If someone had the technology level to be able to travel in time and the computional power to manage such technology, then presumably it wouldn't be necessary to hold a small metal and plastic box next to your head to communicate with your mothership.
Something like a implant wired directly into brain is far more believable. Even then, that may be a inexplicably low level of technology.
Like using a morse code telegraph in todays era. Try neural link to the mothership, or a uploaded human mind or a sentient AI remote controlling a body. Ironically that would be a more plausible claim than this absurd crap. It also means we'd be unable to detect time travellers.
Technology is incremental there are no leaps and short circuits and any advancement is necessarily standing on the shoulders of many small advances previously.
If you can transport a whole human an arbitrary distance through spacetime then way out things such as nanotechnology perhaps even sentient AIs are a given.
If you can transport a whole human with any precision. Then surely you can transport sound waves or even neural impulses back and forth. Which would require a billion zillion times less energy. See E=MC^2(Frakking with spacetime necessarily would require an enormous ammount of energy, it may be to move a given mass FTL you may require more than that in energy mass equivelent).
Indeed it'd be far easier just to take over the mind of someone in the past.
I'd point out that time travel is a technology that means FTL travel (the two are essientially the same thing) along with being able to maniuplate spacetime arbitrarily.
I doubt such future humans or whoever would be so interested in the past, when you have the ability to pretty snap a new universe off our own and travel into it.
In our own future we'd sooner have sentient AIs and nanotechnolgy than time travel.
So, if time travel is real or ever possible in any way, we wouldn't necessarily be aware of it or be able to detect it let alone spot someone playing Angry Birds on their smartphone in old film or photography.
I live in NZ. We've had BILLIONS of dollars injected into our economy since Lord Of the Rings, the ammount above seems like a pretty damn sweet deal.
Our roads in the more pristine areas are now all but impassible in peak tourist season due to foreigners in underpowered rental camper-vans (RVs).
Which is why Tourists comment nobody seems to live here. Most NZers have learned to go holiday in Australia or a pacific island, who seem to be offering us cheap flights and accomodation all the time.
In the 1990s when I told people I was from New Zealand people had either never heard of it or I would get asked how long it took me to pick up english, or what was it like wearing clothing. I had a lot of fun with misinformation, like that Moa's are good eating, but make terrible pets.
Nowadays they have heard of us, so instead I may get asked if I was an extra in LOTR or do I know Jermain Clement or Brett McKenzie as supposedly all Kiwi's are/do, as if we're a small town.
*sigh* I guess it's an upgrade for people thinking we run around in grass skirts still.
The overhead of organization eats into my time for other things, so I do the minimum and get on with it. I witness ruthlessly organised people in the work environment, who really do catalog everything, make lists and notes, to the point of being OCD. With only the occasional exception to the rule, I also observe that these people don't get anything more done than the rest of us.
The most productive people seem to have no organizational system (if they do it's in their heads) and just seem to enter some kind of zen like state, muck in and Get Shit Done.
If your software project is comparable to crappy fast food then your doing something wrong. Code obesity is killing our kids! On a more serious note, if you're reusing code you may be bringing along a lot of unnecessary fat that you really didn't need to. If you really want a lean mean program you will not be bringing in feature-laden libraries, you'll have to rewrite some stuff yourself.
The very top chefs and cooks will use 5-8 ingredients at the most to make dishes, they understand the importance of simplicity. A few really good ingredients combined expertly is by far the winning strategy. Something like a McDonalds hamburger will have dozens of ingredients when you count all the additives, without which it would be unpalatable.
I've seen some pretty impressive meals with even less ingredients. I worked in a restaurant that perhaps had no more than 20 ingredients on the entire menu at a time, if you exclude condiments.
Seasoned programmers will cook code with color and flavor, not coloring and flavoring.
Why the discrepancy? Japanese driving conditions? Japanese driving style? I'm sure they think their test accurately represents the local conditions. This suggests the Japanese are doing something right...
Are you serious? Have you actually seen an accident before? How about a vehicle made in the 90s or 80s?
