I'm in a holding pattern above the airport in Philadelphia because all of the major airports up and down this coast have been "briefly" shut down for runway inspections. I hope the delay is briefer than the duration of my fuel reserve.
In the 1800's plenty of people had proven that manned flight was impossible. It was, using nothing but muscle power and steam power. It took having a small, light internal combusion engine and gasoline to make it possible.
No one had proven any such thing. Science made it clear that "manned flight" was most definitely possible, and scientists and engineers attempted to make flying machines at an ever increasing pace until their efforts resulted in success.
FTL within the bounds of Newtonian physics is impossible.
Newtonian physics has absolutely no problem with v>c.
We have pretty much proven that with quantum physics there are a lot more things about the universe than Newton would have ever expected. I believe on a small scale we have already seen FTL movement of particles through quantum entanglement.
No, not "movement," and no information traveled faster than c.
Also, while travel on a galactic scale is probably pointless without FTL, with the right power source we could easily achieve a substantial fraction of C making a trip to Alpha Centauri possible within 8-10 years. Still too long for cable news networks but certainly possible within human limits.
For hardcore gamers, the PC is the platform of choice. There's just no way consoles cut it for hardcore gamers. Yet, console games outsell PC games something like 7 or 8 to 1 these days, because people wanting a more casual experience outnumber the really hardcore gamers by about that much.
The same thing will happen with mobile games and consoles. Consoles will still exist of course - they're not going anywhere - but the money and the market will naturally shift to mobile. The number of people that want a quick game of Angry Birds on the bus trip vastly outnumbers the number who want to play console style games.
It'll be a pyramid, with the niche but hardcore gamer PC on top, the middle of the road gamers on consoles, and the huge masses of people playing $1 games on phones.
Largely probable, but you seem to be unaware that today, PC game sales bring in much more revenue and are growing faster than console game sales. Of course, this includes juggernauts like WoW and it's true that console ports often sell better on consoles.
I don't know about your search, but google does exact text searches if you put periods between the words. Write.it.like.this to get a single string, otherwise it will find pages that may rank higher if they have those 4 words somewhere in the page.
Nope, just tried it with the phrase cannot.find.results. No results on the top page contain that phrase.
Sometimes it is helpful, the one that sticks in my head recently is when I was looking for the address of Houston Motorsport Park. I didn't know the right name so I searched for Houston Raceway, but it still lead me to the right place.
Perhaps it could be refined some, but I am impressed with Google's ability to work out what I really mean.
I prefer a visible option to toggle between "figure out what I really mean" and "what I type is what I really mean." My best search engine experiences were in the 90s using things like LexisNexis, doing searches for things like [phrase 1] within 20 words of [phrase 2 or 3]. I often know exactly what I'm searching for but web search engines want to show me results based on other sites that mention things vaguely like my search terms. Frequently the page with the exact phrase I typed gets buried under the more heuristic results, which is a pain.
It gets even weirder with Google maps, where for years a search for Jack in the Box with the map showing just downtown Berkeley, California returned a single result, which was some sort of business office outside of London. I demonstrated that one for some Google-employee friends but they couldn't make heads or tails of it.
regardless of the math, S&P's reasoning is sound. let's not try to find scapegoats, please. the U.S. is hurtling at full speed towards a deficit meltdown, and quibbling over S&P's math doesn't change the fact that the country needs to come to terms with it ASAP.
I do not think that words means what you think it means.
Even if their conclusion is correct, their reasoning isn't anything close to sound. "Oh, the justification for our action was off by about 20%? That's okay, we'll just support the same conclusion and justify it with our gut feeling about politics," isn't reasoning at all. It seems to me that sound reasoning would be quantitatively comparing default likelihoods between the US government and other AAA-rated securities and then adjusting accordingly.
What they did is like killing a chicken, looking at its entrails, and then declaring that because of the intestines, they are confident that 2 + 2 = 4.
USB port (via dongle) HDMI out A number of third party cases with integrated keyboards Rear and front camera (admittedly slightly lower in resolution) better battery life under REAL conditions (this states eight under "ideal").
The iPad is far lighter too. And the idea of including an optical trackpad so you can "move around the device" is NUTS on a touchscreen system.
