For one I take issue with the characterization of game players as either "hardcore" or "casual". There's a lot more to gamers than this false dichotomy. Gamers have a wide spectrum of likes and dislikes and skill sets. Someone might be a "hardcore" Halo player as they're really good at it but might only play RTSes occasionally and only "casually" because they're not good at them. Are they hardcore or casual? Oh no the stupid two-party classification has broken down! Also whenever you read "casual gamer" on a blog or in a magazine mentally replace that term with "retard" because that is the connotation the word has anymore and it is ridiculous.
What is worse is when developers somehow target "casual/retard" or "hardcore" players with their games. They want to consider their target audience as "hardcore" so they leave out any and all features which might lessen the challenge of the game for their precious hardcore strawmen. You can play Fallout 3 without ever really using VATS but it is a nice feature for people who aren't terribly talented aiming in an FPS with a console controller. VATS makes the game more approachable because you can be a good RPG player but bad at FPSes and still enjoy the game. The opposite also happens, developers will target "casual/retard" players and not include any features which might challenge players too much or assign their third string development teams to make the games.
This article is filled with such bullshit and and presumes that more immersion is somehow needed to make games good. It's nice to see someone wondering aloud that maybe new camera angles need to be tried in games or that there's too little innovation in control schemes. What pisses me off is the suggestion that FPSes are too hard for "casuals/retards" and "hardcores" aren't properly served by them. Just because someone doesn't live and breath Halo multiplayer doesn't mean they are somehow discombobulated at the mere thought of a character's point of view being the exact same as that of the player. Just because you live and breath Halo multiplayer doesn't mean you don't want to chill out playing Tetris every now and again.
This article's suggestion that somehow "casual/retard" players will have to wait until the Wii, Natal, or PS3 motion sensor dumbs down FPSes for them to play is ludicrous. It's not only the "hardcore" strawmen that can use an XBox controller. If a developer's game is so hard to control that only the most dedicated players can make it past the second level then the developer fucked up. They're games, a form of entertainment, they shouldn't require absolute dedication to beat or even get far enough to make it interesting. Unfortunately these games get passes on the controls because they turned the graphics to 11 or more realistically render blood splatter patterns. Games don't need to be divided into "unplayable by anyone with a full time job" and "press X to win".
The iPhone (and other WebKit browsers) fully support normal HTTP compression schemes and Etags, webmasters just need to enable it on the server end. If servers enable compression there's no need for an intermediary for the iPhone as the data comes directly from the server in a compressed form. It's also fairly trivial to configure Apache to allow you to store files compressed on disk and have it just send those rather than compress content on the fly. Unfortunately a lot of sites, even mobile friendly sites, don't bother enabling compression. The iPhone and other WebKit using phones all support it and have the power to make it useful.
The Shuttle was designed to do a couple of things, build and service a space station, launch a space telescope, launch/retrieve orbital experiments, and carry large military payloads and do all of this affordably through a high launch frequency. It has largely accomplished all of its missions except the affordability part. Yes it is bigger and more expensive than the Dyna Soar++ it was originally conceived to be and accomplished several of its goals a decade late but did largely live up to them. The major issue with the Shuttle which nearly (some might suggest did) ruined the whole program was the Challenger disaster.
In 1985 there were a record nine Shuttle missions. At that rate the Shuttle is fairly economical to fly as a lot of fixed costs get amortized over a larger number of launches. The economic efficiency of a launch vehicle is directly related to launch frequency. A big portion of launch cost is personnel costs, they're getting paid whether you do one or ten flights in a year. The key to the Shuttle being successful as a platform was/is a high launch frequency. Both NASA and the DoD had a number of satellite and space probe launches scheduled on the Shuttle which helped pad out NASA's manned space science missions (Spacelab, etc). These were all in addition to the long term plans like the space telescope and a space station. The Shuttle isn't cheap but is very capable, a single mission can replace several smaller scale missions that taken together would cost more than a Shuttle launch. The Challenger disaster ruined the Shuttle's scheduling and set NASA back by at least a decade.
The DoD was set to launch a number of spy satellites (including an early missile warning system) as well as the GPS Block II satellites on the Shuttle in 1986. With the Shuttle fleet grounded after Challenger the DoD had to kick their Complementary Expendable Launch Vehicle program into high gear. Originally meant to be a compliment to the Shuttle to cover tight last minute scheduling conflicts the program was repurposed to be a Shuttle replacement for a lot of DoD missions and became the Titan IV. The Delta II was developed to launch the GPS satellites and went on to be a fairly successful family of ELVs. The NASA missions intended to be launched on the Shuttle were all pushed back or canceled outright and the number of flights were cut back. In the late 80s and 90s a lot of would-be Shuttle business was instead taken up by the likes of the Delta II and Titan III. The as-designed space station was canceled its components later rolled into the ISS which became an international effort.
The Shuttle is not a perfect design but it is not the abject failure its detractors cast it as being. The Saturn was designed to be and was built as a racehorse, it was meant to get the Apollo stack to the Moon and that was about it. The Saturn was not very economical to build or launch and would have made a terrible workhorse. The Shuttle was a realization that cost to orbit was a bigger issues than getting more mass into orbit. If a smaller launcher can get half the mass into orbit at a third of the cost then more science can get done per dollar. The Shuttle was approaching the sweet spot of capability and affordability when the Challenger disaster happened. The program never really recovered economically from Challenger which meant one of the Shuttle's two main features was non-existant.
The Soviet Union (and today Russia) had direct access to the Baltic, the Arctic Sea (from which to access both Atlantic and Pacific with no "straits" to run through) and to the Bering Sea, Chukchi Sea and the Sea of Japan, not to mention the Black Sea.
Direct access is not the same as unrestricted access. Russia (and the former Soviet Union) only controls a single "warm water" port at Vladivostok. Russian access to the Atlantic is restricted through the Barents, Bering, and Black seas all bordering NATO members. Access to the Indian ocean requires the cooperation of various Middle East powers. Vladivostok has its own limitations due to its proximity to both Japan and South Korea. During the Cold War the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact powers maintained significantly fewer surface fleet assets than did the US and NATO powers. What a "two ocean" strategy describes is territorial control and force projection (sending someone to go fight) anywhere bordered by either the Pacific or Atlantic oceans. The US carrier battle group is designed to go just about anywhere in the world and fight a war. The Soviet and modern Russian navies are more based around cruiser battle groups which don't force project quite as well but can more readily disrupt maritime supply lines. So as the GP mentioned, Russia does not have a "two ocean" navy.
UMTS packet switched calls are already Voice over IP calls. UMTS carriers can support a number of optimizations for these calls that use things like header compression or stripping to reduce the bandwidth needed for calls. With third party VoIP the IP overhead is rarely going to be optimized as the packets will just be treated like normal data packets. This means third party VoIP would in most cases end up using more bandwidth than native UMTS VoIP even using super efficient codecs. Both methods use quite a bit more bandwidth than UMTS circuit switched calls which don't require all of the extra IP overhead. While some mythical data-service only iPhone might seem better at first, "I only pay for data!", it would actually be a larger burden on cellular networks and carriers would charge you even more than they do for traditional voice/data/SMS service. Bear in mind data-only cards carriers sell have required plans that start at around $60 and have fairly low bandwidth caps and high latency (for voice applications).