Those older vehicles were not light. The bodies were made from cold rolled steel, with solid I-beam construction. They were much, much safer than most modern unibody designs, if only due to mass. They got similar or better fuel mileage due to the lack of restrictive emission add-ons.
Furthermore, newer cars aren't "safer". They handle better and are more controllable due to innovations in suspension and steering, and have a safer compartment resulting in better safety, but the vehicles themselves are less likely to survive even a 'mild' fender bender without thousands of dollars in a rebuild.
Have you actually been in an accident? Those older vehicles (80s and earlier) wouldn't crunch up, while they look better after an accident, the occupants would be worse off. They were quite simply, death traps. Even wearing seatbelts people died in accidents that are highly survivable today. All other things being equal the road death tolls have come down a long way due to car design. So I know what I'd pick over repair ability any day.
Mass? Yeah that helps kill the other people and not you. Then If you hit something hard, or hit something of equal mass you're just as screwed. Modern cars are designed to transfer as little momentum as possible to the occupants through crumple zones, intrusion beams, other crash-deforming structures. Older cars were simply did not have any of this you'd be killed by colliding with the inside of a car.
Newer cars ARE safer, there's plenty of hard facts and living people to attest to that. Newer drivers are the problem. Higher attainable speeds and making use of them really un does advances in safety.
I've yet to see a modern passenger vehicle in a collision that didn't total the modern vehicle. A friend's 91 suburban was hit by a modern Honda Odyssey (late model): the Honda hit his rear passenger side quarter section. After replacing two sheered bolts and redoing the rear body panel, his Suburban was as good as new.
Not really the best example? How about comparing two vehicles of equivalent mass? You're forgetting how cheap it is to replace the whole Honda:)
It's not all about power and speed. The most fun car I've ever owned was also the smallest and most underpowered, was a 1977 Mini Cooper. 0-60 time of about 12 seconds after some modification, but compared to just about everything I've ever driven it was the most fun by far. Somehow it felt fast, and did everything with personality.
Oh and it got 50mpg around the city with a good tune up. That's 'green' for you. Interestingly the next owner had it sorted out with a 1600cc fuel injected honda motor. 0-60 in 4 seconds! 45mpg.
Cars to today are more like flying sensory deprivation tanks that do everything possible to hide the sensation of travelling, and the amount of fuel your burning hauling a whole lot of necessary car around.
Plenty of diesel cars already do 60-70MPG. With the advantage of having no ignition system to go wrong and lots of torque, horse power is a misleading gauge of power, torque is what turns the wheels.
Sure, some people don't like diesels due to the noise they make. They are typically quieter when cruising as the RPM is often about 1000RPM lower than a petrol engine.
Huh?? Torque is a momentary measure of twisting force, horsepower is a measure of an engines rate of mechanical work output. Horsepower = torque x engine rpm. So perhaps meant that the other way around?
Just to bust a bit of a myth: Diesels do not have more maximum torque than an equivalent displacement naturally aspirated gasoline engine. This is partly Diesels are not as volumetrically efficient as gasoline engines, they have smaller valves and heads that do not breath as well, especially as the RPMs climb. Diesels are well suited to forced induction though, and this is where all that awesome torque comes from.
Android: I did a factory wipe of my phone. Android automatically downloaded my phones settings, extensive contact list etc from my Google account, including re-downloading apps from the market. My photos, videos were untouched on the SD card and automatically picked up by the gallery app. If I lost my cellphone I could equally recover all my personal data. Thank you Google for
iPhone: My friend did a full reset of his iPhone, it prompted him "Do you want to back up your iPhone?" he did this. While it backed up his settings. It did not back up his Apps nor his thousands of photos from recent holidays.
Needless to say he was distraught and a bit like "So tell me about this Android thing?". Apple gets alot right, but gets other things catastrophically wrong.
Frankly I have heard so many stories like this and I've never had a single problem with my Android phones. In situations like this it's saved my bacon by respecting my data, and the completely painless syncing to Google is a delight. Every non-geek I know who's bought an Android is utterly happy.
Fragmentation is monopolian/FUDanese for competition, choice.