So what is going to be the draw? Especially for a business, where the third party aftermarket is much more extensive for the iPad?
I've dropped my phone running across the street, on the bathroom floor, etc. It has a slight scuff on the metal edging (I have a 3GS). Glass is completely unmarred and all I had was a thin plastic surround. My boss has broken two by sitting on them while they were in her back pocket. It just sort of depends on how it falls, how it takes its damage. I wouldn't call the phone fragile though -- I doubt many of the less expensive plastic phones would survive a fall onto pavement regardless of the landing.
Plastic phones take a lot more abuse than fragile glass phones. My old RAZR and older Nokia survived a dozen drops that would have probably shattered a recent iPhone. Rigid aluminum and glass = fragile. Good flexible plastic body = durable.
My daughter's iPhone 4 fell out of her back pocket when she was riding a Harley. She didn't realize it until she reached her destination; then her husband took off to look for it. He found it laying in a busy road, with tire marks on it.
It was fine.
"a notoriously fragile device" is anti-fanboy hyperbole.
A literal majority of the iPhone 4 owners I know have dealt with shattered glass causes by a sub-meter drop onto a hard surface, and none of them were riding a moving vehicle at the time. One was dropped from a pocket while sitting on a stationary motorcycle, and yes, it was shattered front and back.
Maybe Harleys have special iPhone protecting fields, or maybe we should remember that a single survived drop doesn't have any meaning.
Can someone please explain to me why despite the fairly linear rising budget of NASA we are shutting everything down right now? Is mismanagement really that bad at NASA? Is it saddled with debt from past programs?
I don't get it. It's like I'm watching my generation drop the ball despite all the obvious reasons in my mind to establish a presence off this rock. "Oh, my parents' generation put people on the moon. Not only did my generation stop putting people and telescopes in space, we also made ground observatories illegal and have re-instituted burning people who claim the Earth is not the center of the universe. Why? Because it was more affordable in the very immediate future."
How about make it run well on on all hardware capable of running XP SP3? You may not get the fancy display bells and whistles (Aero), but the core APIs and should still be the same. This would actually get a lot of people to upgrade. I don't expect fancy display features to work on old hardware, but it would be nice since I have a perfectly good windows machine that I am not going to upgrade since it does what I want for a windows box but would like the added security updates of a more modern OS.
If you have at least 2 GB of RAM, 7 already runs better than XP on the same system.
Airplanes have boundary layers attached in flight.
All you need to do to a heat-sink is rough up the surface enough that the boundary layer is turbulent. It's not like drag is an issue.
The first point in favor of this heat-sink is pure bullshit. Want to bet everything else is also bullshit.
How well do bearings conduct heat?
WTF happened to/.
This needs to be modded up. There will be many other comments with objections, but we need to get +5 informative or insightful attached to the 100% unarguable reality that spinning a surface absolutely doesn't eliminate the boundary layer. People should take fluid mechanics classes before writing about boundary layers.
It seems that the invite-only PicasaWeb albums (where only specific google accounts have access) would no longer be invite-only. That alone is reason enough to not join G+. When signing up for G+, they gave the following notice:
Linking Google+ with Picasa Web Albums When you join Google+:
* [...]
* Your albums' visibility settings aren’t changed, but people they’re shared with can now share them with others.
* [...]
If they could fix this issue, I would sign up. Otherwise, forget it.
-molo
In my experience the invite only Picasa web albums didn't even require a Google account. I sent one to my parents last year and was surprised when they just forwarded the link to several other people who also looked.
This post is either a joke that I didn't detect or a truly sick attack on a very reasonable point by one of Slashdot's most reliably intelligent posters. Why do you think that the suggestion to educate people about new technology to allay the very common fear of the unknown is at all related to a fear of change? How is it related to politics at all?
Maybe this is some sort of automated spam message from a hacked account designed to...um...game a search engine or something? I'm having trouble seeing any likely motivation for this comment.
Keynote is WAY better than Powerpoint. Even PP can be okay though (if frustrating to actually use) if you use it properly. Unfortunately MS seems to design it to encourage abuse, rather than the opposite.
