I hate to feed a troll, but there's three schools of thought here:
Cue-Tee
Cutie
Cute
And for the record, the first two schools are wrong. Official pronunciation is "cute," according to the developers. This is especially useful when you have QuickTime and Qt things expressed with the same letters. QT is short for QuickTime and is pronounced "cue-tee," but Qt is "cute."
Incidentally the name derives from the archaic Xt library. Which, as far as I know could only be pronounced by stating the letters.
The paint and fuselage material are the most important things on it that they can gather data from that isn't already something they can get their hands on through other channels.
Don't underestimate the value of this. Whether they can build an exact working RQ170 fleet doesn't matter. If they can get one useful free technology out of it, it's a big deal. Something like paint and skin material would potentially be directly applicable to their rockets, which they build for export. If they could trivially do an upgraded stealthier rocket, that pretty much instantly improves the average selling price, which helps the Iranian economy. It also means that scarier weapons are going to be floating around in the world. I can imagine North Korea being crazy enough to shoot at US warships if they thought there was any chance they we couldn't see the rockets coming, and they could insist they had no idea why our destroyer exploded.
Actually deploying an RQ170 fleet requires a massive support infrastructure outside of the RQ170 fleet itself, so I don't think direct copying was ever the primary concern in the event of a loss of vehicle like this. It's the peripheral stuff. The design of an antenna. The ingredients in the paint. Some cleverly designed duct in the exhaust system. All that kind of stuff has the potential to inspire somebody working in a completely different project.
Unfortunately, computing is going to be like TV - if you want to maximize profit, you cater to the lowest common denominator. Hopefully Linux will continue to be Team Discovery Channel.
You want the Linux UI to be based on occasionally shooting a cannon at people? Or, you want somebody to fork Linux and make it only ever print messages about weddings and such?
Plus people have cancer, so no one has the right to complain about anything.
What about the people with cancer who lost their home due to flooding, and now can't get a hard drive upgrade. even they aren't allowed to complain? Harsh.
Oh that's right, there's somebody like you calling deathwatch on every new thing ever released. You talk about people moving to KDE - a few years ago when KDE 4 was released, you, or one of your many clones was saying exactly the same thing about KDE.
And to this day, I don't know anybody who has done a large scale deployment of KDE4. Where I work to this day we have something like 1000 users on KDE 3.x, and the rest on Windows 7 and OSX 10.6. Part of that is simply down to the fact that I work for a relatively conservative organisation which depends on fairly stable environments for Linux and would be slow to move to any new version, no matter how good. But, that's clearly not the only explanation because the non-Linux workstations are so much newer. The last place I worked, I was also on KDE3. The other users in my immediate department were also on KDE3 or Gnome2. Gnome 2 was current at the time. (Though, Linux use wasn't officially deployed, so people just used whatever they wanted if they needed a Linux box. Presumably, somebody there was running KDE4, but I never actually noticed it if that's the case.)
From where I'm sitting, a lot of the people complaining about KDE 4 seem to have been right. Which is a shame, because I like the Qt4 API's much better than the Qt3 API's, and the abstract component model of Kparts is really cool in KDE4. It just fucking sucked to use in practice.
I have to know... Are you joking, did you just wake up from a very long coma, or are you just deeply miseducated on the subject? I honestly can't tell if I'm supposed to laugh or cry.
But by the time they actually stopped selling it, it hadn't been updated in many many years. All the people who were really into Hypercard had long since migrated into two different technologies: Supercard, which is still being made I guess (most versions of Myst were built on it), and this little technology called... oh gosh, what was it now... "HTML" or something like that.
Largely, this. Also, HyperCard never really made the transition to color and "big" 14 inch displays very effectively. When it was killed in the 90's, it was still very much a product of the 80's. It just didn't do the sorts of things people wanted to be doing
HTML (as it existed at the time) certainly didn't do everything that HyperCard did. ome of what HyperCard did, it frankly didn't do very well. And, HTML did do a lot of things that HyperCard didn't. (Like allow viewing of the content on something other than a Mac.)
If HyperCard were still alive today in some sort of all-singing, all-dancing, 3D enabled full color incarnation, it wouldn't be a pleasant product to use. It wouldn't have the elegant simplicity. It would be an application with clear archaeological "layers" with very different API's for things added on over the course of decades by very different development teams, during alternating periods of growth and stability. Half the features would be deprecated, and they would be the only half that were adequately documented.