Because Android is seeing explosive growth and widespread adoption, plenty of choice, and so far no hard data showing a few problems, despite trolling from Jobs and his reality distortion blogosphere.
I wonder if Android Market was almost intentionally crappy, to allow alternative app stores. So far I've been quite impressed with the alternative offerings, and I'm damn thankful one company does not control the sole means of personalising my 'droid.
HTC's Sense and Motorola's MotoBlur are really superficial skins and have been mischaracterised has some kind of OS re-write. Although they are a bit more than just a custom home screen application (for example I use an app called ADW Launcher instead of default), the underpinnings of Android aren't really heavily modified.
I remember desktop Linux getting usable and stable back in 1999, at least it could do anything Windows or Mac could do at the time. I was quite excited, I figured a year or two of development from the FOSS community to polish and iron out bugs would mean a Windows killer was on the way.
Indeed, it seemed unstoppable all you'd need to do was hand someone a live CD to cure their Microsoft related woes. Nothing paid, no licencing, and a good platform for development, I couldn't see how it cold fail.
But a decade later, I've given up holding my breath. Every major Distro release I see minor incremental improvements, often gains are eaten up by brand new problems. It seems periodically everything is completely re-written from the ground up, to only be slightly better. Desktop Linux has been consistenly behind the major players, content to imitate. I remember seeing 3D desktop effects demo'd in August 2003 by Microsoft. It took until 2006 before Compiz, to actually be usable, only when Vista wasn't far away. Oh and only when the BETA versions of Windows 7 showed massive performance improvements did Canonical do something about how painfully long Ubuntu was taking to boot.
There is absolutely no fucking innovation in the userspace, just autisticly copying Windows/OSX. Sure both Microsoft and Apple copy each other, but they both have a long list of GUI innovations and the patents to go with them in wider use today. Oh uh, the desktop cube thing and the tabbed windows I think are pretty cool. But these are Mac-ish, look cool in demos, great to show off to geeky girls in coffee shops when they notice my linux laptop, but I haven't really figured out what advantage they are.
FOSS development is not wanting for brute force labor nor programming talent, dare I say this dwarfs whats available for MS or Apple to muster by a few orders of magnitude.
But by all measures it's absolutely fucking autistic and has been counting words in the dictionary repeatedly for the last 20 years.
Desktop Linux needs a clean-sheet rethink just as happens every 6 months it seems, except this time it actually needs some high-level right brain design. This is exactly what happend with Android, which is a linux distro done right - finally- and look at what's happening with that.
While I still use Ubuntu quite a lot, I've given up on destop linux as a hobby, I'm now a Android nerd. And you know what? I'm happier now.
While I'm still a PC user first and foremost, as well as a smartphone totting hipster, I hang my head in shame. Apple, Microsoft, OSS crowd are all too damn selfish, too far up their own agendas be it profit, politics or whatever. Aren't computers intended for use by people? More specificly aren't computers Tools for productivity communication and leisure for use by human beings? Should this not be priority #1 in design in development?
Dude, this morning has been one troll story after another. Look at the last 3-4 stories - Microsoft is dead, Linux is dead, now we just need a Mac is dead story and we'll complete the troll trifecta.
Try typing anything of length on a touch screen keyboard - hell try touch typing.
A mouse is still the most accurate input device, you can select a single pixel, or it can accelerate movement, a small few cm movement makes a larger on screen one. Touch screens are cute for specific tasks optimized for the platform but don't scale. Multi-touch is misleadingly titled, you cannot still do more than one input at once. With a keyboard you can be pressing keys or shortcut combos whilst the mouse is moving, and input mouse buttons and scroll wheel at the same time. Touch screens you can only do one gesture at a time, perhaps some software may support you using a second hand. But thats it.
I've noticed almost all new laptops have multi-touch gestures on their trackpads, it won't be long before mice end up with multi-touch pads on their tops.
Sounds like the plot of Peter F. Hamilton's novel Pandora's Star. Basically a Star being observed by an astronomer goes goes out suddenly, it turns out it was enveloped in a solar-system sized impenetrable black barrier. Some alien entity did so to wall-in a potentially dangerous civilization intent on expanding to other systems. In this case the planet may have been sealed off.