Having read Tufte and seen many good and bad presentations in both Keynote and PP, I disagree that one is better than the other. Bad presentations come from bad design principles and poor communication choices, not from software. Also, many of the problems associated with digital presentations are simply a case of the wrong people being invited to a meeting, or the meeting format being poorly suited for the content (10 minutes of ideas expanded to fill a 1 hour time slot, for instance).
GP: As for your red Xs, I suggest you paste special any content that isn't coming from an image file and select Picture (enhanced metafile).
Yes, IE9 is crappy. I don't like the UI, it's not as snappy as I like it to be and I don't like it that I still have to write IE-hacks for my websites.
For non-JS, IE9 and Opera are the fastest browsers around in Windows. My peeve is having low framerates while scrolling through very long websites with lots of images/whatnot. IE9 and Opera have the smoothest non-js html rendering, followed by a big step down to Firefox (which I use because noscript is amazing and I don't like the Opera or IE9 UIs), then Chrome (my backup, but too slow to use more than a couple times a week without cringing), then Safari.
I cut way back on Google usage a few months ago when they took over the arrow keys' normal smooth window scrolling and made it jump from one search result to another. That just makes it hard to read and track which entry is next when it jumps like that.
From www.google.com go to the little settings icon, select search settings, and turn off instant search. No more blue arrow. Enjoy!
That seems a little odd; even if these machines were as bad as the worst-proposed worst-case, it should take years for any cancer to develop because of them.
Look, cancer occurs everywhere, and people are lousy with seeing patterns that don't exist. The same sort of thing happened w/ Fukishima: it would take years for that to have _caused_ cancer in anyone, but if a month after the disaster someone you know gets diagnosed, you will assume it was *because* of the disaster. People read an article about how these machines are unsafe, and a month later their co-worker gets diagnosed; they assume it's because of the machine. But in neither case could there have been enough time for the proposed cause to have had that effect.
And the article says "TSA *employees* identified cancer clusters possibly linked to radiation exposure." The employees? Not, like, a doctor?
These machines should be tested for safety, and I hope they are... before an _actual_ cancer cluster is created.
I agree entirely. I think that the backscatter scanners need real research to establish their safety parameters, but it seems extremely unlikely that this particular possible cancer cluster is at all related. Actually, I take that back. Why bother researching these scanners when they're incredibly expensive and won't even detect the type of hidden item that resulted in their purchase? Let's just stop purchasing them and donate them to labs.
OP says that the letter says it "questions whether it is even safe to stand near an operating scanner, let alone inside one."
Um, helps to read the fine linked document, which has been partially redacted, but still says "Individual effective dose per screening (frontal and rear) of a subject is , less than the 10 urem (0.10 uSv) limit. Further down a standard (NCRP 1993) is quoted which "recommends that members of the general public receive less than 1 mSv (0.1 rem) per year."
So, if these numbers are compared (who knows if they are reproducible) you are considered safe up to about 10,000 scans per year (1 mSv / 0.10 uSv).
The document does indicate there is a potential danger from X-ray beam overshoot "above and behind" the scanner. Yes, but note in the diagram this area BEGINS at 13.8 FEET above the ground, and RISES IN A CONE!!! So, you may be at risk if you're about 14 feet tall (or work in an office on the second floor?) standing behind the machine...
That standard doesn't apply to low energy radiation absorbed in the first millimeter of skin. This is a very significant difference between the academic papers calling the safety of the scanners into question and the non-peer reviewed non-public supposed research used to justify their safety.
And once upon a time there was no debate about the fact that it was possible to turn lead into gold or that the sun revolved around the earth in scientific literature. That's because science is actually, and a little counter intuitively, quite stuck in its ways. When there is an established fact that the vast majority of the community believe in, it's very difficult to publish a counter argument (periodicals don't want to be viewed as "wacky" for publishing thinking outside the box), and it's led science down the wrong route many times in the past. That's not to say I believe the current position is wrong, but making anything difficult to openly question in scientific circles is unproductive.
1) The scientific method and the culture we identify as Science first started to look like their modern forms in the 1600s. It's not a coincidence that alchemy (which was always questioned and outright denied by many or most prominent "natural philosophers," despite your assertion to the contrary) began to die in the 1600s.