Your argument is silly. Buses pick you up from bus stops, not from your house. If you want to get on a bus you have to go to a bus stop. An intelligent civilization on a planet a thousand light years from Earth that has astronomers is going to look up and see a similar sky. Even if their eyes only work well in the infrared they can still build detectors (just like we do) that cover the entire EM spectrum. When they build their telescopes they will find the same things we have. Their radio telescopes will pick up synchrotron radiation, pulsars, AGNs, and the CMB. Their optical telescopes will see the same stars and they'll deduce similar if not the same cosmological and physical theories. An important thing they'll find are the hydrogen and hydroxyl lines in the microwave band. These lines are in the middle of a relatively quiet portion of the radio spectrum. These are both radio emission bus stops.
Any alien radio astronomers will be looking at the same frequencies that our radio astronomers do since they're both looking at all the same phenomena. If they decide to announce their presence to the rest of the galaxy their best bet will be to do so on a frequency other radio astronomers are likely to be looking at. You might catch a bus randomly passing by but your best bet is to wait at a bus stop since you can be reasonably sure a bus will eventually stop there. Interstellar messages don't have to be fully understood or translated to be important either. Simply receiving a coherent signal from another intelligent civilization would provide a wealth of information. For one it says "there's someone out there" and that signal is going to come from a specific place. Other types of telescopes can be trained on that location to try to learn all you could about that civilization or at least the environment they live in. The light coming from the planet traveled at the same speed as their radio signal so atmospheric spectra would be contemporaneous with the sending of the signal. Aliens detecting the Arecibo message would be able to look at Earth and see what it was like in 1974 when the message was sent. Knowing there's a civilization there they could keep telescopes trained on Earth to learn more about us even if they didn't fully understand the content of the Arecibo message.
It also does not matter in the slightest if there exist civilizations with esoteric means of communication. If they exist and want to talk to less advanced civilizations they'll communicate via the lowest common denominator of radio or optical transmissions. If they only want to communication via their esoteric means then they obviously only want to talk to equally advanced civilizations and we don't have a lot to offer them (at least they don't think we do). We don't really need to worry about such civilizations, we only need to concern ourselves with the ones stopping at the same bus stop as us. This is also why we tend to look for Earth-like planets when talking about extraterrestrial life. Yes some odd creatures with completely alien chemistries might exist but if we wouldn't recognize them then there is no reason to look for them right now. We can instead look for the creatures with chemistries we do understand fairly well and would recognize instantly. Also in the hunt for Earth-like planets we're not throwing away knowledge of all the non-Earth-like planets. If we find some life form in an asteroid or on the Moon with a chemistry completely unlike ours we can dig through our exoplanet archive and look for markers of such lifeforms on planets we found that were like the home of the life form we found. Just because life forms might exist that are unlike us or civilizations might exist that don't communicate like we do is no reason to assume that all life is unlike ours and all civilizations don't communicate like we do.
You're overstating the Shuttle's reboost utility for the station. Of all of the Shuttle's RCS thrusters it can only use its venier thrusters for reboost maneuvers. It's primary thrusters' plumes are directed at the station while docked and could damage it during a long turn (which reboosts require). Even using the smaller venier thrusters the burn has to be timed and pulsed carefully to keep from over stressing the docking adapters on both the station and the Shuttle. When the Shuttle is docked its only point of contact is the docking adapter. Most typically a docked Progress provides reboost for the station.
The issue during the Columbia stand down was MPLM missions that had been scheduled were put on hold. The MPLMs can carry about 10t of cargo so there was a huge gap in the ISS supply chain. The Progress can only carry about 2.6t of cargo which meant a single scrapped MPLM Shuttle mission would have required four previously unscheduled Progress flights. At the station complete stage the Shuttle will be less of a resupply necessity since the station will have water recycling (it has that now) and all of its modules will be in place. The ISS was designed to only really require ATV/HTV/Progress resupply once it was fully armed and operational. The Shuttle was required for construction but much less so once the station is actually complete.
What the fuck are you talking about? iTunes populates its database automatically from ID3 information in files you add to the library. When importing a CD it will look up CDDB information for you and populate the album's information from that. I can't think of an online music store that doesn't ship files with ID3 information. If you're importing CDs without looking up CDDB information or downloading untagged albums from BitTorrent you're just shitting in your own breakfast. Even then iTunes can still look up an album's information from CDDB to populate its database. It is absolutely trivial to manage the information in iTunes' database.
iTunes does not run in the background. The iTunesHelper app does. This app recognizes when an iPod is plugged in and launches iTunes if you've got that option set.
Yeah that's not going to really work in the United States. AT&T ended their unlimited data plan for GoPhone users back in November of last year. This leaves two data options there, ad-hoc which is 1/KB or the data packages which are 1MB for $4.99 (0.5/KB) and 100MB for $19.99 (0.2/KB). These prices are the same for the GoPhone (pay as you go) and monthly prepaid plans. At those data rates browsing the web is pretty damn expensive. Take the Engadget mobile page, it weighs in at about 128KB without clicking on any of the individual stories. Using the above prepaid prices a single load of the page will cost you either $1.28, $0.64, or $0.25. Using the web on a smartphone isn't terribly attractive if a mobile version of a web page costs you a quarter to view. The RSS feed is about 160KB but at least gives you all the front-page stories in a single go (for $0.32).
Sprint doesn't offer prepaid plans. Verizon has 99 "mobile web" offerings on their pre-paid plans but it doesn't detail what exactly that entails as they also have a $15/day "mobile broadband" plan. Verizon also requires any smartphones to be purchased with a contracted data plan (attached to a voice plan). It makes sense then to assume their 99 "mobile web" is only available on their pre-paid handsets which are most assuredly not smartphones. T-Mobile no longer offers pre-paid unlimited data plans for phones or data cards. The only pre-paid plan they have available is a data plan for the Sidekick.
No hybrid on the market today uses lead-acid batteries for their battery packs and all the manufacturers of hybrids have well established recycling programs for their batteries. While not every bit of the battery is easily reusable NiMH and most LiIon batteries contain no heavy metals. The lead-acid batteries used for the starters are also smaller than those needed in non-hybrids and there's lots of recycling programs for lead-acid batteries. Hybrids also have the advantage of advanced charge controllers (the secret sauce of hybrid car batteries) that keep the batteries optimally charged. This give the batteries (either NiMH or LiIon) a much longer usable lifetime than they would get if they were just dumb charged like reusable AAs.
You claim to have done more research than some people but you're either misinformed or being dishonest in condemning hybrids as major end-of-life polluters. Hybrids cars are not the ultimate solution to all of our transportation needs but they do open a lot of important opportunities. For starters the engineering work on hybrid cars has uses besides just hybrid cars themselves. The first generation Honda Insight gets its good milage partially from being a hybrid and partially from its aerodynamics and its drive mechanics (CVT etc.). Several truck manufacturers are now producing hybrid trucks, I believe UPS is operating a few of them right now. Not only do they get better milage in city driving conditions than standard diesels but they also have reduced emissions. Replacing local delivery trucks with hybrids would significantly reduce diesel emissions in cities which is really important for people who like or need to breath.
