If you feel you're not being paid enough, ask for a raise. If you don't get it and you're still unhappy, then change workplace. It's not that hard. And this is even from a part-time employee...
What a standard line. You've clearly never worked in a hostile workplace have you? The "If you don't like it, there's the door" attitude is nice in theory. The In practice all that happens is any self-respecting ambitious individual moves on to some other job, and you're left with the disrespectful unambitious drips that can't work anywhere else. Often the employer just uses the high staff turnover to have a workplace full of cheap expendable employees, some middle manager gets a wage raise himself, out of all this. Costs saved from paying your staff less, neglecting the work environment are quickly wiped out by abject business failure. You quickly end up with employees who don't give a damn, you know the kind. Customer service standards will degrade, sales will struggle, you'll have more employees acting up, management will struggle with discipline, will have to be harsh. Showing up drunk or not at all and some outright bilking the business. Eventually, something has to give. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
I've been a middle manager in a hostile work place, I moved real quick on rather than standing my ground and trying to fix things. Later the union did move into the work place - a rather easy target due to the catastrophically low moral and flagging sales.
But as you say, people could ask for raises and make demands, you can't get fired for asking nicely and stating your case, and if you do, in most countries you can dispute wrongful dismissal. It's disappointing that more employees don't put up more of a fight if they want their work place to be better. It's just a shame that unions have to be paid to do it for them.
Unity and Gnome3 especially seem aimed at smaller screens operating in full screen for applications
Blame tablets for the new fangled obsession with going back to full screen apps, which has seen much needed progress in windowed multitasking take a step backwards. In fact lets just blame dumbed down tablets, and one incumbent tablet monopoly, by setting computing progress back into reverse by over simplifying user input and forcing the user back to one task at a time.
This is fine for idle content consumption, which seems to be the unfortunate future of mainstream computing. But I can't help feeling this is a job for television, computers are meant to be tools not appliances.
It is a worrying sign because at the moment KDE, Gnome and Ubuntu all seem clueless in how to deal with their customer base.
Your use of the word "customer" implies these projects are in anyway "customer-focused" or even give a flying damn. If a million users they've shafted up and switch to something else what difference would it make? That would put a proprietary company out of business, maybe put Mozilla and Canonical on hard times, but a group of volunteers? They don't really answer to anyone.
Mod me down for saying it open source projects can at times be elitist outright toxic, despite best intentions. We know it. User feedback can fall on deaf ears, that is if there is even any attempt to get feedback and study it, or if there is even any meaningful general public user base outside enthusiasts and developers.
Any developer of an operating system, regardless of proprietary or open licence, would do well to pay attention to what power users do to tweak the OS immediately after installing, and what tools developers create to make it easy to tweak. Consider the nice little app Ubuntu Tweak - it's a worry when a third party add-on gives superior fast access to common things you need to fix, it demonstrates how broken-by-design the original OS is.
Interesting, Linux Mint, Pinguy and other Ubuntu derived have not embraced Unity, and as always their versions of 11.04 fix quite a list of broken things.
Microsoft paid a lot of attention with Windows 7, after Vista. A lot of the defaults, such as services, were similar to what power users would do to tweak some speed out of Vista.
The altitude record is not speculative. See the below youtube video of the AS350 touching down on the summit. Being a knife edge summit, it kind of perched momentarily before taking off. Ironically, a video on youtube is pretty good proof, and a spectacular watch.
How much does a blackhawk helicopter weigh? This hover bike has a power to weigh ratio of 500-700hp per ton depending on the rider's mass, that puts many helicopters to shame. The blackhawk is below 200hp per ton.
Therefore it would go MUCH higher than 10000feet if it wasn't for the inefficiency of ducted fans in rarefied air?
Accelerometers in portables are horrific for gaming because the screen moves too. It's an impoverished control scheme plain and simple. Touchscreens are fine for Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, but most traditional game formats aren't suited to a touchscreen interface. Simulation games fall down the worst. The instant response and feedback of a button or an analog controller can't be beat.