2) Your argument that science goes down the wrong route nicely refutes your argument that science is stuck in its ways - we only know that we've taken the wrong route because science is inherently great at revising ideas and getting us away from bad ones. The most fame you can have as a scientist comes from questioning and overturning (with evidence) current ideas. However, most current scientific ideas are pretty solidly grounded, so the most common claims of refutation are made by whacky pseudoscientists, since it's increasingly difficult to find accepted theories that are genuinely scientifically invalid.
More than any other field in history, science automatically adapts with time to more closely resemble the truth.
Voice/Data Usage Limitation: Sprint reserves the right, without notice, to limit throughput speeds, and to deny, terminate, modify, disconnect or suspend service if off-network usage in a month exceeds: (1) voice: 800 min. or a majority of minutes; or (2) data: 300 megabytes or a majority of kilobytes. Prohibited network use rules apply. See in-store materials or sprint.com/termsandconditions for specific prohibited uses.
They roam onto the verizon network, so their coverage is only as spotty as verizon for voice.
That would have been just dandy ten years ago.
Now, between GPS, GoogleTalk, and the other various social services out there, I pay more attention to data coverage than I do voice. Yes, having voice is important too in case you need medical attention, etc... but as far as usage goes, I'm 99% data. Dropping down to roaming data speeds does not a fun experience make.
It's plenty fast for GPS, obviously, but VOIP might be dicey if you're out in the boonies.
Slashdot Mirror
And now I'm cleared to land.
I'm in a holding pattern above the airport in Philadelphia because all of the major airports up and down this coast have been "briefly" shut down for runway inspections. I hope the delay is briefer than the duration of my fuel reserve.
In the 1800's plenty of people had proven that manned flight was impossible. It was, using nothing but muscle power and steam power. It took having a small, light internal combusion engine and gasoline to make it possible.
No one had proven any such thing. Science made it clear that "manned flight" was most definitely possible, and scientists and engineers attempted to make flying machines at an ever increasing pace until their efforts resulted in success.
FTL within the bounds of Newtonian physics is impossible.
Newtonian physics has absolutely no problem with v>c.
We have pretty much proven that with quantum physics there are a lot more things about the universe than Newton would have ever expected. I believe on a small scale we have already seen FTL movement of particles through quantum entanglement.
No, not "movement," and no information traveled faster than c.
Also, while travel on a galactic scale is probably pointless without FTL, with the right power source we could easily achieve a substantial fraction of C making a trip to Alpha Centauri possible within 8-10 years. Still too long for cable news networks but certainly possible within human limits.
Maybe!
For hardcore gamers, the PC is the platform of choice. There's just no way consoles cut it for hardcore gamers. Yet, console games outsell PC games something like 7 or 8 to 1 these days, because people wanting a more casual experience outnumber the really hardcore gamers by about that much.
The same thing will happen with mobile games and consoles. Consoles will still exist of course - they're not going anywhere - but the money and the market will naturally shift to mobile. The number of people that want a quick game of Angry Birds on the bus trip vastly outnumbers the number who want to play console style games.
It'll be a pyramid, with the niche but hardcore gamer PC on top, the middle of the road gamers on consoles, and the huge masses of people playing $1 games on phones.
Largely probable, but you seem to be unaware that today, PC game sales bring in much more revenue and are growing faster than console game sales. Of course, this includes juggernauts like WoW and it's true that console ports often sell better on consoles.
I don't know about your search, but google does exact text searches if you put periods between the words. Write.it.like.this to get a single string, otherwise it will find pages that may rank higher if they have those 4 words somewhere in the page.
Nope, just tried it with the phrase cannot.find.results. No results on the top page contain that phrase.
Sometimes it is helpful, the one that sticks in my head recently is when I was looking for the address of Houston Motorsport Park. I didn't know the right name so I searched for Houston Raceway, but it still lead me to the right place.
Perhaps it could be refined some, but I am impressed with Google's ability to work out what I really mean.