In many FOSS forums especially on Slashdot you see the Joe Sixpack strawman trotted out to either attack or defend. There's far more classes of users than just witless Joe Sixpack and savvy Tom Developer. There's plenty of people that are highly adept at using a computer but can't and will never program. There's also a lot of users that are adept at what they do often but have little computer knowledge outside of that particular domain. Looking at these users as Joe Sixpack who's never touched a computer before is shortsighted and counterproductive. The article bitching about social media widgets and whether or not people asked for them is inane. If some kid spends all their time on Facebook and Twitter and buys a netbook with Linux pre-installed they'll be far less likely to go back to Windows if their new computer works out of the box with the services they already use. A Facebook widget isn't likely to sell a computer as a part of the feature checklist on the box but it's something that will help endear the OS (as they experience it) to the user.
NASA's highest budget years (in today's dollars) were 1963-69 and topped out at 5.5% of the federal budget. In the 70s this dropped to below 2% then below 1% where it stayed until the late 80s early 90s where it went back to 1%. It then went back down below 1% and has stayed there since. The total cost of Apollo was somewhere around $145b in today's dollars. For comparison the ISS is at about $150b with about $100b of that being paid by the US. The Interstate highway system between 1956 and 1991 cost about $500b and World War II cost about $288b. The Big Dig doesn't even come remotely close to these so your sense of scale is a little distorted. I wonder though which megaprojects do you think we should have taken on after Apollo but neglected to because we all decided to be pussies? Apollo only had as much funding and Congressional interest as it took to beat the USSR to the Moon. Once we landed there everyone stopped giving a shit and cut NASA's funding in half. Don't kid yourself, Apollo was an awesome project that advanced many fields of science significantly but it was undertaken as a dig swinging contest with the USSR.
In terms of rockets, while the Titans were a relatively dependable family they were expensive and dangerous. The current batch of EELVs beats the biggest Titan IV in lifting capability and price. I can't find any specifics on the Titan V's proposed payloads or costs but if they're anything like the Titan 3L2 and 3L4 studies done in the 60s they would have been expensive but impressive LVs. As it stands though the existing Delta IV and Altas V heavy variants are cheaper and have good lifting capacity. With nominal upgrades both EELVs can be man-rated and easily capable of both ISS and Lunar Orion launches. It would also mean that NASA is opening up a market for man-rated HLVs. This fulfills your proposal for opening a factory and building rockets on a massive scale. You're not going to see SBS systems any time soon as they're impractical to build and launch from Earth but there's a lot of missions that will become tenable if the cost of HLVs comes down due to demand.
With Nokia, Google, Palm, and Apple all backing WebKit based browsers it is highly unlikely that Opera is going to magically "rebound" in popularity if the iPhone's popularity wanes. WebKit is open source so it can live past the interests of any of its corporate backers and performs really well even in the mobile space. Opera's mobile browsers require all sorts of tricks to give the appearance of good performance. Opera is better than older versions of mobile IE and RIM's horrible browser but that's not saying much.
Rail shooters work pretty well on the iPhone, i.e. Time Crisis works well enough on the iPhone. Wolf3D is also fun to play and I'm looking forward to Doom. There's nothing inherently wrong with rail shooters and there's likely a lot of legs to that type of game on touch devices. A lot of FPSes are effectively on rails but allow free movement to give the illusion that they're not. On the iPhone such a game could just be a rail shooter and let you focus on the shooting part. More to the point, games have adapted to a variety of controller types over the years. A lot of the genres you mentioned are as old as video games. Several game types used paddle controllers in the 70s, if you can use a dial to control a game you can use a tilt sensor. Besides the genres you mention adapting play styles to fit the iPhone there's also the other half of the game market. There's plenty of genres that are almost optimized for playing on a touch sensitive screen. Point-and-click adventure games like Myst are a natural fit as are many types of RPGs. Shmups that use the tilt sensors tend to work really well in most cases.
The iPhone isn't going to be good at every single type of game but it doesn't have to be. It also offers a bit more than just a touch screen to developers. The iPhone can find its location via GPS, the 3GS can determine its heading with its compass, and can find its orientation in space with the motion sensors. It also has a microphone, a camera, and near constant network connectivity. While the motion sensors are probably most useful for controlling games of all those features the others do offer developers options.
School textbooks in California face a far more complex problem than the up front cost of books from publishers. We have some of the toughest and byzantine textbook requirements in the country. This has contributed to us paying ridiculous prices for textbooks since fewer publishers want to even try selling the state new books. To compound this problem the textbook review process has been co-opted by a variety of special interest groups which increases requirements of publishers even further. This factor has also led to a lobotomization of actual content in textbooks, these SIGs demand history be white washed and reading material not be too stimulating. If we can break down the book approval/purchasing system into a more rational one we'll immediately save some money since we'll have actual competition between different publishers for our business.
The costs of paper books is a bit of a red herring. The emphasis in these sorts of comments tends to be on the paper part as if paper was somehow amazingly expensive or a fundamentally poor medium. The printing and materials cost of textbooks is a tiny fraction of their cover price. Our approval process puts up large barriers of entry for publishers meaning that only larger publishers with a plethora of reviews and revisions will ever get adopted. This added overhead increases the non-printing portion of the book's production cost which in turn is added to the cover price. If we just switched from a paper version of a book from ABC Publishing to the online version the only money saved would be the physical production price which is relatively small. A $100 would end up turning into a $90 book.
It's not so much suburban building needs to stop it just needs to be done better. The early suburban growth of the US was based entirely around mass transit systems. You had both railroad and streetcar suburbs. Railroad suburbs were often small towns that railroads had built stations in. When a small town got its rail link to the bigger nearby city the upper and middle class city workers would often emigrate from the cities to the smaller towns and then commute back into the city by day to work. Streetcar suburbs were similar but were based around streetcars (horse, cable, and electric). Cities would build extensions in the agricultural or unused outskirts of town and then connect the extension to the city's streetcar lines. The streetcar suburbs were closer to the city than the railroad suburbs and tended to be compressed much like the inner city though on a bit smaller of a scale.
In railroad suburbs you basically had a self sufficient town that saw an influx of commuters move in. Since these were small towns (until their population boomed) local transportation could easily be done on foot. Railroad suburbs developed around the local train stations. Streetcar suburbs were more linearly set up since streetcars ran on rails on existing streets. They were at least zoned such that houses and shops were all within walking distance of each other. The streetcar suburb would often be rows of houses along a street car line with shops at or near intersections of those lines. In both cases the suburbs provided an easy and relatively cheap commute into the heart of the city and really anywhere people needed to go.
For starters the en.m.wikipedia.org site uses the same URL scheme as the normal Wikipedia. By changing the subdomain from "en." to "en.m." you're magically using the mobile version of Wikipedia. This also allows easy links different Wikipedia site translations, this is the German version of this page. The old mobile site is fine for accessing with older or less capable devices or if you have an extreme bandwidth constraint. The newer mobile page (which has actually been live for quite a while) gives a much better experience on more capable devices.
The Etruscans didn't build Roman roads. You could say the Romans copied the specs of their chariots from some earlier culture. You might be strictly correct but also rather foolish. Horse drawn chariots made by anyone have natural dimensions, based on the width of a horse and how much horizontal clearance they need to run. You line the wheels of the chariot up with the center of the horse's ass so it remains balanced when its pulled. Your supposed point is invalid.