Now given this star system is 20 light years aware they must not have liked something they saw in our leaked radio or TV from 1980, been deeply offended and immediately dispatched their interstellar battle fleet. Cue dyson barrier locking them down.
A real God would provide his word encoded in binary in the crystal structure of a 10km high Diamond pyramid. In otherwords something unambiguously the product of someone with admin rights to the universe.
They probably think obscurity = security. By having their own proprietary OS will give them some kind of extra layer of security.
Which we all know is a fallacy. Like hiding valuables out of sight when locking your car. My wife still insisted she hide her handbag under the seat despite assuring her that security experts beg to differ. *Sigh*
Been using RC and now on final. Tested thoroughly. Ubuntu is increasingly a blatant Mac clone to the point of absurdity. The left-oriented window controls without reason right down to the purplification of the default wallpaper. Gnome has always been Mac-inspired for sure, but this is ridiculous! Does Canonical has a agenda to take on Apple? They hired to many mac fans? Who knows.
I'll be switching to Kubuntu as always. KDE's killer features (what did I ever do without tabbed windows?) are worth putting up with it's relative bugginess.
If I'm speaking to a linux user or a long time Ubuntu user I will tell them it is excellent, infact the best Ubuntu ever - good turn of speed, slick install, some 'aha' momments of delight. Ubuntu has now taken on a nice pace of progress with every release.
To my non-linux using friends and colleagues who are curious, while I do give them a live CD, I respond to the question of using desktop linux full time, with "How do enjoy you feel about plucking body hairs with tweasers?"
Slashdot Mirror
If someone had the technology level to be able to travel in time and the computional power to manage such technology, then presumably it wouldn't be necessary to hold a small metal and plastic box next to your head to communicate with your mothership.
Something like a implant wired directly into brain is far more believable. Even then, that may be a inexplicably low level of technology.
Like using a morse code telegraph in todays era. Try neural link to the mothership, or a uploaded human mind or a sentient AI remote controlling a body. Ironically that would be a more plausible claim than this absurd crap. It also means we'd be unable to detect time travellers.
Technology is incremental there are no leaps and short circuits and any advancement is necessarily standing on the shoulders of many small advances previously.
If you can transport a whole human an arbitrary distance through spacetime then way out things such as nanotechnology perhaps even sentient AIs are a given. If you can transport a whole human with any precision. Then surely you can transport sound waves or even neural impulses back and forth. Which would require a billion zillion times less energy. See E=MC^2(Frakking with spacetime necessarily would require an enormous ammount of energy, it may be to move a given mass FTL you may require more than that in energy mass equivelent).
Indeed it'd be far easier just to take over the mind of someone in the past.
I'd point out that time travel is a technology that means FTL travel (the two are essientially the same thing) along with being able to maniuplate spacetime arbitrarily.
I doubt such future humans or whoever would be so interested in the past, when you have the ability to pretty snap a new universe off our own and travel into it.
In our own future we'd sooner have sentient AIs and nanotechnolgy than time travel.
So, if time travel is real or ever possible in any way, we wouldn't necessarily be aware of it or be able to detect it let alone spot someone playing Angry Birds on their smartphone in old film or photography.
Why, the ship in orbit of course.
I live in NZ. We've had BILLIONS of dollars injected into our economy since Lord Of the Rings, the ammount above seems like a pretty damn sweet deal.
Our roads in the more pristine areas are now all but impassible in peak tourist season due to foreigners in underpowered rental camper-vans (RVs).
Which is why Tourists comment nobody seems to live here. Most NZers have learned to go holiday in Australia or a pacific island, who seem to be offering us cheap flights and accomodation all the time.
In the 1990s when I told people I was from New Zealand people had either never heard of it or I would get asked how long it took me to pick up english, or what was it like wearing clothing. I had a lot of fun with misinformation, like that Moa's are good eating, but make terrible pets.
Nowadays they have heard of us, so instead I may get asked if I was an extra in LOTR or do I know Jermain Clement or Brett McKenzie as supposedly all Kiwi's are/do, as if we're a small town.