Boil it down further, touchscreens are limited by the fact your fingers are in the way of the view port.
The mythbusters tested this. It was busted. But they did in a worst case scenario type test get some needle to twitch. Unshielded equipment and a unrealistically high power level.
However I know a couple of pilots who often can hear GSM cellphone chrips through radio. But these are not comercial aircraft.
No really. Reason why is that Hans Rosling points out that the majority of humans alive do not have even a washing machine. Which is a rather fundamental minimum of home appliances that we take for granted. It gives some idea of just how little resources about 5 out of 7 billion humans actually consumer per head. By some measures you'll hear the 1 billion wealthiest humans have a resource footprint equal or greater of the other 6 billion combined. It's not a sustainable inequality from any point of view. I don't see how it will stablise without a heroic effort of foresight and planning (not gunna happen), or a huge readjustment by either highly disruptive technology (hopefully) or socio-economic upheaval (include unpleasant war and terrorism in that).
So it's by that accident things are reasonable sustainable now - in the short term at least until everyone wants a washing machine.
World? Ridiculous anyone-sue-anyone-for-anything lawsuits are very much an American insititution, in the rest of the world they are just entertaining Only-In-America news articles.
Thats a good point but you then forgot 3a) The usernames often the same also, not just the emails. I think use of email as login isn't helpful for security either. It shouldn't be used for anything but password resets etc.
From reading up on the user reports of this. It seems this has been happening in this pattern since mid to late May. Apple has inexplicably not said a damn thing (yet), but has been removing credit card details from accounts, and locking some others out. Which indicates they are aware of this issue and dealing with it. Interestingly users report they are having no problems having their balances refunded. The silence is conspicuous, no? I guess this issue getting slashdotted means Apple is going to say something.
What worries me is they appear to have known about it for a while and are trying to clean it up as quietly as possible. If this is was a glitch one presume they would admit it in a downplayed fashion. I'd wager it is a BIG hack.
Leaving us with two possiblities:
1) iTunes has been seriously fckued over for teh lulz and profit and is trying to keep it quiet.
2) Or iTunes fraud may have been a constant (but contained) background noise for some while and this isn't much of an abberation. Apple may prefer to live with some level of fraud and patch it up the leaks quietly. Just because it's trending on/. != a actual real issue.
I cringed when I discovered for myself iTunes forces you to enter and keep your credit card details, just to be able to get access to the app store to just download free stuff even.
I'm watching how this develops, I purchased my wife an iPod touch (both regretting it slightly), because if this turns out to be another widespread hack like the others reccently it'd be the last time I ever buy an Apple product.
The real question is if I can install some real Linux on it, or is it locked down?
""even if you lose your computer, you can just log in to another Kogan Agora Chromium Laptop and get right back to work."
Yeah right, as if you always have a top DSL connection everywhere. And if you loose your connection are you loosing any data, too?
No because the data is all the the cloud. At most you lose (not loose) a few seconds of work typing in a Google Doc for instance. See the many youtube videos of this in action if you like.
With Linux it's just so easy to backup your data. Because in Linux everything is just a file, you can use the simple tools like rsync or dd. Or just open a file manager and copy your whole system to some hard disk. Trust me it works.
Yes because the majority of computer users know how what rsync or dd are let alone how to use them? I'd guess that 1% or less of computer users these days have ever touched a *nix command line.
Take a laptop, with the same system, and just copy/home to some external hard disk. Then copy it back to the new laptop and you have all settings and all data on your new laptop. No magic "cloud" is needed.
Yes but how many stories do we know of people who didn't back up their laptop, or hadn't done it for months, or people who've lost the laptop and their backups. Why not have the OS do the heavy lifting to protect the users data? This is where the "magic" cloud works. You don't need to find someone tech savvy to spend 4 hours copying all your data back and reinstalling your applications. You kind of just log in and you have it all back.