If it is important I'll leave a voicemail or a follow up SMS (if it is a cell). I like to give people at least some idea why I called and give them enough information to figure out if they want to call me back or not. I try not to be a hypocrite when it comes to voicemails so I try to never leave "call me back" messages.
To answer my own rhetorical question he has, he spends a paragraph musing over Visual Voicemail. I don't quite understand what his problem with it is, the iPhone lets you not listen to messages as easily as it lets you listen to them. It also makes sure messages are associated with contacts in your address book so its obvious who the voicemail is from. He could just used the "missing calls" screen or listen to the voicemails or just throw his phone in a lake because he doesn't seem to be a good conversationalist anyways.
The main complaint of the article isn't a technical one, both Visual Voicemail and Google Voice solve the technical problems with voicemail. His real problem is a social one. His friends are assholes and leave messages consisting of "call me back" knowing they're calling his cell phone and more to the point probably know he has an iPhone or doesn't like checking his voicemail. He's not using the iPhone's ability to ignore useless voicemails and his friends don't seem to register the fact he has caller ID and will be able to see he missed their call.
This is a vexing situation because these people have probably had cell phones for the past ten years if not longer. They know everyone has caller ID and their phones alert them to missed calls. There's no need to waste the time on "call me back" voicemails for anyone. At the same time voicemail is not without its uses. Voicemail can be left by anyone with a phone including landlines. Your SO can leave a message from their landline work phone saying they'll be late for dinner or your kid's school can tell you to come pick them up because they're sick. Voice also tends to be a bit more information dense than printed words since it can convey emotion as well as information.
Oh well, we should all ditch voicemail because a Slate writer has dumbass friends.
This whole idea begs the question of whether or not newspapers actually need "saving". The Kindle is not going to save large newspapers anymore than their websites will save them. What needs to change is not so much the delivery format but the way newspapers are run. Newspapers and news entities cannot effectively run as for-profit organizations or at the very least not as publicly traded for-profit organizations. The demand for stock price returns have led to newsroom cuts, consolidations, and expansions into markets newspapers shouldn't really be in. Newspapers either became or got swallowed up by "media companies" and now are part of television, radio, newspapers, magazine, and sometimes internet media conglomerates. We're all the worse for it because in order to drive a profit newspapers have increased column inches for advertising and reduced column inches for actual articles. They've also taken to filling space with wire articles instead of having a decent sized newsroom of their own. Wire services in and of themselves are useful entities, especially for smaller papers but we've moved into an age where people can log onto Google News and read wire service articles, newspapers don't need to waste ink printing them.
What will save newspapers the media conglomerates failing under their own weight and breaking back up. Newspapers will end up becoming more format neutral news organizations. They'll start providing news articles to specialized providers instead of running the whole stack themselves. A newsroom will write the stories and pass them off to Amazon to load on the Kindle, to Audible to make into an audiobook, to their website, and to a printer that will put the words to paper for people that still want (or need) a physical version of the news. The LA Times newspaper (for example) however will probably go away. It will end up being the "News and other work from the LA region" paper. A dedicated publishing group will pick up stories from the LA Times newsroom, advertisers, and possibly local blogs, and print and distribute them. The LA Times newsroom will no longer have to worry about the printer as long as their stories are submitted on time, advertisers can still get local ads out to people, and everyone will still be able to get the news that is important to them.
The main difference between that future and today will be the newsroom and the printer will not be owned and operated by the same company. More newsrooms will likely end up privatized or run as community owned entities similar to the St.Petersburg Times. News is a difficult thing to make profitable as it is a service in the public interest. If existing news organizations don't reorganize they will fail and other organizations with more streamlined processes and better management will eventually fill the void. A newspaper might fail but the journalists that love their work will keep doing it in one way or another.
Stop bringing this point up as it is for the most part worthless. For starters looking for completely alien types of life is damn near pointless because we would be highly unlikely to recognize it as such. Such life could readily exist on Earth right now but we do not recognize it. Looking for something without knowing what to look for isn't going to be very fruitful. It will be more useful to look for planets and solar systems like ours to look for life like ours. We would be able to recognize it more easily and we can use all of our baselines to determine its characteristics. Not finding a bunch of life like ours will also be useful in letting us know our type of life is not common in the galaxy and then we should look for the more exotic types.
Life on Earth loves carbon and water because both have fairly unique properties among naturally occurring chemicals. As any organic chemistry student will tell you carbon can form into a multitude of configurations each with unique properties of their own. It's far more difficult for silicon to form such long/complex chains so it's less than ideal as a biological base chemical. Water like carbon has some useful properties, its solid form is less dense than its liquid form which means things living at the bottom of an ocean or lake don't necessarily freeze when the temperature drops. Water is also a great solvent without being too damaging and is fairly abundant in the universe.
Narrowing a search for life to something similar to ourselves is not going to miss out on some big picture. There's hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, we don't have to find every bit of life everywhere. We only need to find one other solar system with life to know life is not a unique phenomenon in the universe. Two says we're a little more common, a thousand says we're downright expected. It's fine to skip over the highly exotic life forms because it's highly likely that there's at least a measurable number of solar systems with life similar enough to ours to recognize it as such.
An endowment is not a checking account an organization can just withdrawl cash from and spend. The endowment exists because the organization lives off the interest generated by the endowment. If they just dipped into the endowment whenever they needed money the endowment would quickly dry up. Endowments only distribute a small percentage of their total value in any given year. This article from August 2007 explains Harvard's endowment a bit more. According to that article they seek to spend 5% of the endowment per year and as of that article has distributed $1.1b which is about 3% of the endowment. If returns on Harvard's endowment are down 40% and continue to be down over the next few years the endowment will start to shrink making that 5% distribution smaller. If Harvard's operating expenses are $3b as the article claims then lower endowment distributions means they either need to cut operating expenses or get that operating capital from somewhere else. Oh shit, organizations with endowments have real budgetary concerns!
If a hostile civilization has the capability to travel through the depths of space and blow us to smithereens we're already boned. With our current level of technology (which does not include manned deep space travel of smithereen blasting) we've managed to find more than 300 extra solar planets. A space traveling smithereen blasting civilization could easily build a highly advanced interferometer which would be able to not only detect Earth but map its surface and take spectrographic readings. If this civilization is within about 100 lightyears of Earth they would have had the opportunity to observe the rising CO2 in our atmosphere and other effects of the industrial revolution. A long term study would show that there was no series of geological events tied to this rise and conclude that the life on this planet was building stuff. With even bigger and more powerful telescopes they could possibly plot the expansion of agriculture and urbanization. At the very least they would be able to conclude that Earth is teeming with life of some sort that they might want to blow to smithereens. There's no need for such a civilization to wait until they start hearing our radio broadcasts.
The idea of blasting rival civilizations to smithereens and/or enslaving populations comes from a lack of appreciation for exactly how massive a distance there is between stars. Alpha Centauri is fairly close to our solar system but between us and it is a mind-bogglingly large gulf of not-a-whole-lot. If you were traveling towards it in a space ship it would remain a tiny white dot in the sky until you were within a few AU of it, a single lightyear is 63,241AU and Alpha Centauri is 276,363AU away. This whole idea is something born of science fiction and not really rooted in any sort of scientific fact. Comparisons to Earthly travel and destruction (the New World et al.) don't really fit the scale of the problem. Hernán Cortés sailing across the Atlantic and killing Aztecs is not even close to the same scale as Zorg'pht of Gliese 876 traveling to our solar system to beat the shit out of humans.