*sigh* I guess it's an upgrade for people thinking we run around in grass skirts still.
+1 but you forgot slaughtering of kittens and pornography.
The overhead of organization eats into my time for other things, so I do the minimum and get on with it. I witness ruthlessly organised people in the work environment, who really do catalog everything, make lists and notes, to the point of being OCD. With only the occasional exception to the rule, I also observe that these people don't get anything more done than the rest of us.
The most productive people seem to have no organizational system (if they do it's in their heads) and just seem to enter some kind of zen like state, muck in and Get Shit Done.
rm -rf *
If your software project is comparable to crappy fast food then your doing something wrong. Code obesity is killing our kids! On a more serious note, if you're reusing code you may be bringing along a lot of unnecessary fat that you really didn't need to. If you really want a lean mean program you will not be bringing in feature-laden libraries, you'll have to rewrite some stuff yourself.
The very top chefs and cooks will use 5-8 ingredients at the most to make dishes, they understand the importance of simplicity. A few really good ingredients combined expertly is by far the winning strategy. Something like a McDonalds hamburger will have dozens of ingredients when you count all the additives, without which it would be unpalatable.
I've seen some pretty impressive meals with even less ingredients. I worked in a restaurant that perhaps had no more than 20 ingredients on the entire menu at a time, if you exclude condiments.
Seasoned programmers will cook code with color and flavor, not coloring and flavoring.
Why the discrepancy? Japanese driving conditions? Japanese driving style? I'm sure they think their test accurately represents the local conditions. This suggests the Japanese are doing something right...
Are you serious? Have you actually seen an accident before? How about a vehicle made in the 90s or 80s?
Those older vehicles were not light. The bodies were made from cold rolled steel, with solid I-beam construction. They were much, much safer than most modern unibody designs, if only due to mass. They got similar or better fuel mileage due to the lack of restrictive emission add-ons.
Furthermore, newer cars aren't "safer". They handle better and are more controllable due to innovations in suspension and steering, and have a safer compartment resulting in better safety, but the vehicles themselves are less likely to survive even a 'mild' fender bender without thousands of dollars in a rebuild.
Have you actually been in an accident? Those older vehicles (80s and earlier) wouldn't crunch up, while they look better after an accident, the occupants would be worse off. They were quite simply, death traps. Even wearing seatbelts people died in accidents that are highly survivable today. All other things being equal the road death tolls have come down a long way due to car design. So I know what I'd pick over repair ability any day.
Mass? Yeah that helps kill the other people and not you. Then If you hit something hard, or hit something of equal mass you're just as screwed. Modern cars are designed to transfer as little momentum as possible to the occupants through crumple zones, intrusion beams, other crash-deforming structures. Older cars were simply did not have any of this you'd be killed by colliding with the inside of a car.
Newer cars ARE safer, there's plenty of hard facts and living people to attest to that. Newer drivers are the problem. Higher attainable speeds and making use of them really un does advances in safety.
I've yet to see a modern passenger vehicle in a collision that didn't total the modern vehicle. A friend's 91 suburban was hit by a modern Honda Odyssey (late model): the Honda hit his rear passenger side quarter section. After replacing two sheered bolts and redoing the rear body panel, his Suburban was as good as new.
Not really the best example? How about comparing two vehicles of equivalent mass? You're forgetting how cheap it is to replace the whole Honda :)
It's not all about power and speed. The most fun car I've ever owned was also the smallest and most underpowered, was a 1977 Mini Cooper. 0-60 time of about 12 seconds after some modification, but compared to just about everything I've ever driven it was the most fun by far. Somehow it felt fast, and did everything with personality.
Oh and it got 50mpg around the city with a good tune up. That's 'green' for you. Interestingly the next owner had it sorted out with a 1600cc fuel injected honda motor. 0-60 in 4 seconds! 45mpg.
Cars to today are more like flying sensory deprivation tanks that do everything possible to hide the sensation of travelling, and the amount of fuel your burning hauling a whole lot of necessary car around.