Because if you are an IT guy, chances are you've done that for your friends and family. I can see how a Chromebook would see my aging parents calling on me less.
You can even just copy your whole system to the new computer and you don't need to install anything on the new laptop.
I still think the whole "cloud for private people" is just a scam for your money so that you need always either expensive DSL connection at home or G3 or UMTS for your laptop. The idea is, even if you use your laptop, with they have now plenty of data capacity for very cheap (like 500GB for 50$) you still need a constant internet connection either with wireless or G3/UMTS.
No the scam is around getting you hooked to online services so advertisers can target you better. When your offline doing something on your computer, you're not so reachable. Get your conspiracy theories straight! Geez.;)
Having had a play with Chromium OS I have to say a few things.
The Chrome web app store is a success and growing. I see Chrome OS having a chance as a result.
But there are problems with that - most of the "Apps" don't amount to much more than a bookmark to a website, such as the Facebook app. Things are going to have to change for chrome to get any success.
The challenge is convincing consumers that the Chromebook on the shelf next to the cheaper netbook is a better buy than something that can run a full copy of windows, and Chrome anyway.
Even more confusing is Chrome OS Linux www.getchrome.eu which is a susestudio built me-too distro that boots into chrome full screen. You'll find it if your hurting for a Chrome[ium] build to download and won't realise it's not the legit thing until you see the small grey on white text at the bottom of page saying it's nothing to do with Google.
Google also makes a Chrome browser build for Linux, which is often confused with Chromium browser available in most distro's repositories.
From my (basic) understanding of Android and how it's multitasking it works: No.
This is nothing to do with the App store being open, this is more to do with Android App devs no doubt learning to code on a PC and not really getting to grips with coding for a mobile environment how Android multitasks in a unique way. In desktop development power consumption is rarely even thought about.
They need to go with it rather than try to workaround it. Nor at times do they seem to grasp what limited resources and a battery mean and how Google designed around these limitations.
If you encounter an App that behaves poorly, uninstall it, rate it low in the market and harass the developer. That's what the rating system is for.
Often you'll find many alternatives that achieve the same thing - inexplicably one app may hog battery in the background, one may not at all. It's lazy rushed make-a-buck development pure and simple.
Fantastic yet another open-source knock off clone of something proprietary that is just going to kick a hornet's nest of patent trolls and lawyers. Instead of that, how about a clean-sheet fully-original independant open alternative?
In software there is a Jazillion ways to solve a problem and it's doubtful the incumbent solution is the very best, why do you need to copy or reverse engineer anything in the software world except for lack of creativity, inspiration and originality?
It's perfectly ok of course to admit your ripping off an algorithim because you can't come up with something better, and want to make a statement by slapping an open licence on your rip off.
It'll never catch on of course, because a reverse-engineered skype protocol it can't be used in any major project because of the aforementioned hord of rabid lawyers.
OSS can do it's own thing, and can do it very well. There are sucess stories of originality from Firefox to BitTorrent and others. Just please not another me-too project that sets open software back a couple of years in terms of widespread acceptance.
There is an old high school science teacher's trick where you place mushed up boiled corn flakes in a zip-lock plastic bag and stroke a strong magnet to one corner. After a while a collection of dark stuff occurs in the corner, which visibly moves with the magnetic field. This is in fact iron.
I'm not sure how the human body's concentration of iron in the blood compares to corflakes but it's convincing there should be some small effect. Interesting to learn it's potentially beneficial.
Problem is of course 99% of the claims about therapeutic magnets are still bunk.
"It does seem to be sufficient short-term profit to motivate private industry. If we humans ever go to those worlds than it will be because a nation or a consortium of them believes it to be to its advantage or to the advantage of the human species...
Just now, there are a great many matters pressing in on us that compete for the money it takes to send people to other worlds. Should we solve those problems first or are they a reason for going?"