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For one I take issue with the characterization of game players as either "hardcore" or "casual". There's a lot more to gamers than this false dichotomy. Gamers have a wide spectrum of likes and dislikes and skill sets. Someone might be a "hardcore" Halo player as they're really good at it but might only play RTSes occasionally and only "casually" because they're not good at them. Are they hardcore or casual? Oh no the stupid two-party classification has broken down! Also whenever you read "casual gamer" on a blog or in a magazine mentally replace that term with "retard" because that is the connotation the word has anymore and it is ridiculous.
What is worse is when developers somehow target "casual/retard" or "hardcore" players with their games. They want to consider their target audience as "hardcore" so they leave out any and all features which might lessen the challenge of the game for their precious hardcore strawmen. You can play Fallout 3 without ever really using VATS but it is a nice feature for people who aren't terribly talented aiming in an FPS with a console controller. VATS makes the game more approachable because you can be a good RPG player but bad at FPSes and still enjoy the game. The opposite also happens, developers will target "casual/retard" players and not include any features which might challenge players too much or assign their third string development teams to make the games.
This article is filled with such bullshit and and presumes that more immersion is somehow needed to make games good. It's nice to see someone wondering aloud that maybe new camera angles need to be tried in games or that there's too little innovation in control schemes. What pisses me off is the suggestion that FPSes are too hard for "casuals/retards" and "hardcores" aren't properly served by them. Just because someone doesn't live and breath Halo multiplayer doesn't mean they are somehow discombobulated at the mere thought of a character's point of view being the exact same as that of the player. Just because you live and breath Halo multiplayer doesn't mean you don't want to chill out playing Tetris every now and again.
This article's suggestion that somehow "casual/retard" players will have to wait until the Wii, Natal, or PS3 motion sensor dumbs down FPSes for them to play is ludicrous. It's not only the "hardcore" strawmen that can use an XBox controller. If a developer's game is so hard to control that only the most dedicated players can make it past the second level then the developer fucked up. They're games, a form of entertainment, they shouldn't require absolute dedication to beat or even get far enough to make it interesting. Unfortunately these games get passes on the controls because they turned the graphics to 11 or more realistically render blood splatter patterns. Games don't need to be divided into "unplayable by anyone with a full time job" and "press X to win".
The iPhone (and other WebKit browsers) fully support normal HTTP compression schemes and Etags, webmasters just need to enable it on the server end. If servers enable compression there's no need for an intermediary for the iPhone as the data comes directly from the server in a compressed form. It's also fairly trivial to configure Apache to allow you to store files compressed on disk and have it just send those rather than compress content on the fly. Unfortunately a lot of sites, even mobile friendly sites, don't bother enabling compression. The iPhone and other WebKit using phones all support it and have the power to make it useful.
The Shuttle was designed to do a couple of things, build and service a space station, launch a space telescope, launch/retrieve orbital experiments, and carry large military payloads and do all of this affordably through a high launch frequency. It has largely accomplished all of its missions except the affordability part. Yes it is bigger and more expensive than the Dyna Soar++ it was originally conceived to be and accomplished several of its goals a decade late but did largely live up to them. The major issue with the Shuttle which nearly (some might suggest did) ruined the whole program was the Challenger disaster.
In 1985 there were a record nine Shuttle missions. At that rate the Shuttle is fairly economical to fly as a lot of fixed costs get amortized over a larger number of launches. The economic efficiency of a launch vehicle is directly related to launch frequency. A big portion of launch cost is personnel costs, they're getting paid whether you do one or ten flights in a year. The key to the Shuttle being successful as a platform was/is a high launch frequency. Both NASA and the DoD had a number of satellite and space probe launches scheduled on the Shuttle which helped pad out NASA's manned space science missions (Spacelab, etc). These were all in addition to the long term plans like the space telescope and a space station. The Shuttle isn't cheap but is very capable, a single mission can replace several smaller scale missions that taken together would cost more than a Shuttle launch. The Challenger disaster ruined the Shuttle's scheduling and set NASA back by at least a decade.
The DoD was set to launch a number of spy satellites (including an early missile warning system) as well as the GPS Block II satellites on the Shuttle in 1986. With the Shuttle fleet grounded after Challenger the DoD had to kick their Complementary Expendable Launch Vehicle program into high gear. Originally meant to be a compliment to the Shuttle to cover tight last minute scheduling conflicts the program was repurposed to be a Shuttle replacement for a lot of DoD missions and became the Titan IV. The Delta II was developed to launch the GPS satellites and went on to be a fairly successful family of ELVs. The NASA missions intended to be launched on the Shuttle were all pushed back or canceled outright and the number of flights were cut back. In the late 80s and 90s a lot of would-be Shuttle business was instead taken up by the likes of the Delta II and Titan III. The as-designed space station was canceled its components later rolled into the ISS which became an international effort.
The Shuttle is not a perfect design but it is not the abject failure its detractors cast it as being. The Saturn was designed to be and was built as a racehorse, it was meant to get the Apollo stack to the Moon and that was about it. The Saturn was not very economical to build or launch and would have made a terrible workhorse. The Shuttle was a realization that cost to orbit was a bigger issues than getting more mass into orbit. If a smaller launcher can get half the mass into orbit at a third of the cost then more science can get done per dollar. The Shuttle was approaching the sweet spot of capability and affordability when the Challenger disaster happened. The program never really recovered economically from Challenger which meant one of the Shuttle's two main features was non-existant.
Direct access is not the same as unrestricted access. Russia (and the former Soviet Union) only controls a single "warm water" port at Vladivostok. Russian access to the Atlantic is restricted through the Barents, Bering, and Black seas all bordering NATO members. Access to the Indian ocean requires the cooperation of various Middle East powers. Vladivostok has its own limitations due to its proximity to both Japan and South Korea. During the Cold War the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact powers maintained significantly fewer surface fleet assets than did the US and NATO powers. What a "two ocean" strategy describes is territorial control and force projection (sending someone to go fight) anywhere bordered by either the Pacific or Atlantic oceans. The US carrier battle group is designed to go just about anywhere in the world and fight a war. The Soviet and modern Russian navies are more based around cruiser battle groups which don't force project quite as well but can more readily disrupt maritime supply lines. So as the GP mentioned, Russia does not have a "two ocean" navy.
UMTS packet switched calls are already Voice over IP calls. UMTS carriers can support a number of optimizations for these calls that use things like header compression or stripping to reduce the bandwidth needed for calls. With third party VoIP the IP overhead is rarely going to be optimized as the packets will just be treated like normal data packets. This means third party VoIP would in most cases end up using more bandwidth than native UMTS VoIP even using super efficient codecs. Both methods use quite a bit more bandwidth than UMTS circuit switched calls which don't require all of the extra IP overhead. While some mythical data-service only iPhone might seem better at first, "I only pay for data!", it would actually be a larger burden on cellular networks and carriers would charge you even more than they do for traditional voice/data/SMS service. Bear in mind data-only cards carriers sell have required plans that start at around $60 and have fairly low bandwidth caps and high latency (for voice applications).