The other problem is that HyperCard was always a tool for the sorts of people who would never seek out that sort of tool. If you were a serious developer making a spreadsheet app, you would be using a real language. HyperCard was the "friendly" "empowering" tool for folks who weren't programmers. Those people would never buy a development tool. The actual market for people willing to pay for Hypercard would be miniscule, and mostly consist of people who discovered it back when it was free and still remember it being fun. Since it is the sort of thing that can only be "discovered" but wouldn't be sought out by people who didn't know they wanted it, it would have been a bad business decision to spend money developing it.
I say all this as somebody who loved HyperCard back in the day, but I think it just survived into a world where it had no place. The fact that it would have had some influence on the development of tools like Interface Builder is certainly interesting, but eventually we have to let it go.
I recently left the n900 world for an Android phone - my first - the Samsung Captivate Glide (SGH-I927).
I expected to root it easily; I hadn't realized how hostile manufacturers are becoming towards their customers. Indeed, as I write this, I still haven't succeeded. It actually feels like I may be the only person in the world who bought this device, which, to me, is utterly confounding.
I still carry my n900, but I got an iPhone for work, and bought an Android tablet recently, and I have had the same rude awakening of just how user-friendly the n900 actually was. I have spent the last two years looking for something newer, faster, and *better* than my n900, and I just haven't found it. Given how awkwardly Maemo begat Meego which has stumbled into Tizen, I'm not even very optimistic that anything will come along in the forseeable future. I'd practically kill to have a whizzy new n900 with the latest CPU and screen, but nobody wants to sell it to me. Even the most open android thing kind of pales in comparison to the promise of a genuinely open platform.
I love the fact that I can write PyQt scripts while I am on the subway that work perfectly on my real computers when I get to the office/home. I can forward X11 apps to/from my phone just as I do with my normal computers. (Obviously, some aren't worth forwarding to a phone, but others work just fine on a touch screen.) The X11 forwarding over SSH with implausible complicated SSH tunnels between overly complicated networks is, AFAIK, impossible on Android, despite the fact that Android has VNC and ssh terminal emulator apps. In the context of working on a real big "Enterprisey" production network, having a "normal" ssh/X11 stack makes a huge difference.
I know the n900 never got Angry Birds, or whatever, but it has been an invaluable tool in a way that no other mobile device seems willing to be, not even the "very open, easy to do whatever you want" Android platform, which is disappointing.
How can a single rocket, a tube filled with fuel, cost $10 billion? Please explain.
The LHC is basically an almost empty tube that doesn't go anywhere. When you consider the difference between the mass of a few protons vs. a full load of rocket fuel, you will see that the $10 billion tube has an amazingly better $/kg payload ratio compared to the $9 billion dollar tube, while only having a ~10% cost difference. The $10 billion dollar tube is also portable! (It's also newer, and due to inflation, you have to expect than misc. Tubes of Science always grow in price over the years. LHC might have only cost $1 billion in the year 1750, but at the time, there weren't that many dollars, which is why it was impossible to build at that time!)
Don't forget the fact that at some point, they'll try to do a stereoscopic 3D conversion. So, for all upcoming media formats, they'll sell you the 2D and 3D versions separately. (...Says a guy who has worked on stereo projects, trained with folks who know how to do great stereo, visited a 3D post-conversion facility, and is actually very excited about potentially awesome stereo cinematgoraphy in the next decade, but thinks that the current move to make everything 3D regardless of whether it makes sense if a fucking travesty.)
The intellectual value of college is hardly the classes, it's spending time with similarly interested people outside of class time debating and discussing various things. Outside of the academic world it's nigh impossible to find that kind of density of intellectually astute individuals.
I have to respectfully disagree with you. First, finding high density groups of people who share your geeky interest is easy these days. There's probably a meetup group of them. Or a hackerspace full of them. Or a gathering for a lecture at a museum or a film screening.
More importantly, physical density isn't that significant. You and I are currently debating intellectualism among geeks. Which is about as geeky a conversation as a person can have. It would be improbable that the two of us are in the same time zone, and unreasonable to imagine that everybody who has posted to this slashdot discussion is in the same city.
In five minutes, I can jump on discussion forums talking about marine electrical systems, economics in developing nations, and nitpicking my favorite anime. I certainly think the Universities are a good thing, but ultimately there are people who will seek out content, and people who don't care. These days, pervasive communication technologies have made it so nobody doesn't have access to a group of people to talk to about any subject. With a phone, I can even sail to a third world economy on a boat, and download the latest episode of anime without missing a beat.
Some time in the next few years I do plan on going back to take some more classes because I like that sort of thing. But, it's hardly a requirement in the late 20th century. (Let alone the present...)
Super+X to spawn a VT, rm filen[tab], enter, Ctrl+D.
And if it was important, it was in SVN anyway, so I can always get it back from the server if I deleted the wrong thing. The Recycle Bin exists because Microsoft wanted to emulate the Macintosh as much as possible in Windows 95. The Trash can exists because the designers of the original Macintosh wanted to build one of the only general purpose computers without any sort of command line.