No, we shouldn't, thanks for asking. That's a common argument, but unfortunatley wrong. Basically put spin offs from the investment in the space program and other research from after WWII and through the cold war have transformed our technological civilization.
... to the point that landing on the moon was just about a flag. In the case of the Apollo program, $150 billion in todays money was dumped on our brightest minds (about 400,000 people, many highly skilled jobs) top universities and our most cutting edge industry. If it all crashed and burned on the launch pad it wouldn't have mattered, the boost to humanity was awesome.
If you look at list of the problems we need to solve on this planet, they read like a list of technological problems to get to the stars. No 1 might be clean, cheap, unlimited energy that fusion would be a good candidate for. No 2 might be ecosystems - we'll need food and air recycling for long space flight. It goes on. It's the teach a man to fish principal. We need to skip frittering away resources on what seems to be the most pressing and urgent problems and go straight for the big goals.
Dare I say it, we have our problems now, and are poorly equipped to face them because we gave up on spaceflight some time in the 1970s and worried to much about problems to close to home.
So instead of a 40MHz 486 and 8MiB of EDO RAM, we now require at least a 2,5GHz dual core with 1GiB of DDR3 SDRAM to accomplish the same thing on a web page.
Yes but try running a modern browser in that ammount of ram, and then load a modern web page. 8mb would let you load a couple of jpgs into memory for display thats about it. 40mhz would mean your waiting till the next ice age to load a Slashdot article and execute it's script heavy comment interface..
Slashdot Mirror
If you feel you're not being paid enough, ask for a raise. If you don't get it and you're still unhappy, then change workplace. It's not that hard. And this is even from a part-time employee...
What a standard line. You've clearly never worked in a hostile workplace have you? The "If you don't like it, there's the door" attitude is nice in theory. The In practice all that happens is any self-respecting ambitious individual moves on to some other job, and you're left with the disrespectful unambitious drips that can't work anywhere else. Often the employer just uses the high staff turnover to have a workplace full of cheap expendable employees, some middle manager gets a wage raise himself, out of all this. Costs saved from paying your staff less, neglecting the work environment are quickly wiped out by abject business failure. You quickly end up with employees who don't give a damn, you know the kind. Customer service standards will degrade, sales will struggle, you'll have more employees acting up, management will struggle with discipline, will have to be harsh. Showing up drunk or not at all and some outright bilking the business. Eventually, something has to give. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
I've been a middle manager in a hostile work place, I moved real quick on rather than standing my ground and trying to fix things. Later the union did move into the work place - a rather easy target due to the catastrophically low moral and flagging sales.
But as you say, people could ask for raises and make demands, you can't get fired for asking nicely and stating your case, and if you do, in most countries you can dispute wrongful dismissal. It's disappointing that more employees don't put up more of a fight if they want their work place to be better. It's just a shame that unions have to be paid to do it for them.
"Founded in 1985, iCloud Communications is an established business run by a seasoned management team."
I'm interested in these seasoned managers, is the purpose of the seasoning to mask bitterness and un-palatability?
Unity and Gnome3 especially seem aimed at smaller screens operating in full screen for applications
Blame tablets for the new fangled obsession with going back to full screen apps, which has seen much needed progress in windowed multitasking take a step backwards. In fact lets just blame dumbed down tablets, and one incumbent tablet monopoly, by setting computing progress back into reverse by over simplifying user input and forcing the user back to one task at a time.
This is fine for idle content consumption, which seems to be the unfortunate future of mainstream computing. But I can't help feeling this is a job for television, computers are meant to be tools not appliances.
It is a worrying sign because at the moment KDE, Gnome and Ubuntu all seem clueless in how to deal with their customer base.
Your use of the word "customer" implies these projects are in anyway "customer-focused" or even give a flying damn. If a million users they've shafted up and switch to something else what difference would it make? That would put a proprietary company out of business, maybe put Mozilla and Canonical on hard times, but a group of volunteers? They don't really answer to anyone.
