1) You might want to provide a citation for your first statement, as I'm having difficulty understanding it. By "giving off C02", do you mean something other than respiration?
2) Where did you get your understanding that the scientists working on climate change are all working off the same datasets? There are thousands of relevant datasets, maybe tens of thousands! And scientists are continually creating new datasets themselves.
3) About FOIA requests. The oil industry has worked harder and with more success to suppress information it doesn't like than the climate scientists ever did.
I love your line beginning "When I see complete violation of the scientific method...." You speak with such authority about knowing that climate science is all tainted crap. Are you able to reach definitive conclusions across all scientific literature? Where does your mastery of the process and the research literature come from? Of course, I'm only accepting the arguments of others instead of doing my thinking all for myself. But I'll mostly trust the scientists on this, just as I do on quantum mechanics and every other scientific endeavour -- not to be right, but to be not too wrong, and to be improving.
What a pile of rubbish! There are thousands of scientists working in fields that have a bearing on climate change, from geology to biochemistry to atmospheric physics. They publish tens of thousands of articles on topics related to climate change in the peer-reviewed literature. By doing so, they palpably demonstrate that they do not treat their work as above criticism.
He says "I find it bizarre that people refuse to accept we are having an impact on the environment. The evidence is everywhere. ***I'm not talking global warming***" [my highlight]
And you take him to task 3 times for talking about environmental problems that are not to do with AGW. *That's what he said he was going to do* Dumbass.
Absolute horseshit and twattery. What Lomborg does is nothing like a rigorous analysis of abatement policies. If it were, it wouldn't be a book with disingenuous footnotes, it would be a cost curve. Like the ones that these guys have done: http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/ccsi/Costcurves.asp
Like any cost-curve, it includes lots of actions that are net cash positive -- like home insulation. And yes, they've thought about fucking bounce-back effects too.
Who knows why this got modded interesting, it's fuckin' dumb.
Let's try a little thought experiment, shall we? Two scenarios: 1) Let's imagine that you are working on the bleeding edge of science and you're investigating a question that no-one knows the answer to, like "why does Nt-acetylation of bulk proteins happen?". You do some clever research, and whaddya know, you come up with an interesting answer: "it's because acetylation can function as a degradation signal". That forces a need to revisit thinking on protein turnover, a larger topic, and may even mean that we need to think again about exactly how homeostasis works. So you write it all up and if you can get the paper past your clever colleagues who do peer review, you might get published in Science and you can be very proud of yourself. Look, it's happened here! http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/327/5968/966 2) Now, let's imagine that you investigate something a bit more fundamental to modern biological science. Say, the idea that DNA encodes genetic information about the shape of proteins. Let's say you invent a clever experiment and the findings are very striking -- they appear to show that DNA doesn't encode that information after all! Now for the thought experiment bit: do you think that the standards and scrutiny that will be applied to your claim will be higher or lower than in scenario 1, given that your results will require the setting aside / reinterpretation of an enormous mass of prior experimental results and accepted scientific theory. Why, that's right! Your results will be subjected to more careful scrutiny. They will have to be replicated, validated, tested etc etc every which way from Sunday, because the inherent balance of probabilities is that your results are wrong or artefactual or explicable within the current framework, and that the prior thinking was right. It's not *impossible* that the opposite holds true, but it *is* extremely unlikely.
People who seek to demonstrate that anthropogenic climate change is not happening are much closer to scenario 2 than scenario 1. Scientists will quite reasonably say, "just before we chuck out all the accumulated evidence and thinking about how the world works and accept your argument that you've shown it that is, in fact, possible for humans to add net tens of billions of tons of gases such as CO2 and CH4 to the atmosphere in the space of decades without it having an impact on climate, do you mind terribly if we take a very long hard look at your evidence and reasoning?"