And, in a nod towards elegance over safety, the original trash can was emptied across reboots. I apparently have 88 items in my trash can. So, apparently not everybody is consumed by iconic OCD and needs to empty it immediately. (Is the current Recycle Bin icon particularly ugly when full? I haven't really kept track of recent Widows version, but it seems like that sort of thing might have a subtle impact on user behaviors.)
Graphic cards manufacturers do take Linux seriously. At least Intel and AMD/ATI do, they contribute with open source drivers, engineers and even specs.
Intel doesn't take graphics seriously, and AMD/ATi doesn't take drivers seriously. To the extent that either cares about graphics drivers on Linux, they do reasonably well only at taking the "on Linux" part seriously.
I continue to be astounded at the stuff you kids do with your phones nowadays. On behalf of those of us who remember this big bakelite phones screwed to the kitchen wall with 15 feet of twisted up cord and a rotary dial... WTF? Xorg on a phone?? Really??
Yes, you can make calls with it. Including calls over Skype, and Google chat, etc.
As for Xorg on a phone, I think it's more reasonable than a lot of people realise. I know it's traditional to have some strange hacked together proprietary framebuffer interface on a phone, but you really don't get anything from it. Considering old UNIX workstations running X11 had 40 MHz processors and 16 MB of RAM, claiming that a modern cell phone can't use X11 because it would be too heavy seems like an awkward argument with > 10x the power and resources available. OTOH, you get to use an existing, mature software stack that a lot of people already know how to make fast, and how to use efficiently. If it makes you feel any better, you only get OpenGLES on the phone, so applications which use full OpenGL won't work when forwarded.
Heck, if the idea of being able to do server admin with X11 forwarding over SSH bothers you that much, just install web server software on the phone itself and use it as the server, and ssh into it from your laptop to do the admin. Yes, it actually works just fine. (Though you can only serve over Wifi - your service provider almost certainly won't route data to your phone's public cellular IP to use it as a server over that connection.)
Part of the problem with sniffer dogs is that we are inexplicably obsessed with a bunch of silly scenarios that dogs can't stop. Like, some sort of attack by tweasers, or a full tube of tooth paste. Obviously, every attack that has made it in the air since 9/11 has been stopped by the passengers. So, if somebody did bring two katanas and a full collection of viking cutlery on board, there is still no chance that they would be able to hijack the plane. But, official policy is that the passengers should all be passive sheep, and choose to be extra vulnerable for no obvious reason. And really, being stabbed by a guy with a knife is no worse in the air than it would be at a bar, or standing in the security line, or on a subway. But, we've decided that airplanes have to be perfect capsules of hyper safety, no matter the cost, and no matter how dangerous other places that we spend more time may be.
In practice, the only really credible threat is a bomb, or maybe a gun. Sniffer dogs would be able to find most bombs, and many guns. And, since a small pistol would be inadequate for killing more than a handful of people (which you could do at least as easily on the ground, at an elementary school of something), a gun which would really pose a serious risk to downing the aircraft or killing the overwhelming majority of the passengers would be large enough to be fairly easy to catch. Even assuming you managed to one-hit-kill every passenger on a large airplane, the bulk of the ammunition for that many people would be relatively easy to spot.
So, yeah. Dogs. Perfect solution, which is considered useless.
The reason is we all slip up, or goof off, or whatever while working from time to time. None of us like the idea that something like that is forever committed to tape, subject to review and so on. I mean how would you feel if at work your employer wanted to watch you all the time? Not like cameras in the halls, but a camera on you, and on your computer, that all the time they wanted to record what you did, and have the ability to review it at any time for things they find fault with? I bet you'd be against that, even though you are probably a perfectly upstanding employee with nothing to hide overall. It is just uncomfortable the idea that you'll be recorded all the time and someone could look over everything you do.
Sure, I screw up sometimes. Sure, I goof off. But, I'm not the guy who society has decided to trust enough to allow him to get wiretaps and watch people all the time. The Police can and do watch people all the time. That power has to be balanced out. If the police don't like that, they can go get another fucking job. The cops have no special right to be cops. They don't get to dictate the terms of being a cop. The fact that they really really want to wield unlimited power over other people doesn't change anything. The fact that they wanted to be a cop since they were a little kid doesn't change anything. If they make the choice to be in a position of wielding power, it must also be wielded against them, no matter how much they whine about it. Any other way leads directly to a police state.
That Hollywood hasn't had an ORIGINAL idea in decades. Instead of developing a NEW idea, they fall back on releasing part 2,3,4, then "prequels".