Mod me down for saying it open source projects can at times be elitist outright toxic, despite best intentions. We know it. User feedback can fall on deaf ears, that is if there is even any attempt to get feedback and study it, or if there is even any meaningful general public user base outside enthusiasts and developers.
Any developer of an operating system, regardless of proprietary or open licence, would do well to pay attention to what power users do to tweak the OS immediately after installing, and what tools developers create to make it easy to tweak. Consider the nice little app Ubuntu Tweak - it's a worry when a third party add-on gives superior fast access to common things you need to fix, it demonstrates how broken-by-design the original OS is.
Interesting, Linux Mint, Pinguy and other Ubuntu derived have not embraced Unity, and as always their versions of 11.04 fix quite a list of broken things.
Microsoft paid a lot of attention with Windows 7, after Vista. A lot of the defaults, such as services, were similar to what power users would do to tweak some speed out of Vista.
Canoncial are you listening?
The altitude record is not speculative. See the below youtube video of the AS350 touching down on the summit. Being a knife edge summit, it kind of perched momentarily before taking off. Ironically, a video on youtube is pretty good proof, and a spectacular watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HckQcNNoJc
How much does a blackhawk helicopter weigh? This hover bike has a power to weigh ratio of 500-700hp per ton depending on the rider's mass, that puts many helicopters to shame. The blackhawk is below 200hp per ton. Therefore it would go MUCH higher than 10000feet if it wasn't for the inefficiency of ducted fans in rarefied air?
Accelerometers in portables are horrific for gaming because the screen moves too. It's an impoverished control scheme plain and simple. Touchscreens are fine for Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, but most traditional game formats aren't suited to a touchscreen interface. Simulation games fall down the worst. The instant response and feedback of a button or an analog controller can't be beat.
Boil it down further, touchscreens are limited by the fact your fingers are in the way of the view port.
The mythbusters tested this. It was busted. But they did in a worst case scenario type test get some needle to twitch. Unshielded equipment and a unrealistically high power level.
However I know a couple of pilots who often can hear GSM cellphone chrips through radio. But these are not comercial aircraft.
Japan, Germany, etc are already facing a contracting and aging population as result of declining birth rate.
Paradoxically, give people in third world nations a higher standard of living, and longer healthier lives, they will stop having excessive children.
Of that, the most important part is quality of life, health and education for women.
This new infrastructure needs to be built with sustainable resources, rather than repeat mistakes of old.
Freezing population growth no magic fix things could still get worse, especially as developing nations start wanting western luxuries.
Reminds me of the TED talk about washing machines. http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html
No really. Reason why is that Hans Rosling points out that the majority of humans alive do not have even a washing machine. Which is a rather fundamental minimum of home appliances that we take for granted. It gives some idea of just how little resources about 5 out of 7 billion humans actually consumer per head. By some measures you'll hear the 1 billion wealthiest humans have a resource footprint equal or greater of the other 6 billion combined. It's not a sustainable inequality from any point of view. I don't see how it will stablise without a heroic effort of foresight and planning (not gunna happen), or a huge readjustment by either highly disruptive technology (hopefully) or socio-economic upheaval (include unpleasant war and terrorism in that).
So it's by that accident things are reasonable sustainable now - in the short term at least until everyone wants a washing machine.
sue-happy world
World? Ridiculous anyone-sue-anyone-for-anything lawsuits are very much an American insititution, in the rest of the world they are just entertaining Only-In-America news articles.
I refer you to where I said "regretting it slightly", it's the in-app payments that are sucking me dry.
Thats a good point but you then forgot 3a) The usernames often the same also, not just the emails. I think use of email as login isn't helpful for security either. It shouldn't be used for anything but password resets etc.
From reading up on the user reports of this. It seems this has been happening in this pattern since mid to late May. Apple has inexplicably not said a damn thing (yet), but has been removing credit card details from accounts, and locking some others out. Which indicates they are aware of this issue and dealing with it. Interestingly users report they are having no problems having their balances refunded. The silence is conspicuous, no? I guess this issue getting slashdotted means Apple is going to say something.
