even the books.
FWIW, your experience is not entirely typical right now, because the sciences are well ahead of the other fields of study in terms of online material. A lot of this is because there is so little use in most sciences for older material (i.e., an paper on Shakespeare from 1950 might still be relevant, a biology study from then almost definitely won't be). So if there are only the last 10 years online that's just great, especially to someone like a medical student who won't (or shouldn't) look at much with a copyright date more than 5 years old. Another factor is that science publishing has become extremely centralized, especially journals. So when Elsevier went online, a huge percentage of medical journals are suddenly electronic. Finally, the article really talks about public libraries, which don't really have the same function as a university library, and certainly don't have the same resources. A university library can pay licensing fees for it's 10-50,000 students and employees; the Chicago Public Library probably has less funding and potentially millions of people who could use it, making licenses much more difficult.
For antique books, sure, libraries will always exist, but even there I'd prefer to see them as conservation points where they are transferred into electronic format(s) made available online. Being an antique book collector myself, I would hate to know that precious antique books are being touched by people who don't wash their hands, or worse.
Ha! I work at an archive cataloging American books published between 1750 and 1920. I wash my hands regularly after handling them, but it's more to get me clean than the books, because 19th century texts, especially if they were bound in leather, just shed crap all over everything. As for storage and transfer, that clearly is the future. A lot of libraries will go from being what are called "dim" archives (with things physically accessible, but closely controlled) to being "dark" archives (things stored offsite, or at least away from patrons and accessible in a matter of days and not minutes), at least for older/rarer/valuable material.
BUT, and this is a big but, librarians will tell you that there is not yet a tried-and-true method for electronic storage. The world is full of old storage media that are basically unreadable. What can we put things on that will still be good in a few hundred years? Or will there be some sort of reliable upgrade method? And are we really going to trust someone like Google to effectively be the repository of the world's knowledge?
Another issue is that of storing physical things. Libraries work right now as basically distributed storage. No library is encyclopedic, but if you can look at all of them (through something like OCLC's WorldCat) then you can find most everything. If, as we assume, the number of libraries storing physical things goes down, then it becomes more likely that the last remaining copies of a lot of texts are going to disappear. We can argue if this is a bad thing or not, but it definitely needs to be considered.
The betta I had as a kid could recognize me. When I opened the lid to his little tank he would come to the surface on the right side, where I would drop food. He wouldn't come when my brother (who never fed him) did the same thing. We were both about the same height, same hair and skin coloring, etc., so that's pretty clever, at least for a fish. Hell, my own father still can't tell us apart. I suppose I should have fed him more often.
Anyway, the point is that fish aren't mindless automatons like everyone thinks. They have a (limited) ability to learn (simple) things.
If the time was reduced to 7-10 years this would surely promote creativity. The first poem I published was in 1991. At the rate I publish maybe I'll have someone interested in putting out a chapbook by 2012 or so. At that point, under your scheme, my first poem has been out of copyright for 14 years -- before I've had a chance to make a dime on it, outside of the free contributor's copy of a now-extinct literary journal. Maybe 7-10 years makes sense for pop albums, but for the low end of literary publication, the end where the money isn't and where people have always gotten noticed by publishing dribs and drabs here and there for little or no money at all, it just doesn't work. As a poet I want what money I can squeeze out of it. Like the paperboy in Better Off Dead, I say: "I want my two dollars!"