I prefer a visible option to toggle between "figure out what I really mean" and "what I type is what I really mean." My best search engine experiences were in the 90s using things like LexisNexis, doing searches for things like [phrase 1] within 20 words of [phrase 2 or 3]. I often know exactly what I'm searching for but web search engines want to show me results based on other sites that mention things vaguely like my search terms. Frequently the page with the exact phrase I typed gets buried under the more heuristic results, which is a pain.
It gets even weirder with Google maps, where for years a search for Jack in the Box with the map showing just downtown Berkeley, California returned a single result, which was some sort of business office outside of London. I demonstrated that one for some Google-employee friends but they couldn't make heads or tails of it.
regardless of the math, S&P's reasoning is sound. let's not try to find scapegoats, please. the U.S. is hurtling at full speed towards a deficit meltdown, and quibbling over S&P's math doesn't change the fact that the country needs to come to terms with it ASAP.
I do not think that words means what you think it means.
Even if their conclusion is correct, their reasoning isn't anything close to sound. "Oh, the justification for our action was off by about 20%? That's okay, we'll just support the same conclusion and justify it with our gut feeling about politics," isn't reasoning at all. It seems to me that sound reasoning would be quantitatively comparing default likelihoods between the US government and other AAA-rated securities and then adjusting accordingly.
What they did is like killing a chicken, looking at its entrails, and then declaring that because of the intestines, they are confident that 2 + 2 = 4.
The iPad2 already has:
USB port (via dongle)
HDMI out
A number of third party cases with integrated keyboards
Rear and front camera (admittedly slightly lower in resolution)
better battery life under REAL conditions (this states eight under "ideal").
The iPad is far lighter too. And the idea of including an optical trackpad so you can "move around the device" is NUTS on a touchscreen system.
So what is going to be the draw? Especially for a business, where the third party aftermarket is much more extensive for the iPad?
The SD card slot is pretty serious draw.
I've dropped my phone running across the street, on the bathroom floor, etc. It has a slight scuff on the metal edging (I have a 3GS). Glass is completely unmarred and all I had was a thin plastic surround. My boss has broken two by sitting on them while they were in her back pocket. It just sort of depends on how it falls, how it takes its damage. I wouldn't call the phone fragile though -- I doubt many of the less expensive plastic phones would survive a fall onto pavement regardless of the landing.
Plastic phones take a lot more abuse than fragile glass phones. My old RAZR and older Nokia survived a dozen drops that would have probably shattered a recent iPhone. Rigid aluminum and glass = fragile. Good flexible plastic body = durable.
My daughter's iPhone 4 fell out of her back pocket when she was riding a Harley. She didn't realize it until she reached her destination; then her husband took off to look for it. He found it laying in a busy road, with tire marks on it.
It was fine.
"a notoriously fragile device" is anti-fanboy hyperbole.
A literal majority of the iPhone 4 owners I know have dealt with shattered glass causes by a sub-meter drop onto a hard surface, and none of them were riding a moving vehicle at the time. One was dropped from a pocket while sitting on a stationary motorcycle, and yes, it was shattered front and back.
Maybe Harleys have special iPhone protecting fields, or maybe we should remember that a single survived drop doesn't have any meaning.
Can someone please explain to me why despite the fairly linear rising budget of NASA we are shutting everything down right now? Is mismanagement really that bad at NASA? Is it saddled with debt from past programs?
I don't get it. It's like I'm watching my generation drop the ball despite all the obvious reasons in my mind to establish a presence off this rock. "Oh, my parents' generation put people on the moon. Not only did my generation stop putting people and telescopes in space, we also made ground observatories illegal and have re-instituted burning people who claim the Earth is not the center of the universe. Why? Because it was more affordable in the very immediate future."
Maybe NASA is that mismanaged, but your own link includes a graph showing that NASA's budget has been in general decline since 1991: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1a/NASA_budget_linegraph_BH.PNG
How about make it run well on on all hardware capable of running XP SP3? You may not get the fancy display bells and whistles (Aero), but the core APIs and should still be the same. This would actually get a lot of people to upgrade. I don't expect fancy display features to work on old hardware, but it would be nice since I have a perfectly good windows machine that I am not going to upgrade since it does what I want for a windows box but would like the added security updates of a more modern OS.
If you have at least 2 GB of RAM, 7 already runs better than XP on the same system.