Bah, there are piles of brilliant original ideas floating around Hollywood. When one of them gets made, it brings in less money than Transformers VIII : The return of the curse of the revenge of the ghost of the fallen franchise. Consequently, studios continue to invest primarily in fairly bland pictures that are likely to appeal to the broadest possible audience. It would be financially irresponsible to do otherwise. It's also worth noting that part of the appeal of big dumb loud "American" movies lies in the fact that they survive dubbing so well. When the characters and plot don't matter much, a movie can survive a cheap local-market dub and still bring in a lot of money.
I live in L.A. I'm actually in Hollywood every week. I know a lot of people who have some awesome ideas. They just can't convince anybody that there is a guaranteed market because, frankly, there isn't a guaranteed market for that stuff.
Your list shows one of the issues with trying to find the independently produced stuff. It's mostly unfunded. A lot of production happens around existing stuff like Star Trek fan works and parodies, Bat Man, Ghost Busters, etc. When you are trying to get volunteers to work on something, the stuff with a recognizable name that people are already fans of is the most likely to actually get made. That means that it's hard to find a lot in the way of original programming in continuous series that is independently made.
You can find some things like independent short films, and independent minisode series which add up to about the length of one normal TV episode. But, they are naturally harder to find, since they are generally one-offs. There are also TV-ish video podcasts which tend to cover things like news and gossip, but are much more rarely in the form of things like narrative dramas.
So, what does it take for something like a completely original independently produced science fiction TV show? Well, mostly money. Something like SG-U costs a lot to make. You hire actors, writers, etc. If you didn't partcularly like SG-U and you are happy it was cancelled, then assume an even higher budget for writers or vfx or whatever you thought was the weak link.
Money for production only comes if there is an expectation of money for distribution. If you won't get paid to put something online, you won't pay to make it. YouTube will do some revenue sharing, but not enough for people to work full time making a show. And, there is no guarantee that YouTube will pay you anything. Hulu shows make money on ads, but Hulu is run by the major networks, so they aren't going to be very active in promoting new production that competes with the existing structures. It's very much an Internet experiment by networks that see broadcast as The Right Way, and want to defend their positions. That leaves Net Flix, which really promotes itself based on movies, and TV shows that have been released on DVD. It would be a (possibly sensible but) very large and expensive strategic shift to really promote original production for NetFlix.
I think NetFlix is best positioned to move into creating distruptive new productions, but it would be risky to spend enough money to give such a move a real chance of changing the way things are done.
Until then, fiction series created by people completely independent of the well known Big Players both in terms of money and borrowing IP will be rare, small, done in spare time, generally intermittent, and frequently terrible. Hell, a buddy of mine and I have been working on post production of something that we shot in March in our spare time, and we don't expect to be finished before the end of the year. It's only like ten minutes, but a few amateurs dedicating spare moments just aren't that efficient. With a real crew working full time professionally on our little project, it would probably have been done in a week. That sort of productivity doesn't come for free, and that's part of the reason why independent stuff is so rare.
You also frequently have the problem of a specialist trying to work as a generalist. An actor decides to create something, and characters are fine, but the lighting and technical aspects are a disaster. A technically minded 3D modeler decides that he can do better, so he creates something where every frame is absolutely beautiful, and the audio is perfectly clear, but you don't care about any of the characters, the writing is awful, and the acting would be improved by overdubbing the dialog with something from espeak.
No, DOS was pretty much made by Tim Paterson in his basement. Microsoft bought it off him for $50,000 because they needed an OS fast to snag the IBM PC contract.
In terms of the original creation, that's fair. OTOH, if you consider all of the people involved with DOS at any point, across various versions, I think my point still makes some sense.
In spite of the fact that "some 40 experts on bombs and hazardous materials from across the country and at least eight national laboratories..." have decided on this course of action, all of us World of Warcraft players and PHP developers have concluded it's a bad idea to handle it this way.
More than 40 experts were involved in making DOS.
More than 40 experts were involved in coming up with the deployment plan for the airport porno radiation scanners.
There are lots of cases where 40 or more experts can come up with a suboptimal solution that can be improved apon by the combined thoughts of thousands of people, some of whom are also experts. I personally doubt this is one of them, but dismissing the possibility out of hand seems unjustified. Experts come up with stupid ideas all the time.
If each website takes 10 hours, you can only view two full websites in a 24 day. So, you can load the google home page, and look at the first page of search results. If each website takes 1 second to view, then I can easily view many more web sites.