/. != a actual real issue.
What worries me is they appear to have known about it for a while and are trying to clean it up as quietly as possible. If this is was a glitch one presume they would admit it in a downplayed fashion. I'd wager it is a BIG hack.
Leaving us with two possiblities:
1) iTunes has been seriously fckued over for teh lulz and profit and is trying to keep it quiet.
2) Or iTunes fraud may have been a constant (but contained) background noise for some while and this isn't much of an abberation. Apple may prefer to live with some level of fraud and patch it up the leaks quietly. Just because it's trending on
Either way, talk about reality distortion.
I cringed when I discovered for myself iTunes forces you to enter and keep your credit card details, just to be able to get access to the app store to just download free stuff even.
I'm watching how this develops, I purchased my wife an iPod touch (both regretting it slightly), because if this turns out to be another widespread hack like the others reccently it'd be the last time I ever buy an Apple product.
The real question is if I can install some real Linux on it, or is it locked down?
""even if you lose your computer, you can just log in to another Kogan Agora Chromium Laptop and get right back to work."
Yeah right, as if you always have a top DSL connection everywhere. And if you loose your connection are you loosing any data, too?
No because the data is all the the cloud. At most you lose (not loose) a few seconds of work typing in a Google Doc for instance. See the many youtube videos of this in action if you like.
With Linux it's just so easy to backup your data. Because in Linux everything is just a file, you can use the simple tools like rsync or dd. Or just open a file manager and copy your whole system to some hard disk. Trust me it works.
Yes because the majority of computer users know how what rsync or dd are let alone how to use them? I'd guess that 1% or less of computer users these days have ever touched a *nix command line.
Take a laptop, with the same system, and just copy /home to some external hard disk. Then copy it back to the new laptop and you have all settings and all data on your new laptop. No magic "cloud" is needed.
Yes but how many stories do we know of people who didn't back up their laptop, or hadn't done it for months, or people who've lost the laptop and their backups. Why not have the OS do the heavy lifting to protect the users data? This is where the "magic" cloud works. You don't need to find someone tech savvy to spend 4 hours copying all your data back and reinstalling your applications. You kind of just log in and you have it all back.
Because if you are an IT guy, chances are you've done that for your friends and family. I can see how a Chromebook would see my aging parents calling on me less.
You can even just copy your whole system to the new computer and you don't need to install anything on the new laptop.
I still think the whole "cloud for private people" is just a scam for your money so that you need always either expensive DSL connection at home or G3 or UMTS for your laptop. The idea is, even if you use your laptop, with they have now plenty of data capacity for very cheap (like 500GB for 50$) you still need a constant internet connection either with wireless or G3/UMTS.
No the scam is around getting you hooked to online services so advertisers can target you better. When your offline doing something on your computer, you're not so reachable. Get your conspiracy theories straight! Geez. ;)
Having had a play with Chromium OS I have to say a few things.
The Chrome web app store is a success and growing. I see Chrome OS having a chance as a result. But there are problems with that - most of the "Apps" don't amount to much more than a bookmark to a website, such as the Facebook app. Things are going to have to change for chrome to get any success.
The challenge is convincing consumers that the Chromebook on the shelf next to the cheaper netbook is a better buy than something that can run a full copy of windows, and Chrome anyway.
Even more confusing is Chrome OS Linux www.getchrome.eu which is a susestudio built me-too distro that boots into chrome full screen. You'll find it if your hurting for a Chrome[ium] build to download and won't realise it's not the legit thing until you see the small grey on white text at the bottom of page saying it's nothing to do with Google.
Google also makes a Chrome browser build for Linux, which is often confused with Chromium browser available in most distro's repositories.
From my (basic) understanding of Android and how it's multitasking it works: No.
This is nothing to do with the App store being open, this is more to do with Android App devs no doubt learning to code on a PC and not really getting to grips with coding for a mobile environment how Android multitasks in a unique way. In desktop development power consumption is rarely even thought about.