I'm stunned that no-one has mentioned the extraordinary scenes of unethical behaviour on the PBS documentary where a remote spycam feature is being used at another school in the Bronx. My jaw dropped open as I saw (at ~4m50s) the Assistant Principal spy on two schoolgirls and describe how he routinely does this with all 6th and 7th graders ("they don't even realise we're watching" -- he then takes control of the second girl's machine and takes a picture, and we see her duck out of his line of sight. His commentary as he did this had me climbing the walls, it was so unpleasant and -- hopefully -- self-incriminating: "I always like to mess with them and take a picture". What's even worse is seeing the disconcerted look on the girl's face before she ducks and listening to the interviewer laugh -- the interviewer's reaction is a perfect example of how you can get caught up in a moment and fail to maintain independence of mind. You can't be certain from the video where she is -- there's a possibility she's at home. In a beautifully ironic twist, PBS carefully blurred out some of the writing on a whiteboard at ~3m40s, presumably to protect someone's privacy! Of course, they didn't bother to blur out the name of the second schoolgirl who got spied on.
I hate to break it to ya, pal, but a university is not really comparable to a commercial enterprise in terms of how computers are used. I work for a top-tier management consultancy with a few thousand employees -- the support includes 24/6 first-line phone guys who use Bomgar for remote sessions, second-line phone support to handle the many highly complex support jobs that come in (often involving sodding Notes, natch) as well as a 6 to 7 person local IT desk in every office to ensure that hardware can be replaced quickly if need be. Behind the scenes and invisible to users are large numbers of corporate IT guys who maintain the servers, build new apps, test deployments etc etc. What kills corporate machines and makes the support load heavy is: networking incl VPN, security, enterprise apps, and the pounding of users. Wouldn't make much difference if it were Macs or PCs, it's the needs of enterprise computing that drive the size of the support.
Some interesting points you make. You appear to be flitting between two perspectives: 1, Apple doesn't understand enterprise requirements, and 2, Apple is not serious about the enterprise. I think 2 is closer to the truth, but probably still overstates the case somewhat -- Apple is focused on the home market and sufficiently interested in the enterprise space to accommodate some of their needs -- but not at the expense of price-point or damage to the value to the consumer. For example, Apple is stuffed full of industrial designers and hardware engineers all of whom understand that physical performance is important -- including all the environmental factors you mentioned. They will have forecast the standard operating range of conditions in which they expect iPads to be used, and then actively considered the cost and other tradeoffs required for more extensive ruggedisation. They will have recognised that the tradeoffs include a correlation between ruggedisation and slimness, for example, and doubtless swung more towards slimness (prized by the core market) than ruggedness (prized by a secondary enterprise market). I'm not saying they made the right tradeoffs, only that I consider it extremely unlikely that a commercial organisation with massive resources, launching a major new product, would fail to anticipate and work through the implications of their decisions for each of their potential target markets.
BTW, I think there are some enterprise markets that the iPad is not an obvious competitor for, at least at present: Fedex et al is one, due to the ruggedness, machine vision and requirement for pen-based signatures. However, there are some completely new large markets that the iPad is the only game in town for. The ability of the device to provide an interface that is completely designed for a particular purpose makes a big difference at that size.
Those were two dumbass comments you made: 1) You can choose to sync manually from your music collection. But if you don't want to bother, you don't have to. 2) He meant update your content, not your software. You know, update your iPod with photos you've taken on your camera and downloaded onto your computer. (Additionally, you obviously don't *need* to update your iPod software, but you may well want to. And it happens only a couple of times a year)
Erm, these are the same issues that iPhone enterprise deployments have faced -- the answers are going to be pretty similar -- apps for enterprises are managed and deployed by the app-writers (ie the enterprise) -- they're not on the AppStore.
To quote from Apple's literature: "The process for deploying your own applications is: Â Register for enterprise development with Apple. Â Sign your applications using your certificate. Â Create an enterprise distribution provisioning profile that authorizes devices to use applications you've signed. Â Deploy the application and the enterprise distribution provisioning profile to your users' computers. Â Instruct users to install the application and profile using iTunes."
I think computing for end users breaks down into two categories: - Task-centric stuff like movies, photos etc. Broadly consumer-oriented. - Document-centric stuff like slide decks, word documents, spreadsheets, etc. Broadly business-oriented.
There are plenty of shops offering similar services in the UK. Additionally, because people are paid monthly rather than weekly, cash flow crises are less frequent.
Lots of people here suggesting electronic funds transfer, but they're all talking about it as if it were a one-time transaction. Typically, however, it would be set up as a standing order -- ie a one time instruction to pay a set amount on a regular date (either for a certain number of transactions or "until further notice"). And it's free.
US banks make UK banks look consumer-friendly, and that's a really special trick! You guys need some overseas competition.