Similarly, if it takes 10 hours to view a 1 minute YouTube video, I just won't bother. If my connection is fast enough to stream YouTube in real time, I'm much more likely to bother with it, which increases my data usage. Similarly, as the connection gets faster, I'll want to switch from the 320*240 stream to the 480p stream, which will take even more bandwidth. If greater speeds didn't result in people doing interesting new things with their connections, you wouldn't have mentioned YouTube in your post. You would have talked about using a BBS.
The fun of a python script is that it can potentially run on a lot more platforms than you will ever bother to provide Qt for. I can execute the exact same file on my phone and my windows box. Going dual-GUI with a layer of abstraction between your code and the UI means that it can run pretty much anywhere, but where Qt is available to python, it won't look like ass. (Hey, I'm not saying tk isn't useful, but it doesn't exactly look right at home on any platform popular in the last decade.)
To be fair, I'm not sure how strictly that provision is actually enforced. If you actually show up with a pile of cash and try to sweet talk your salesman, I'm pretty sure he'll do just about anything to take some of your cash. Besides, there are relatively few cases where you would really need something other than LGPL. Under LGPL, you can charge for your software, keep your application source closed, and even make extensive changes to Qt itself. The only thing you would need to do is make changes to Qt available as source. There are certainly some cases where GPL doesn't meet the needs of a particular project, but for a typical application developer, it's more than good enough. (And, while Qt may not work for a specific project, IMHO it's still well worth learning because there are so many projects where it can be a very useful tool.)
Slashdot Mirror
And for the record, the first two schools are wrong. Official pronunciation is "cute," according to the developers. This is especially useful when you have QuickTime and Qt things expressed with the same letters. QT is short for QuickTime and is pronounced "cue-tee," but Qt is "cute."
Incidentally the name derives from the archaic Xt library. Which, as far as I know could only be pronounced by stating the letters.
Don't underestimate the value of this. Whether they can build an exact working RQ170 fleet doesn't matter. If they can get one useful free technology out of it, it's a big deal. Something like paint and skin material would potentially be directly applicable to their rockets, which they build for export. If they could trivially do an upgraded stealthier rocket, that pretty much instantly improves the average selling price, which helps the Iranian economy. It also means that scarier weapons are going to be floating around in the world. I can imagine North Korea being crazy enough to shoot at US warships if they thought there was any chance they we couldn't see the rockets coming, and they could insist they had no idea why our destroyer exploded.
Actually deploying an RQ170 fleet requires a massive support infrastructure outside of the RQ170 fleet itself, so I don't think direct copying was ever the primary concern in the event of a loss of vehicle like this. It's the peripheral stuff. The design of an antenna. The ingredients in the paint. Some cleverly designed duct in the exhaust system. All that kind of stuff has the potential to inspire somebody working in a completely different project.
You want the Linux UI to be based on occasionally shooting a cannon at people? Or, you want somebody to fork Linux and make it only ever print messages about weddings and such?
What about the people with cancer who lost their home due to flooding, and now can't get a hard drive upgrade. even they aren't allowed to complain? Harsh.
And to this day, I don't know anybody who has done a large scale deployment of KDE4. Where I work to this day we have something like 1000 users on KDE 3.x, and the rest on Windows 7 and OSX 10.6. Part of that is simply down to the fact that I work for a relatively conservative organisation which depends on fairly stable environments for Linux and would be slow to move to any new version, no matter how good. But, that's clearly not the only explanation because the non-Linux workstations are so much newer. The last place I worked, I was also on KDE3. The other users in my immediate department were also on KDE3 or Gnome2. Gnome 2 was current at the time. (Though, Linux use wasn't officially deployed, so people just used whatever they wanted if they needed a Linux box. Presumably, somebody there was running KDE4, but I never actually noticed it if that's the case.)
From where I'm sitting, a lot of the people complaining about KDE 4 seem to have been right. Which is a shame, because I like the Qt4 API's much better than the Qt3 API's, and the abstract component model of Kparts is really cool in KDE4. It just fucking sucked to use in practice.
You would be deaf too, if you lived next to a bomb range!
I have to know... Are you joking, did you just wake up from a very long coma, or are you just deeply miseducated on the subject? I honestly can't tell if I'm supposed to laugh or cry.
Largely, this. Also, HyperCard never really made the transition to color and "big" 14 inch displays very effectively. When it was killed in the 90's, it was still very much a product of the 80's. It just didn't do the sorts of things people wanted to be doing
HTML (as it existed at the time) certainly didn't do everything that HyperCard did. ome of what HyperCard did, it frankly didn't do very well. And, HTML did do a lot of things that HyperCard didn't. (Like allow viewing of the content on something other than a Mac.)