I had no idea diesel costed more than gasoline there. In other parts of the world diesel is significantly cheaper!
Plenty of diesel cars already do 60-70MPG. With the advantage of having no ignition system to go wrong and lots of torque, horse power is a misleading gauge of power, torque is what turns the wheels.
Sure, some people don't like diesels due to the noise they make. They are typically quieter when cruising as the RPM is often about 1000RPM lower than a petrol engine.
Huh?? Torque is a momentary measure of twisting force, horsepower is a measure of an engines rate of mechanical work output. Horsepower = torque x engine rpm. So perhaps meant that the other way around?
Just to bust a bit of a myth: Diesels do not have more maximum torque than an equivalent displacement naturally aspirated gasoline engine. This is partly Diesels are not as volumetrically efficient as gasoline engines, they have smaller valves and heads that do not breath as well, especially as the RPMs climb. Diesels are well suited to forced induction though, and this is where all that awesome torque comes from.
http://xkcd.com/505/
Information revolution requires dirt surface, and rocks.
Android: I did a factory wipe of my phone. Android automatically downloaded my phones settings, extensive contact list etc from my Google account, including re-downloading apps from the market. My photos, videos were untouched on the SD card and automatically picked up by the gallery app. If I lost my cellphone I could equally recover all my personal data. Thank you Google for
iPhone: My friend did a full reset of his iPhone, it prompted him "Do you want to back up your iPhone?" he did this. While it backed up his settings. It did not back up his Apps nor his thousands of photos from recent holidays. Needless to say he was distraught and a bit like "So tell me about this Android thing?". Apple gets alot right, but gets other things catastrophically wrong.
Frankly I have heard so many stories like this and I've never had a single problem with my Android phones. In situations like this it's saved my bacon by respecting my data, and the completely painless syncing to Google is a delight. Every non-geek I know who's bought an Android is utterly happy.
Fragmentation is monopolian/FUDanese for competition, choice. Because Android is seeing explosive growth and widespread adoption, plenty of choice, and so far no hard data showing a few problems, despite trolling from Jobs and his reality distortion blogosphere.
I wonder if Android Market was almost intentionally crappy, to allow alternative app stores. So far I've been quite impressed with the alternative offerings, and I'm damn thankful one company does not control the sole means of personalising my 'droid.
HTC's Sense and Motorola's MotoBlur are really superficial skins and have been mischaracterised has some kind of OS re-write. Although they are a bit more than just a custom home screen application (for example I use an app called ADW Launcher instead of default), the underpinnings of Android aren't really heavily modified.
Choices are not confusing, when one is presented with meaningful and pertinent plain-English information about which one to choose.
Or is too-bolder and that a radical thing to say? Mod me Troll then.
I remember desktop Linux getting usable and stable back in 1999, at least it could do anything Windows or Mac could do at the time. I was quite excited, I figured a year or two of development from the FOSS community to polish and iron out bugs would mean a Windows killer was on the way.
Indeed, it seemed unstoppable all you'd need to do was hand someone a live CD to cure their Microsoft related woes. Nothing paid, no licencing, and a good platform for development, I couldn't see how it cold fail.
But a decade later, I've given up holding my breath. Every major Distro release I see minor incremental improvements, often gains are eaten up by brand new problems. It seems periodically everything is completely re-written from the ground up, to only be slightly better. Desktop Linux has been consistenly behind the major players, content to imitate. I remember seeing 3D desktop effects demo'd in August 2003 by Microsoft. It took until 2006 before Compiz, to actually be usable, only when Vista wasn't far away. Oh and only when the BETA versions of Windows 7 showed massive performance improvements did Canonical do something about how painfully long Ubuntu was taking to boot.
There is absolutely no fucking innovation in the userspace, just autisticly copying Windows/OSX. Sure both Microsoft and Apple copy each other, but they both have a long list of GUI innovations and the patents to go with them in wider use today. Oh uh, the desktop cube thing and the tabbed windows I think are pretty cool. But these are Mac-ish, look cool in demos, great to show off to geeky girls in coffee shops when they notice my linux laptop, but I haven't really figured out what advantage they are.