The weird bit to UK ears in your story is the first sentence of your second paragraph: UK companies almost invariably pay their staff's salaries by electronic funds transfer (and almost always on a monthly basis too).
You're taking a very US-centric view of the world. In other countries: 1) Phone banking is perfectly feasible. Even from the middle of fields. 2) So is using a wireless PIN-pad -- which are cheap enough now for small businesses to own. 3) Cheques in the UK incur costs for businesses, just as card payments do (and indeed, just as cash handling does). To take an example, Barclays charges 15p for an epayment, between 19 and 28p for cheque payments, and between 48 and 55p per £100 of cash deposited.
There is much to regret about the encroachment of ebanking, including as you point out, the growing power of credit card companies. However, there really are some gains as well, including greater convenience and utility.
I agree with you that the other poster's language was intemperate...but I can also tell you that from overseas, the US approach to banking looks very odd indeed. I haven't written a cheque to a friend or family member in years. If I want or need to give someone money, I do an electronic funds transfer. It takes place on the same day and it's incredibly straightforward. All you need is the sort code (unique branch identifier) and the account number of the person you're transferring the money to -- plus your authenticators to transfer the money, which vary from bank to bank, but typically include a username and two passwords, and increasingly, a token-based authenticator as well. The sort code and account number are deliberately designed to be inadequate for identity theft -- they don't provide any information that an attacker can use to gain access to your account.
Typical use cases: 1) A group of 19 of us are going on holiday this summer. We need a deposit from everyone for the villa, so my wife emails everyone the sort code and account number, and everyone does an electronic funds transfer. 2) I pay across money each month from my Barclays account to our joint First Direct account to cover business expenses incurred on my credit card. Again, done via e-banking.
I think that, by and large, people have calculated that the additional risks of identity theft are worth incurring given the enormous additional utility of being able to bank electronically (which in my book, means making e-payments). And I say that as a big fan of Ross Anderson.
It's always been harder to attack an airplane than to attack an airport, yet terrorists by and large have not done so. That is mostly because attacks on airplanes are higher profile than attacks on airports.
So we are told that privacy is not compromised because the people viewing the images are in another room and cannot tell who they're looking at. Well, they're going to need *someone* to know who they're looking at, or else there's no bloody point in this system. Specifically, they need to be able to say "Bob, the feller in the machine has got a gun on his left calf". And Bob needs to be able to say "OK, I'm on it. Keep me updated with news from the other queues".
Well, if they can tell Bob that, they can also say, "Hey Bob, this one's got a tiny dick. And that sexy fucking bitch who just went through with the baby had the biggest fucking nipples you've ever seen". And Bob can reply "Alright, I'm pulling her over. I'll find her name and you Google her"
This system has no meaningful privacy protections. The protection that's most likely to be effective for any one of us, is going to be the large volumes of passengers they are dealing with, which reduces the time available for them to take a prurient interest in one particular passenger.
You're really onto something with the idea of a vertical mount in the kitchen. But re your point about limited functionality, the iPad may not be to your taste (sorry, dreadful pun), but it provides significant functionality for just the scenario you described: in addition to recipe websites, there are lots of recipe apps already written, and with the iBooks app, you could look at real recipe books as well -- with the advantage of them not taking up work surface real estate, too. Gordon Ramsay already does "cook alongs"" based on the fact that people have tellies in their kitchen -- the large form factor for the iPad would make it easy for chefs to sell masterclass video guides.
In general, it's pretty clear that there are going to be apps that work on the iPad because of its size and touchscreen. Medical settings are another obvious area where the extra screen inches will make new apps really feasible.
Of course not. Many websites still work fine -- eg facebook. But owners of many major websites have decided that an app offers a *better way* of accessing the content than the website. They use the apps to provide additional functionality and more appropriate layout (this is in iPhone world). And anyway, most users tend to spend most of their time on a relatively limited number of websites -- a dozen or so -- thus, they are often happy to download apps to enhance the experience.