Your argument is silly. Buses pick you up from bus stops, not from your house. If you want to get on a bus you have to go to a bus stop. An intelligent civilization on a planet a thousand light years from Earth that has astronomers is going to look up and see a similar sky. Even if their eyes only work well in the infrared they can still build detectors (just like we do) that cover the entire EM spectrum. When they build their telescopes they will find the same things we have. Their radio telescopes will pick up synchrotron radiation, pulsars, AGNs, and the CMB. Their optical telescopes will see the same stars and they'll deduce similar if not the same cosmological and physical theories. An important thing they'll find are the hydrogen and hydroxyl lines in the microwave band. These lines are in the middle of a relatively quiet portion of the radio spectrum. These are both radio emission bus stops.
Any alien radio astronomers will be looking at the same frequencies that our radio astronomers do since they're both looking at all the same phenomena. If they decide to announce their presence to the rest of the galaxy their best bet will be to do so on a frequency other radio astronomers are likely to be looking at. You might catch a bus randomly passing by but your best bet is to wait at a bus stop since you can be reasonably sure a bus will eventually stop there. Interstellar messages don't have to be fully understood or translated to be important either. Simply receiving a coherent signal from another intelligent civilization would provide a wealth of information. For one it says "there's someone out there" and that signal is going to come from a specific place. Other types of telescopes can be trained on that location to try to learn all you could about that civilization or at least the environment they live in. The light coming from the planet traveled at the same speed as their radio signal so atmospheric spectra would be contemporaneous with the sending of the signal. Aliens detecting the Arecibo message would be able to look at Earth and see what it was like in 1974 when the message was sent. Knowing there's a civilization there they could keep telescopes trained on Earth to learn more about us even if they didn't fully understand the content of the Arecibo message.
It also does not matter in the slightest if there exist civilizations with esoteric means of communication. If they exist and want to talk to less advanced civilizations they'll communicate via the lowest common denominator of radio or optical transmissions. If they only want to communication via their esoteric means then they obviously only want to talk to equally advanced civilizations and we don't have a lot to offer them (at least they don't think we do). We don't really need to worry about such civilizations, we only need to concern ourselves with the ones stopping at the same bus stop as us. This is also why we tend to look for Earth-like planets when talking about extraterrestrial life. Yes some odd creatures with completely alien chemistries might exist but if we wouldn't recognize them then there is no reason to look for them right now. We can instead look for the creatures with chemistries we do understand fairly well and would recognize instantly. Also in the hunt for Earth-like planets we're not throwing away knowledge of all the non-Earth-like planets. If we find some life form in an asteroid or on the Moon with a chemistry completely unlike ours we can dig through our exoplanet archive and look for markers of such lifeforms on planets we found that were like the home of the life form we found. Just because life forms might exist that are unlike us or civilizations might exist that don't communicate like we do is no reason to assume that all life is unlike ours and all civilizations don't communicate like we do.
You're overstating the Shuttle's reboost utility for the station. Of all of the Shuttle's RCS thrusters it can only use its venier thrusters for reboost maneuvers. It's primary thrusters' plumes are directed at the station while docked and could damage it during a long turn (which reboosts require). Even using the smaller venier thrusters the burn has to be timed and pulsed carefully to keep from over stressing the docking adapters on both the station and the Shuttle. When the Shuttle is docked its only point of contact is the docking adapter. Most typically a docked Progress provides reboost for the station.
The issue during the Columbia stand down was MPLM missions that had been scheduled were put on hold. The MPLMs can carry about 10t of cargo so there was a huge gap in the ISS supply chain. The Progress can only carry about 2.6t of cargo which meant a single scrapped MPLM Shuttle mission would have required four previously unscheduled Progress flights. At the station complete stage the Shuttle will be less of a resupply necessity since the station will have water recycling (it has that now) and all of its modules will be in place. The ISS was designed to only really require ATV/HTV/Progress resupply once it was fully armed and operational. The Shuttle was required for construction but much less so once the station is actually complete.
What the fuck are you talking about? iTunes populates its database automatically from ID3 information in files you add to the library. When importing a CD it will look up CDDB information for you and populate the album's information from that. I can't think of an online music store that doesn't ship files with ID3 information. If you're importing CDs without looking up CDDB information or downloading untagged albums from BitTorrent you're just shitting in your own breakfast. Even then iTunes can still look up an album's information from CDDB to populate its database. It is absolutely trivial to manage the information in iTunes' database.
iTunes does not run in the background. The iTunesHelper app does. This app recognizes when an iPod is plugged in and launches iTunes if you've got that option set.
Yeah that's not going to really work in the United States. AT&T ended their unlimited data plan for GoPhone users back in November of last year. This leaves two data options there, ad-hoc which is 1/KB or the data packages which are 1MB for $4.99 (0.5/KB) and 100MB for $19.99 (0.2/KB). These prices are the same for the GoPhone (pay as you go) and monthly prepaid plans. At those data rates browsing the web is pretty damn expensive. Take the Engadget mobile page, it weighs in at about 128KB without clicking on any of the individual stories. Using the above prepaid prices a single load of the page will cost you either $1.28, $0.64, or $0.25. Using the web on a smartphone isn't terribly attractive if a mobile version of a web page costs you a quarter to view. The RSS feed is about 160KB but at least gives you all the front-page stories in a single go (for $0.32).
Sprint doesn't offer prepaid plans. Verizon has 99 "mobile web" offerings on their pre-paid plans but it doesn't detail what exactly that entails as they also have a $15/day "mobile broadband" plan. Verizon also requires any smartphones to be purchased with a contracted data plan (attached to a voice plan). It makes sense then to assume their 99 "mobile web" is only available on their pre-paid handsets which are most assuredly not smartphones. T-Mobile no longer offers pre-paid unlimited data plans for phones or data cards. The only pre-paid plan they have available is a data plan for the Sidekick.
No hybrid on the market today uses lead-acid batteries for their battery packs and all the manufacturers of hybrids have well established recycling programs for their batteries. While not every bit of the battery is easily reusable NiMH and most LiIon batteries contain no heavy metals. The lead-acid batteries used for the starters are also smaller than those needed in non-hybrids and there's lots of recycling programs for lead-acid batteries. Hybrids also have the advantage of advanced charge controllers (the secret sauce of hybrid car batteries) that keep the batteries optimally charged. This give the batteries (either NiMH or LiIon) a much longer usable lifetime than they would get if they were just dumb charged like reusable AAs.
You claim to have done more research than some people but you're either misinformed or being dishonest in condemning hybrids as major end-of-life polluters. Hybrids cars are not the ultimate solution to all of our transportation needs but they do open a lot of important opportunities. For starters the engineering work on hybrid cars has uses besides just hybrid cars themselves. The first generation Honda Insight gets its good milage partially from being a hybrid and partially from its aerodynamics and its drive mechanics (CVT etc.). Several truck manufacturers are now producing hybrid trucks, I believe UPS is operating a few of them right now. Not only do they get better milage in city driving conditions than standard diesels but they also have reduced emissions. Replacing local delivery trucks with hybrids would significantly reduce diesel emissions in cities which is really important for people who like or need to breath.