This story is pure bullshit.
Airplanes have boundary layers attached in flight.
All you need to do to a heat-sink is rough up the surface enough that the boundary layer is turbulent. It's not like drag is an issue.
The first point in favor of this heat-sink is pure bullshit. Want to bet everything else is also bullshit.
How well do bearings conduct heat?
WTF happened to /.
This needs to be modded up. There will be many other comments with objections, but we need to get +5 informative or insightful attached to the 100% unarguable reality that spinning a surface absolutely doesn't eliminate the boundary layer. People should take fluid mechanics classes before writing about boundary layers.
It seems that the invite-only PicasaWeb albums (where only specific google accounts have access) would no longer be invite-only. That alone is reason enough to not join G+. When signing up for G+, they gave the following notice:
Linking Google+ with Picasa Web Albums
When you join Google+:
* [...]
* Your albums' visibility settings aren’t changed, but people they’re shared with can now share them with others.
* [...]
If they could fix this issue, I would sign up. Otherwise, forget it.
-molo
In my experience the invite only Picasa web albums didn't even require a Google account. I sent one to my parents last year and was surprised when they just forwarded the link to several other people who also looked.
This post is either a joke that I didn't detect or a truly sick attack on a very reasonable point by one of Slashdot's most reliably intelligent posters. Why do you think that the suggestion to educate people about new technology to allay the very common fear of the unknown is at all related to a fear of change? How is it related to politics at all?
Maybe this is some sort of automated spam message from a hacked account designed to...um...game a search engine or something? I'm having trouble seeing any likely motivation for this comment.
Keynote is WAY better than Powerpoint. Even PP can be okay though (if frustrating to actually use) if you use it properly. Unfortunately MS seems to design it to encourage abuse, rather than the opposite.
Having read Tufte and seen many good and bad presentations in both Keynote and PP, I disagree that one is better than the other. Bad presentations come from bad design principles and poor communication choices, not from software. Also, many of the problems associated with digital presentations are simply a case of the wrong people being invited to a meeting, or the meeting format being poorly suited for the content (10 minutes of ideas expanded to fill a 1 hour time slot, for instance).
GP: As for your red Xs, I suggest you paste special any content that isn't coming from an image file and select Picture (enhanced metafile).
Yes, IE9 is crappy. I don't like the UI, it's not as snappy as I like it to be and I don't like it that I still have to write IE-hacks for my websites.
For non-JS, IE9 and Opera are the fastest browsers around in Windows. My peeve is having low framerates while scrolling through very long websites with lots of images/whatnot. IE9 and Opera have the smoothest non-js html rendering, followed by a big step down to Firefox (which I use because noscript is amazing and I don't like the Opera or IE9 UIs), then Chrome (my backup, but too slow to use more than a couple times a week without cringing), then Safari.
I cut way back on Google usage a few months ago when they took over the arrow keys' normal smooth window scrolling and made it jump from one search result to another. That just makes it hard to read and track which entry is next when it jumps like that.
From www.google.com go to the little settings icon, select search settings, and turn off instant search. No more blue arrow. Enjoy!
Who still wants a keyboard with a numpad?
Every scientist, engineer, businessperson, or individual who thinks quantitatively and likes to do math in real life.
That seems a little odd; even if these machines were as bad as the worst-proposed worst-case, it should take years for any cancer to develop because of them.
Look, cancer occurs everywhere, and people are lousy with seeing patterns that don't exist. The same sort of thing happened w/ Fukishima: it would take years for that to have _caused_ cancer in anyone, but if a month after the disaster someone you know gets diagnosed, you will assume it was *because* of the disaster. People read an article about how these machines are unsafe, and a month later their co-worker gets diagnosed; they assume it's because of the machine. But in neither case could there have been enough time for the proposed cause to have had that effect.
And the article says "TSA *employees* identified cancer clusters possibly linked to radiation exposure." The employees? Not, like, a doctor?
These machines should be tested for safety, and I hope they are... before an _actual_ cancer cluster is created.