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/04/multitasking-android-way.html
They need to go with it rather than try to workaround it. Nor at times do they seem to grasp what limited resources and a battery mean and how Google designed around these limitations.
If you encounter an App that behaves poorly, uninstall it, rate it low in the market and harass the developer. That's what the rating system is for.
Often you'll find many alternatives that achieve the same thing - inexplicably one app may hog battery in the background, one may not at all. It's lazy rushed make-a-buck development pure and simple.
I have to use IE7 and half the internet doesn't work.
If Slashdot drops support for IE7 my productivity will be even higher.
Fantastic yet another open-source knock off clone of something proprietary that is just going to kick a hornet's nest of patent trolls and lawyers. Instead of that, how about a clean-sheet fully-original independant open alternative?
In software there is a Jazillion ways to solve a problem and it's doubtful the incumbent solution is the very best, why do you need to copy or reverse engineer anything in the software world except for lack of creativity, inspiration and originality?
It's perfectly ok of course to admit your ripping off an algorithim because you can't come up with something better, and want to make a statement by slapping an open licence on your rip off.
It'll never catch on of course, because a reverse-engineered skype protocol it can't be used in any major project because of the aforementioned hord of rabid lawyers.
OSS can do it's own thing, and can do it very well. There are sucess stories of originality from Firefox to BitTorrent and others. Just please not another me-too project that sets open software back a couple of years in terms of widespread acceptance.
Please don't feed the patent trolls.
There is an old high school science teacher's trick where you place mushed up boiled corn flakes in a zip-lock plastic bag and stroke a strong magnet to one corner. After a while a collection of dark stuff occurs in the corner, which visibly moves with the magnetic field. This is in fact iron.
I'm not sure how the human body's concentration of iron in the blood compares to corflakes but it's convincing there should be some small effect. Interesting to learn it's potentially beneficial.
Problem is of course 99% of the claims about therapeutic magnets are still bunk.
"It does seem to be sufficient short-term profit to motivate private industry. If we humans ever go to those worlds than it will be because a nation or a consortium of them believes it to be to its advantage or to the advantage of the human species...
Just now, there are a great many matters pressing in on us that compete for the money it takes to send people to other worlds. Should we solve those problems first or are they a reason for going?"
No, we shouldn't, thanks for asking. That's a common argument, but unfortunatley wrong. Basically put spin offs from the investment in the space program and other research from after WWII and through the cold war have transformed our technological civilization.
... to the point that landing on the moon was just about a flag. In the case of the Apollo program, $150 billion in todays money was dumped on our brightest minds (about 400,000 people, many highly skilled jobs) top universities and our most cutting edge industry. If it all crashed and burned on the launch pad it wouldn't have mattered, the boost to humanity was awesome.
If you look at list of the problems we need to solve on this planet, they read like a list of technological problems to get to the stars. No 1 might be clean, cheap, unlimited energy that fusion would be a good candidate for. No 2 might be ecosystems - we'll need food and air recycling for long space flight. It goes on. It's the teach a man to fish principal. We need to skip frittering away resources on what seems to be the most pressing and urgent problems and go straight for the big goals.
Dare I say it, we have our problems now, and are poorly equipped to face them because we gave up on spaceflight some time in the 1970s and worried to much about problems to close to home.
So instead of a 40MHz 486 and 8MiB of EDO RAM, we now require at least a 2,5GHz dual core with 1GiB of DDR3 SDRAM to accomplish the same thing on a web page.
Yes but try running a modern browser in that ammount of ram, and then load a modern web page. 8mb would let you load a couple of jpgs into memory for display thats about it. 40mhz would mean your waiting till the next ice age to load a Slashdot article and execute it's script heavy comment interface..
A jetpack should be no bigger than a hiker's backpack and spit flame. This thing is more like a small aircraft.
There fixed that for you.