FOSS development is not wanting for brute force labor nor programming talent, dare I say this dwarfs whats available for MS or Apple to muster by a few orders of magnitude.
But by all measures it's absolutely fucking autistic and has been counting words in the dictionary repeatedly for the last 20 years.
Desktop Linux needs a clean-sheet rethink just as happens every 6 months it seems, except this time it actually needs some high-level right brain design. This is exactly what happend with Android, which is a linux distro done right - finally- and look at what's happening with that.
While I still use Ubuntu quite a lot, I've given up on destop linux as a hobby, I'm now a Android nerd. And you know what? I'm happier now.
While I'm still a PC user first and foremost, as well as a smartphone totting hipster, I hang my head in shame. Apple, Microsoft, OSS crowd are all too damn selfish, too far up their own agendas be it profit, politics or whatever. Aren't computers intended for use by people? More specificly aren't computers Tools for productivity communication and leisure for use by human beings? Should this not be priority #1 in design in development?
As an IT guy I'm ashamed, no wonder we're hated.
Dude, this morning has been one troll story after another. Look at the last 3-4 stories - Microsoft is dead, Linux is dead, now we just need a Mac is dead story and we'll complete the troll trifecta.
Dude, not necessary, the Mac is dead story has been told in the comments. Particularly this thread http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1826490&cid=33931850
Try typing anything of length on a touch screen keyboard - hell try touch typing.
A mouse is still the most accurate input device, you can select a single pixel, or it can accelerate movement, a small few cm movement makes a larger on screen one. Touch screens are cute for specific tasks optimized for the platform but don't scale. Multi-touch is misleadingly titled, you cannot still do more than one input at once. With a keyboard you can be pressing keys or shortcut combos whilst the mouse is moving, and input mouse buttons and scroll wheel at the same time. Touch screens you can only do one gesture at a time, perhaps some software may support you using a second hand. But thats it.
I've noticed almost all new laptops have multi-touch gestures on their trackpads, it won't be long before mice end up with multi-touch pads on their tops.
Sounds like the plot of Peter F. Hamilton's novel Pandora's Star. Basically a Star being observed by an astronomer goes goes out suddenly, it turns out it was enveloped in a solar-system sized impenetrable black barrier. Some alien entity did so to wall-in a potentially dangerous civilization intent on expanding to other systems. In this case the planet may have been sealed off.
Now given this star system is 20 light years aware they must not have liked something they saw in our leaked radio or TV from 1980, been deeply offended and immediately dispatched their interstellar battle fleet. Cue dyson barrier locking them down.
It may have been the original Battlestar Galactica, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080221/
and my backup analog Irony meter has the needle buried in the red.
A real God would provide his word encoded in binary in the crystal structure of a 10km high Diamond pyramid. In otherwords something unambiguously the product of someone with admin rights to the universe.
They probably think obscurity = security. By having their own proprietary OS will give them some kind of extra layer of security.
Which we all know is a fallacy. Like hiding valuables out of sight when locking your car. My wife still insisted she hide her handbag under the seat despite assuring her that security experts beg to differ. *Sigh*
Or could they be wrong?
Been using RC and now on final. Tested thoroughly. Ubuntu is increasingly a blatant Mac clone to the point of absurdity. The left-oriented window controls without reason right down to the purplification of the default wallpaper. Gnome has always been Mac-inspired for sure, but this is ridiculous! Does Canonical has a agenda to take on Apple? They hired to many mac fans? Who knows.
I'll be switching to Kubuntu as always. KDE's killer features (what did I ever do without tabbed windows?) are worth putting up with it's relative bugginess.
If I'm speaking to a linux user or a long time Ubuntu user I will tell them it is excellent, infact the best Ubuntu ever - good turn of speed, slick install, some 'aha' momments of delight. Ubuntu has now taken on a nice pace of progress with every release.
To my non-linux using friends and colleagues who are curious, while I do give them a live CD, I respond to the question of using desktop linux full time, with "How do enjoy you feel about plucking body hairs with tweasers?"
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Well that rules out one possible cosmic coincidence.