But you clearly *don't* get it. The iPad is crappy for geeks, but not necessarily crappy full-stop. And complaining about 4:3 form factor is just bizarre -- the iPad does more things than just play video and letterboxing is fine, and can you imagine what kind of useless device you'd have for everything besides video if it was 16:9? Or perhaps you'd be dissatisfied with anything less than 2.35:1? And complaining about the fact that you can't read it in bright sunlight is just beyond stupid -- obviously, you can only use eInk for a single-purpose device, and there are some advantages to emissive screens compared to paper, not least that you can read them in the dark -- which should be more important to you than reading in the light if you're a geek, no?
I think you think you're way more of a geek than you really are -- otherwise, you'd understand that the heart of engineering is balancing tradeoffs -- and you'd recognise that the design tradeoffs that Apple have made are to deliver a set of tradeoffs that they think their target market can live with.
They're not interested, to take your last lament, in being first-to-market in a category. They are interested in being the first to deliver devices that are readily picked up and used by people with little knowledge -- of whom there are many more than there are geeks.
When you're insulting people, it's helpful to only insult the people you don't like. By calling them fags, you're insulting both the Scientologists and gay people. I guess the OP may not care 'cos they may not like gay people, but it's still worth calling out. Replace the Fag in SciFag with a racial slur instead and you might get what I mean. (Although in your case, I'm not that hopeful -- see, an insult aimed just at you! Looks like it's possible to do that, after all)
You have no room for sympathies for both the mother *and* the dead child? That's an extraordinarily mean-minded position to take. I'm also not sure that you are expressing your sympathy to the child very well by sneering at their mother. You're ready, on the basis of reading a single news report, to be sure that you *know* this is the fault of the mother? I wish I could live in a world as certain as yours is. And you think she somehow poses a risk to your own personal safety? That's just narcissism, and pretty ridiculous narcissism. You're not a fan of "forgive and forget"? Who are you to forgive or not forgive anyway? What on earth has it got to do with you? The child's father?
I always thought the most interesting moment in that story of a divergence between Heinlein's imagination and how things turned out was when Tex puts his phone in his bag to avoid answering the call -- Heinlein didn't anticipate off-switches, silent settings, or "ignore" buttons. But what he did imagine is truly amazing and extraordinarily believable / internally coherent.
Slashdot Mirror
1) You might want to provide a citation for your first statement, as I'm having difficulty understanding it. By "giving off C02", do you mean something other than respiration?
2) Where did you get your understanding that the scientists working on climate change are all working off the same datasets? There are thousands of relevant datasets, maybe tens of thousands! And scientists are continually creating new datasets themselves.
3) About FOIA requests. The oil industry has worked harder and with more success to suppress information it doesn't like than the climate scientists ever did.
I love your line beginning "When I see complete violation of the scientific method...." You speak with such authority about knowing that climate science is all tainted crap. Are you able to reach definitive conclusions across all scientific literature? Where does your mastery of the process and the research literature come from? Of course, I'm only accepting the arguments of others instead of doing my thinking all for myself. But I'll mostly trust the scientists on this, just as I do on quantum mechanics and every other scientific endeavour -- not to be right, but to be not too wrong, and to be improving.
What a pile of rubbish! There are thousands of scientists working in fields that have a bearing on climate change, from geology to biochemistry to atmospheric physics. They publish tens of thousands of articles on topics related to climate change in the peer-reviewed literature. By doing so, they palpably demonstrate that they do not treat their work as above criticism.
What on earth are you talking about?
He says "I find it bizarre that people refuse to accept we are having an impact on the environment. The evidence is everywhere. ***I'm not talking global warming***" [my highlight]
And you take him to task 3 times for talking about environmental problems that are not to do with AGW. *That's what he said he was going to do* Dumbass.
Absolute horseshit and twattery. What Lomborg does is nothing like a rigorous analysis of abatement policies. If it were, it wouldn't be a book with disingenuous footnotes, it would be a cost curve. Like the ones that these guys have done:
http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/ccsi/Costcurves.asp
Like any cost-curve, it includes lots of actions that are net cash positive -- like home insulation. And yes, they've thought about fucking bounce-back effects too.
Sheesh, people, get a fucking grip.
Who knows why this got modded interesting, it's fuckin' dumb.