If HyperCard were still alive today in some sort of all-singing, all-dancing, 3D enabled full color incarnation, it wouldn't be a pleasant product to use. It wouldn't have the elegant simplicity. It would be an application with clear archaeological "layers" with very different API's for things added on over the course of decades by very different development teams, during alternating periods of growth and stability. Half the features would be deprecated, and they would be the only half that were adequately documented.
The other problem is that HyperCard was always a tool for the sorts of people who would never seek out that sort of tool. If you were a serious developer making a spreadsheet app, you would be using a real language. HyperCard was the "friendly" "empowering" tool for folks who weren't programmers. Those people would never buy a development tool. The actual market for people willing to pay for Hypercard would be miniscule, and mostly consist of people who discovered it back when it was free and still remember it being fun. Since it is the sort of thing that can only be "discovered" but wouldn't be sought out by people who didn't know they wanted it, it would have been a bad business decision to spend money developing it.
I say all this as somebody who loved HyperCard back in the day, but I think it just survived into a world where it had no place. The fact that it would have had some influence on the development of tools like Interface Builder is certainly interesting, but eventually we have to let it go.
I still carry my n900, but I got an iPhone for work, and bought an Android tablet recently, and I have had the same rude awakening of just how user-friendly the n900 actually was. I have spent the last two years looking for something newer, faster, and *better* than my n900, and I just haven't found it. Given how awkwardly Maemo begat Meego which has stumbled into Tizen, I'm not even very optimistic that anything will come along in the forseeable future. I'd practically kill to have a whizzy new n900 with the latest CPU and screen, but nobody wants to sell it to me. Even the most open android thing kind of pales in comparison to the promise of a genuinely open platform.
I love the fact that I can write PyQt scripts while I am on the subway that work perfectly on my real computers when I get to the office/home. I can forward X11 apps to/from my phone just as I do with my normal computers. (Obviously, some aren't worth forwarding to a phone, but others work just fine on a touch screen.) The X11 forwarding over SSH with implausible complicated SSH tunnels between overly complicated networks is, AFAIK, impossible on Android, despite the fact that Android has VNC and ssh terminal emulator apps. In the context of working on a real big "Enterprisey" production network, having a "normal" ssh/X11 stack makes a huge difference.
I know the n900 never got Angry Birds, or whatever, but it has been an invaluable tool in a way that no other mobile device seems willing to be, not even the "very open, easy to do whatever you want" Android platform, which is disappointing.
The LHC is basically an almost empty tube that doesn't go anywhere. When you consider the difference between the mass of a few protons vs. a full load of rocket fuel, you will see that the $10 billion tube has an amazingly better $/kg payload ratio compared to the $9 billion dollar tube, while only having a ~10% cost difference. The $10 billion dollar tube is also portable! (It's also newer, and due to inflation, you have to expect than misc. Tubes of Science always grow in price over the years. LHC might have only cost $1 billion in the year 1750, but at the time, there weren't that many dollars, which is why it was impossible to build at that time!)
Don't forget the fact that at some point, they'll try to do a stereoscopic 3D conversion. So, for all upcoming media formats, they'll sell you the 2D and 3D versions separately.
(...Says a guy who has worked on stereo projects, trained with folks who know how to do great stereo, visited a 3D post-conversion facility, and is actually very excited about potentially awesome stereo cinematgoraphy in the next decade, but thinks that the current move to make everything 3D regardless of whether it makes sense if a fucking travesty.)
I have to respectfully disagree with you. First, finding high density groups of people who share your geeky interest is easy these days. There's probably a meetup group of them. Or a hackerspace full of them. Or a gathering for a lecture at a museum or a film screening.
More importantly, physical density isn't that significant. You and I are currently debating intellectualism among geeks. Which is about as geeky a conversation as a person can have. It would be improbable that the two of us are in the same time zone, and unreasonable to imagine that everybody who has posted to this slashdot discussion is in the same city.
In five minutes, I can jump on discussion forums talking about marine electrical systems, economics in developing nations, and nitpicking my favorite anime. I certainly think the Universities are a good thing, but ultimately there are people who will seek out content, and people who don't care. These days, pervasive communication technologies have made it so nobody doesn't have access to a group of people to talk to about any subject. With a phone, I can even sail to a third world economy on a boat, and download the latest episode of anime without missing a beat.
Some time in the next few years I do plan on going back to take some more classes because I like that sort of thing. But, it's hardly a requirement in the late 20th century. (Let alone the present...)
And if it was important, it was in SVN anyway, so I can always get it back from the server if I deleted the wrong thing. The Recycle Bin exists because Microsoft wanted to emulate the Macintosh as much as possible in Windows 95. The Trash can exists because the designers of the original Macintosh wanted to build one of the only general purpose computers without any sort of command line.