In many FOSS forums especially on Slashdot you see the Joe Sixpack strawman trotted out to either attack or defend. There's far more classes of users than just witless Joe Sixpack and savvy Tom Developer. There's plenty of people that are highly adept at using a computer but can't and will never program. There's also a lot of users that are adept at what they do often but have little computer knowledge outside of that particular domain. Looking at these users as Joe Sixpack who's never touched a computer before is shortsighted and counterproductive. The article bitching about social media widgets and whether or not people asked for them is inane. If some kid spends all their time on Facebook and Twitter and buys a netbook with Linux pre-installed they'll be far less likely to go back to Windows if their new computer works out of the box with the services they already use. A Facebook widget isn't likely to sell a computer as a part of the feature checklist on the box but it's something that will help endear the OS (as they experience it) to the user.
NASA's highest budget years (in today's dollars) were 1963-69 and topped out at 5.5% of the federal budget. In the 70s this dropped to below 2% then below 1% where it stayed until the late 80s early 90s where it went back to 1%. It then went back down below 1% and has stayed there since. The total cost of Apollo was somewhere around $145b in today's dollars. For comparison the ISS is at about $150b with about $100b of that being paid by the US. The Interstate highway system between 1956 and 1991 cost about $500b and World War II cost about $288b. The Big Dig doesn't even come remotely close to these so your sense of scale is a little distorted. I wonder though which megaprojects do you think we should have taken on after Apollo but neglected to because we all decided to be pussies? Apollo only had as much funding and Congressional interest as it took to beat the USSR to the Moon. Once we landed there everyone stopped giving a shit and cut NASA's funding in half. Don't kid yourself, Apollo was an awesome project that advanced many fields of science significantly but it was undertaken as a dig swinging contest with the USSR.
In terms of rockets, while the Titans were a relatively dependable family they were expensive and dangerous. The current batch of EELVs beats the biggest Titan IV in lifting capability and price. I can't find any specifics on the Titan V's proposed payloads or costs but if they're anything like the Titan 3L2 and 3L4 studies done in the 60s they would have been expensive but impressive LVs. As it stands though the existing Delta IV and Altas V heavy variants are cheaper and have good lifting capacity. With nominal upgrades both EELVs can be man-rated and easily capable of both ISS and Lunar Orion launches. It would also mean that NASA is opening up a market for man-rated HLVs. This fulfills your proposal for opening a factory and building rockets on a massive scale. You're not going to see SBS systems any time soon as they're impractical to build and launch from Earth but there's a lot of missions that will become tenable if the cost of HLVs comes down due to demand.
With Nokia, Google, Palm, and Apple all backing WebKit based browsers it is highly unlikely that Opera is going to magically "rebound" in popularity if the iPhone's popularity wanes. WebKit is open source so it can live past the interests of any of its corporate backers and performs really well even in the mobile space. Opera's mobile browsers require all sorts of tricks to give the appearance of good performance. Opera is better than older versions of mobile IE and RIM's horrible browser but that's not saying much.
Rail shooters work pretty well on the iPhone, i.e. Time Crisis works well enough on the iPhone. Wolf3D is also fun to play and I'm looking forward to Doom. There's nothing inherently wrong with rail shooters and there's likely a lot of legs to that type of game on touch devices. A lot of FPSes are effectively on rails but allow free movement to give the illusion that they're not. On the iPhone such a game could just be a rail shooter and let you focus on the shooting part. More to the point, games have adapted to a variety of controller types over the years. A lot of the genres you mentioned are as old as video games. Several game types used paddle controllers in the 70s, if you can use a dial to control a game you can use a tilt sensor. Besides the genres you mention adapting play styles to fit the iPhone there's also the other half of the game market. There's plenty of genres that are almost optimized for playing on a touch sensitive screen. Point-and-click adventure games like Myst are a natural fit as are many types of RPGs. Shmups that use the tilt sensors tend to work really well in most cases.
The iPhone isn't going to be good at every single type of game but it doesn't have to be. It also offers a bit more than just a touch screen to developers. The iPhone can find its location via GPS, the 3GS can determine its heading with its compass, and can find its orientation in space with the motion sensors. It also has a microphone, a camera, and near constant network connectivity. While the motion sensors are probably most useful for controlling games of all those features the others do offer developers options.
School textbooks in California face a far more complex problem than the up front cost of books from publishers. We have some of the toughest and byzantine textbook requirements in the country. This has contributed to us paying ridiculous prices for textbooks since fewer publishers want to even try selling the state new books. To compound this problem the textbook review process has been co-opted by a variety of special interest groups which increases requirements of publishers even further. This factor has also led to a lobotomization of actual content in textbooks, these SIGs demand history be white washed and reading material not be too stimulating. If we can break down the book approval/purchasing system into a more rational one we'll immediately save some money since we'll have actual competition between different publishers for our business.
The costs of paper books is a bit of a red herring. The emphasis in these sorts of comments tends to be on the paper part as if paper was somehow amazingly expensive or a fundamentally poor medium. The printing and materials cost of textbooks is a tiny fraction of their cover price. Our approval process puts up large barriers of entry for publishers meaning that only larger publishers with a plethora of reviews and revisions will ever get adopted. This added overhead increases the non-printing portion of the book's production cost which in turn is added to the cover price. If we just switched from a paper version of a book from ABC Publishing to the online version the only money saved would be the physical production price which is relatively small. A $100 would end up turning into a $90 book.
It's not so much suburban building needs to stop it just needs to be done better. The early suburban growth of the US was based entirely around mass transit systems. You had both railroad and streetcar suburbs. Railroad suburbs were often small towns that railroads had built stations in. When a small town got its rail link to the bigger nearby city the upper and middle class city workers would often emigrate from the cities to the smaller towns and then commute back into the city by day to work. Streetcar suburbs were similar but were based around streetcars (horse, cable, and electric). Cities would build extensions in the agricultural or unused outskirts of town and then connect the extension to the city's streetcar lines. The streetcar suburbs were closer to the city than the railroad suburbs and tended to be compressed much like the inner city though on a bit smaller of a scale.
In railroad suburbs you basically had a self sufficient town that saw an influx of commuters move in. Since these were small towns (until their population boomed) local transportation could easily be done on foot. Railroad suburbs developed around the local train stations. Streetcar suburbs were more linearly set up since streetcars ran on rails on existing streets. They were at least zoned such that houses and shops were all within walking distance of each other. The streetcar suburb would often be rows of houses along a street car line with shops at or near intersections of those lines. In both cases the suburbs provided an easy and relatively cheap commute into the heart of the city and really anywhere people needed to go.
For starters the en.m.wikipedia.org site uses the same URL scheme as the normal Wikipedia. By changing the subdomain from "en." to "en.m." you're magically using the mobile version of Wikipedia. This also allows easy links different Wikipedia site translations, this is the German version of this page. The old mobile site is fine for accessing with older or less capable devices or if you have an extreme bandwidth constraint. The newer mobile page (which has actually been live for quite a while) gives a much better experience on more capable devices.
The Etruscans didn't build Roman roads. You could say the Romans copied the specs of their chariots from some earlier culture. You might be strictly correct but also rather foolish. Horse drawn chariots made by anyone have natural dimensions, based on the width of a horse and how much horizontal clearance they need to run. You line the wheels of the chariot up with the center of the horse's ass so it remains balanced when its pulled. Your supposed point is invalid.
If it is important I'll leave a voicemail or a follow up SMS (if it is a cell). I like to give people at least some idea why I called and give them enough information to figure out if they want to call me back or not. I try not to be a hypocrite when it comes to voicemails so I try to never leave "call me back" messages.