I agree entirely. I think that the backscatter scanners need real research to establish their safety parameters, but it seems extremely unlikely that this particular possible cancer cluster is at all related. Actually, I take that back. Why bother researching these scanners when they're incredibly expensive and won't even detect the type of hidden item that resulted in their purchase? Let's just stop purchasing them and donate them to labs.
OP says that the letter says it "questions whether it is even safe to stand near an operating scanner, let alone inside one."
Um, helps to read the fine linked document, which has been partially redacted, but still says "Individual effective dose per screening (frontal and rear) of a subject is , less than the 10 urem (0.10 uSv) limit. Further down a standard (NCRP 1993) is quoted which "recommends that members of the general public receive less than 1 mSv (0.1 rem) per year."
So, if these numbers are compared (who knows if they are reproducible) you are considered safe up to about 10,000 scans per year (1 mSv / 0.10 uSv).
The document does indicate there is a potential danger from X-ray beam overshoot "above and behind" the scanner. Yes, but note in the diagram this area BEGINS at 13.8 FEET above the ground, and RISES IN A CONE!!! So, you may be at risk if you're about 14 feet tall (or work in an office on the second floor?) standing behind the machine...
That standard doesn't apply to low energy radiation absorbed in the first millimeter of skin. This is a very significant difference between the academic papers calling the safety of the scanners into question and the non-peer reviewed non-public supposed research used to justify their safety.
And once upon a time there was no debate about the fact that it was possible to turn lead into gold or that the sun revolved around the earth in scientific literature. That's because science is actually, and a little counter intuitively, quite stuck in its ways. When there is an established fact that the vast majority of the community believe in, it's very difficult to publish a counter argument (periodicals don't want to be viewed as "wacky" for publishing thinking outside the box), and it's led science down the wrong route many times in the past. That's not to say I believe the current position is wrong, but making anything difficult to openly question in scientific circles is unproductive.
1) The scientific method and the culture we identify as Science first started to look like their modern forms in the 1600s. It's not a coincidence that alchemy (which was always questioned and outright denied by many or most prominent "natural philosophers," despite your assertion to the contrary) began to die in the 1600s.
2) Your argument that science goes down the wrong route nicely refutes your argument that science is stuck in its ways - we only know that we've taken the wrong route because science is inherently great at revising ideas and getting us away from bad ones. The most fame you can have as a scientist comes from questioning and overturning (with evidence) current ideas. However, most current scientific ideas are pretty solidly grounded, so the most common claims of refutation are made by whacky pseudoscientists, since it's increasingly difficult to find accepted theories that are genuinely scientifically invalid.
More than any other field in history, science automatically adapts with time to more closely resemble the truth.
The patent is so broad that not only will Apple's legal team target iPhone competitors but will also look to go after iPad and iPod rivals.
They could. They might. They might not.
Just because they got the patent tells us nothing about whether they will use it offensively (double-meaning intended) or defensively.
If this weren't Apple, we might be left to wonder, but Apple has a pretty offensive litigation-heavy record.
Sprint is NOT unlimited:
Voice/Data Usage Limitation: Sprint reserves the right, without notice, to limit throughput speeds, and to deny, terminate, modify, disconnect or suspend service if off-network usage in a month exceeds: (1) voice: 800 min. or a majority of minutes; or (2) data: 300 megabytes or a majority of kilobytes. Prohibited network use rules apply. See in-store materials or sprint.com/termsandconditions for specific prohibited uses.
http://shop.sprint.com/mysprint/shop/plan_details.jsp?tabId=pt_individual_tab&planCatId=pln301001cat&planFamilyType=&flow=AAL&showDetailsTab=true
The website puts it as "Unlimited data (on our network)" not on the internet in general.
Yes, good point, but it's unlimited in practice. They haven't complained when I crack 20 GB in a month, so I think most people will be fine.
They roam onto the verizon network, so their coverage is only as spotty as verizon for voice.
That would have been just dandy ten years ago.
Now, between GPS, GoogleTalk, and the other various social services out there, I pay more attention to data coverage than I do voice. Yes, having voice is important too in case you need medical attention, etc... but as far as usage goes, I'm 99% data. Dropping down to roaming data speeds does not a fun experience make.
It's plenty fast for GPS, obviously, but VOIP might be dicey if you're out in the boonies.