And, in a nod towards elegance over safety, the original trash can was emptied across reboots. I apparently have 88 items in my trash can. So, apparently not everybody is consumed by iconic OCD and needs to empty it immediately. (Is the current Recycle Bin icon particularly ugly when full? I haven't really kept track of recent Widows version, but it seems like that sort of thing might have a subtle impact on user behaviors.)
Intel doesn't take graphics seriously, and AMD/ATi doesn't take drivers seriously. To the extent that either cares about graphics drivers on Linux, they do reasonably well only at taking the "on Linux" part seriously.
Yes, you can make calls with it. Including calls over Skype, and Google chat, etc.
As for Xorg on a phone, I think it's more reasonable than a lot of people realise. I know it's traditional to have some strange hacked together proprietary framebuffer interface on a phone, but you really don't get anything from it. Considering old UNIX workstations running X11 had 40 MHz processors and 16 MB of RAM, claiming that a modern cell phone can't use X11 because it would be too heavy seems like an awkward argument with > 10x the power and resources available. OTOH, you get to use an existing, mature software stack that a lot of people already know how to make fast, and how to use efficiently. If it makes you feel any better, you only get OpenGLES on the phone, so applications which use full OpenGL won't work when forwarded.
Heck, if the idea of being able to do server admin with X11 forwarding over SSH bothers you that much, just install web server software on the phone itself and use it as the server, and ssh into it from your laptop to do the admin. Yes, it actually works just fine. (Though you can only serve over Wifi - your service provider almost certainly won't route data to your phone's public cellular IP to use it as a server over that connection.)
Part of the problem with sniffer dogs is that we are inexplicably obsessed with a bunch of silly scenarios that dogs can't stop. Like, some sort of attack by tweasers, or a full tube of tooth paste. Obviously, every attack that has made it in the air since 9/11 has been stopped by the passengers. So, if somebody did bring two katanas and a full collection of viking cutlery on board, there is still no chance that they would be able to hijack the plane. But, official policy is that the passengers should all be passive sheep, and choose to be extra vulnerable for no obvious reason. And really, being stabbed by a guy with a knife is no worse in the air than it would be at a bar, or standing in the security line, or on a subway. But, we've decided that airplanes have to be perfect capsules of hyper safety, no matter the cost, and no matter how dangerous other places that we spend more time may be.
In practice, the only really credible threat is a bomb, or maybe a gun. Sniffer dogs would be able to find most bombs, and many guns. And, since a small pistol would be inadequate for killing more than a handful of people (which you could do at least as easily on the ground, at an elementary school of something), a gun which would really pose a serious risk to downing the aircraft or killing the overwhelming majority of the passengers would be large enough to be fairly easy to catch. Even assuming you managed to one-hit-kill every passenger on a large airplane, the bulk of the ammunition for that many people would be relatively easy to spot.
So, yeah. Dogs. Perfect solution, which is considered useless.
Sure, I screw up sometimes. Sure, I goof off. But, I'm not the guy who society has decided to trust enough to allow him to get wiretaps and watch people all the time. The Police can and do watch people all the time. That power has to be balanced out. If the police don't like that, they can go get another fucking job. The cops have no special right to be cops. They don't get to dictate the terms of being a cop. The fact that they really really want to wield unlimited power over other people doesn't change anything. The fact that they wanted to be a cop since they were a little kid doesn't change anything. If they make the choice to be in a position of wielding power, it must also be wielded against them, no matter how much they whine about it. Any other way leads directly to a police state.
Bah, there are piles of brilliant original ideas floating around Hollywood. When one of them gets made, it brings in less money than Transformers VIII : The return of the curse of the revenge of the ghost of the fallen franchise. Consequently, studios continue to invest primarily in fairly bland pictures that are likely to appeal to the broadest possible audience. It would be financially irresponsible to do otherwise. It's also worth noting that part of the appeal of big dumb loud "American" movies lies in the fact that they survive dubbing so well. When the characters and plot don't matter much, a movie can survive a cheap local-market dub and still bring in a lot of money.
I live in L.A. I'm actually in Hollywood every week. I know a lot of people who have some awesome ideas. They just can't convince anybody that there is a guaranteed market because, frankly, there isn't a guaranteed market for that stuff.
Your list shows one of the issues with trying to find the independently produced stuff. It's mostly unfunded. A lot of production happens around existing stuff like Star Trek fan works and parodies, Bat Man, Ghost Busters, etc. When you are trying to get volunteers to work on something, the stuff with a recognizable name that people are already fans of is the most likely to actually get made. That means that it's hard to find a lot in the way of original programming in continuous series that is independently made.