To answer my own rhetorical question he has, he spends a paragraph musing over Visual Voicemail. I don't quite understand what his problem with it is, the iPhone lets you not listen to messages as easily as it lets you listen to them. It also makes sure messages are associated with contacts in your address book so its obvious who the voicemail is from. He could just used the "missing calls" screen or listen to the voicemails or just throw his phone in a lake because he doesn't seem to be a good conversationalist anyways.
The main complaint of the article isn't a technical one, both Visual Voicemail and Google Voice solve the technical problems with voicemail. His real problem is a social one. His friends are assholes and leave messages consisting of "call me back" knowing they're calling his cell phone and more to the point probably know he has an iPhone or doesn't like checking his voicemail. He's not using the iPhone's ability to ignore useless voicemails and his friends don't seem to register the fact he has caller ID and will be able to see he missed their call.
This is a vexing situation because these people have probably had cell phones for the past ten years if not longer. They know everyone has caller ID and their phones alert them to missed calls. There's no need to waste the time on "call me back" voicemails for anyone. At the same time voicemail is not without its uses. Voicemail can be left by anyone with a phone including landlines. Your SO can leave a message from their landline work phone saying they'll be late for dinner or your kid's school can tell you to come pick them up because they're sick. Voice also tends to be a bit more information dense than printed words since it can convey emotion as well as information.
Oh well, we should all ditch voicemail because a Slate writer has dumbass friends.
This whole idea begs the question of whether or not newspapers actually need "saving". The Kindle is not going to save large newspapers anymore than their websites will save them. What needs to change is not so much the delivery format but the way newspapers are run. Newspapers and news entities cannot effectively run as for-profit organizations or at the very least not as publicly traded for-profit organizations. The demand for stock price returns have led to newsroom cuts, consolidations, and expansions into markets newspapers shouldn't really be in. Newspapers either became or got swallowed up by "media companies" and now are part of television, radio, newspapers, magazine, and sometimes internet media conglomerates. We're all the worse for it because in order to drive a profit newspapers have increased column inches for advertising and reduced column inches for actual articles. They've also taken to filling space with wire articles instead of having a decent sized newsroom of their own. Wire services in and of themselves are useful entities, especially for smaller papers but we've moved into an age where people can log onto Google News and read wire service articles, newspapers don't need to waste ink printing them.
What will save newspapers the media conglomerates failing under their own weight and breaking back up. Newspapers will end up becoming more format neutral news organizations. They'll start providing news articles to specialized providers instead of running the whole stack themselves. A newsroom will write the stories and pass them off to Amazon to load on the Kindle, to Audible to make into an audiobook, to their website, and to a printer that will put the words to paper for people that still want (or need) a physical version of the news. The LA Times newspaper (for example) however will probably go away. It will end up being the "News and other work from the LA region" paper. A dedicated publishing group will pick up stories from the LA Times newsroom, advertisers, and possibly local blogs, and print and distribute them. The LA Times newsroom will no longer have to worry about the printer as long as their stories are submitted on time, advertisers can still get local ads out to people, and everyone will still be able to get the news that is important to them.
The main difference between that future and today will be the newsroom and the printer will not be owned and operated by the same company. More newsrooms will likely end up privatized or run as community owned entities similar to the St.Petersburg Times. News is a difficult thing to make profitable as it is a service in the public interest. If existing news organizations don't reorganize they will fail and other organizations with more streamlined processes and better management will eventually fill the void. A newspaper might fail but the journalists that love their work will keep doing it in one way or another.
Stop bringing this point up as it is for the most part worthless. For starters looking for completely alien types of life is damn near pointless because we would be highly unlikely to recognize it as such. Such life could readily exist on Earth right now but we do not recognize it. Looking for something without knowing what to look for isn't going to be very fruitful. It will be more useful to look for planets and solar systems like ours to look for life like ours. We would be able to recognize it more easily and we can use all of our baselines to determine its characteristics. Not finding a bunch of life like ours will also be useful in letting us know our type of life is not common in the galaxy and then we should look for the more exotic types.
Life on Earth loves carbon and water because both have fairly unique properties among naturally occurring chemicals. As any organic chemistry student will tell you carbon can form into a multitude of configurations each with unique properties of their own. It's far more difficult for silicon to form such long/complex chains so it's less than ideal as a biological base chemical. Water like carbon has some useful properties, its solid form is less dense than its liquid form which means things living at the bottom of an ocean or lake don't necessarily freeze when the temperature drops. Water is also a great solvent without being too damaging and is fairly abundant in the universe.
Narrowing a search for life to something similar to ourselves is not going to miss out on some big picture. There's hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, we don't have to find every bit of life everywhere. We only need to find one other solar system with life to know life is not a unique phenomenon in the universe. Two says we're a little more common, a thousand says we're downright expected. It's fine to skip over the highly exotic life forms because it's highly likely that there's at least a measurable number of solar systems with life similar enough to ours to recognize it as such.
An endowment is not a checking account an organization can just withdrawl cash from and spend. The endowment exists because the organization lives off the interest generated by the endowment. If they just dipped into the endowment whenever they needed money the endowment would quickly dry up. Endowments only distribute a small percentage of their total value in any given year. This article from August 2007 explains Harvard's endowment a bit more. According to that article they seek to spend 5% of the endowment per year and as of that article has distributed $1.1b which is about 3% of the endowment. If returns on Harvard's endowment are down 40% and continue to be down over the next few years the endowment will start to shrink making that 5% distribution smaller. If Harvard's operating expenses are $3b as the article claims then lower endowment distributions means they either need to cut operating expenses or get that operating capital from somewhere else. Oh shit, organizations with endowments have real budgetary concerns!
If a hostile civilization has the capability to travel through the depths of space and blow us to smithereens we're already boned. With our current level of technology (which does not include manned deep space travel of smithereen blasting) we've managed to find more than 300 extra solar planets. A space traveling smithereen blasting civilization could easily build a highly advanced interferometer which would be able to not only detect Earth but map its surface and take spectrographic readings. If this civilization is within about 100 lightyears of Earth they would have had the opportunity to observe the rising CO2 in our atmosphere and other effects of the industrial revolution. A long term study would show that there was no series of geological events tied to this rise and conclude that the life on this planet was building stuff. With even bigger and more powerful telescopes they could possibly plot the expansion of agriculture and urbanization. At the very least they would be able to conclude that Earth is teeming with life of some sort that they might want to blow to smithereens. There's no need for such a civilization to wait until they start hearing our radio broadcasts.
The idea of blasting rival civilizations to smithereens and/or enslaving populations comes from a lack of appreciation for exactly how massive a distance there is between stars. Alpha Centauri is fairly close to our solar system but between us and it is a mind-bogglingly large gulf of not-a-whole-lot. If you were traveling towards it in a space ship it would remain a tiny white dot in the sky until you were within a few AU of it, a single lightyear is 63,241AU and Alpha Centauri is 276,363AU away. This whole idea is something born of science fiction and not really rooted in any sort of scientific fact. Comparisons to Earthly travel and destruction (the New World et al.) don't really fit the scale of the problem. Hernán Cortés sailing across the Atlantic and killing Aztecs is not even close to the same scale as Zorg'pht of Gliese 876 traveling to our solar system to beat the shit out of humans.