You can find some things like independent short films, and independent minisode series which add up to about the length of one normal TV episode. But, they are naturally harder to find, since they are generally one-offs. There are also TV-ish video podcasts which tend to cover things like news and gossip, but are much more rarely in the form of things like narrative dramas.
So, what does it take for something like a completely original independently produced science fiction TV show? Well, mostly money. Something like SG-U costs a lot to make. You hire actors, writers, etc. If you didn't partcularly like SG-U and you are happy it was cancelled, then assume an even higher budget for writers or vfx or whatever you thought was the weak link.
Money for production only comes if there is an expectation of money for distribution. If you won't get paid to put something online, you won't pay to make it. YouTube will do some revenue sharing, but not enough for people to work full time making a show. And, there is no guarantee that YouTube will pay you anything. Hulu shows make money on ads, but Hulu is run by the major networks, so they aren't going to be very active in promoting new production that competes with the existing structures. It's very much an Internet experiment by networks that see broadcast as The Right Way, and want to defend their positions. That leaves Net Flix, which really promotes itself based on movies, and TV shows that have been released on DVD. It would be a (possibly sensible but) very large and expensive strategic shift to really promote original production for NetFlix.
I think NetFlix is best positioned to move into creating distruptive new productions, but it would be risky to spend enough money to give such a move a real chance of changing the way things are done.
Until then, fiction series created by people completely independent of the well known Big Players both in terms of money and borrowing IP will be rare, small, done in spare time, generally intermittent, and frequently terrible. Hell, a buddy of mine and I have been working on post production of something that we shot in March in our spare time, and we don't expect to be finished before the end of the year. It's only like ten minutes, but a few amateurs dedicating spare moments just aren't that efficient. With a real crew working full time professionally on our little project, it would probably have been done in a week. That sort of productivity doesn't come for free, and that's part of the reason why independent stuff is so rare.
You also frequently have the problem of a specialist trying to work as a generalist. An actor decides to create something, and characters are fine, but the lighting and technical aspects are a disaster. A technically minded 3D modeler decides that he can do better, so he creates something where every frame is absolutely beautiful, and the audio is perfectly clear, but you don't care about any of the characters, the writing is awful, and the acting would be improved by overdubbing the dialog with something from espeak.
This is part II. The summary mentions that his body was dug up earlier, so it was part I.
In terms of the original creation, that's fair. OTOH, if you consider all of the people involved with DOS at any point, across various versions, I think my point still makes some sense.
Everyone is an expert.
In spite of the fact that "some 40 experts on bombs and hazardous materials from across the country and at least eight national laboratories..." have decided on this course of action, all of us World of Warcraft players and PHP developers have concluded it's a bad idea to handle it this way.
More than 40 experts were involved in making DOS.
More than 40 experts were involved in coming up with the deployment plan for the airport porno radiation scanners.
There are lots of cases where 40 or more experts can come up with a suboptimal solution that can be improved apon by the combined thoughts of thousands of people, some of whom are also experts. I personally doubt this is one of them, but dismissing the possibility out of hand seems unjustified. Experts come up with stupid ideas all the time.
If each website takes 10 hours, you can only view two full websites in a 24 day. So, you can load the google home page, and look at the first page of search results. If each website takes 1 second to view, then I can easily view many more web sites.
Similarly, if it takes 10 hours to view a 1 minute YouTube video, I just won't bother. If my connection is fast enough to stream YouTube in real time, I'm much more likely to bother with it, which increases my data usage. Similarly, as the connection gets faster, I'll want to switch from the 320*240 stream to the 480p stream, which will take even more bandwidth. If greater speeds didn't result in people doing interesting new things with their connections, you wouldn't have mentioned YouTube in your post. You would have talked about using a BBS.
The fun of a python script is that it can potentially run on a lot more platforms than you will ever bother to provide Qt for. I can execute the exact same file on my phone and my windows box. Going dual-GUI with a layer of abstraction between your code and the UI means that it can run pretty much anywhere, but where Qt is available to python, it won't look like ass. (Hey, I'm not saying tk isn't useful, but it doesn't exactly look right at home on any platform popular in the last decade.)
To be fair, I'm not sure how strictly that provision is actually enforced. If you actually show up with a pile of cash and try to sweet talk your salesman, I'm pretty sure he'll do just about anything to take some of your cash. Besides, there are relatively few cases where you would really need something other than LGPL. Under LGPL, you can charge for your software, keep your application source closed, and even make extensive changes to Qt itself. The only thing you would need to do is make changes to Qt available as source. There are certainly some cases where GPL doesn't meet the needs of a particular project, but for a typical application developer, it's more than good enough. (And, while Qt may not work for a specific project, IMHO it's still well worth learning because there are so many projects where it can be a very useful tool.)