Let's try a little thought experiment, shall we? Two scenarios:
1) Let's imagine that you are working on the bleeding edge of science and you're investigating a question that no-one knows the answer to, like "why does Nt-acetylation of bulk proteins happen?". You do some clever research, and whaddya know, you come up with an interesting answer: "it's because acetylation can function as a degradation signal". That forces a need to revisit thinking on protein turnover, a larger topic, and may even mean that we need to think again about exactly how homeostasis works. So you write it all up and if you can get the paper past your clever colleagues who do peer review, you might get published in Science and you can be very proud of yourself. Look, it's happened here!
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/327/5968/966
2) Now, let's imagine that you investigate something a bit more fundamental to modern biological science. Say, the idea that DNA encodes genetic information about the shape of proteins. Let's say you invent a clever experiment and the findings are very striking -- they appear to show that DNA doesn't encode that information after all! Now for the thought experiment bit: do you think that the standards and scrutiny that will be applied to your claim will be higher or lower than in scenario 1, given that your results will require the setting aside / reinterpretation of an enormous mass of prior experimental results and accepted scientific theory. Why, that's right! Your results will be subjected to more careful scrutiny. They will have to be replicated, validated, tested etc etc every which way from Sunday, because the inherent balance of probabilities is that your results are wrong or artefactual or explicable within the current framework, and that the prior thinking was right. It's not *impossible* that the opposite holds true, but it *is* extremely unlikely.
People who seek to demonstrate that anthropogenic climate change is not happening are much closer to scenario 2 than scenario 1. Scientists will quite reasonably say, "just before we chuck out all the accumulated evidence and thinking about how the world works and accept your argument that you've shown it that is, in fact, possible for humans to add net tens of billions of tons of gases such as CO2 and CH4 to the atmosphere in the space of decades without it having an impact on climate, do you mind terribly if we take a very long hard look at your evidence and reasoning?"
I'm stunned that no-one has mentioned the extraordinary scenes of unethical behaviour on the PBS documentary where a remote spycam feature is being used at another school in the Bronx. My jaw dropped open as I saw (at ~4m50s) the Assistant Principal spy on two schoolgirls and describe how he routinely does this with all 6th and 7th graders ("they don't even realise we're watching" -- he then takes control of the second girl's machine and takes a picture, and we see her duck out of his line of sight. His commentary as he did this had me climbing the walls, it was so unpleasant and -- hopefully -- self-incriminating: "I always like to mess with them and take a picture". What's even worse is seeing the disconcerted look on the girl's face before she ducks and listening to the interviewer laugh -- the interviewer's reaction is a perfect example of how you can get caught up in a moment and fail to maintain independence of mind. You can't be certain from the video where she is -- there's a possibility she's at home. In a beautifully ironic twist, PBS carefully blurred out some of the writing on a whiteboard at ~3m40s, presumably to protect someone's privacy! Of course, they didn't bother to blur out the name of the second schoolgirl who got spied on.
I hate to break it to ya, pal, but a university is not really comparable to a commercial enterprise in terms of how computers are used. I work for a top-tier management consultancy with a few thousand employees -- the support includes 24/6 first-line phone guys who use Bomgar for remote sessions, second-line phone support to handle the many highly complex support jobs that come in (often involving sodding Notes, natch) as well as a 6 to 7 person local IT desk in every office to ensure that hardware can be replaced quickly if need be. Behind the scenes and invisible to users are large numbers of corporate IT guys who maintain the servers, build new apps, test deployments etc etc. What kills corporate machines and makes the support load heavy is: networking incl VPN, security, enterprise apps, and the pounding of users. Wouldn't make much difference if it were Macs or PCs, it's the needs of enterprise computing that drive the size of the support.
Some interesting points you make. You appear to be flitting between two perspectives: 1, Apple doesn't understand enterprise requirements, and 2, Apple is not serious about the enterprise. I think 2 is closer to the truth, but probably still overstates the case somewhat -- Apple is focused on the home market and sufficiently interested in the enterprise space to accommodate some of their needs -- but not at the expense of price-point or damage to the value to the consumer. For example, Apple is stuffed full of industrial designers and hardware engineers all of whom understand that physical performance is important -- including all the environmental factors you mentioned. They will have forecast the standard operating range of conditions in which they expect iPads to be used, and then actively considered the cost and other tradeoffs required for more extensive ruggedisation. They will have recognised that the tradeoffs include a correlation between ruggedisation and slimness, for example, and doubtless swung more towards slimness (prized by the core market) than ruggedness (prized by a secondary enterprise market). I'm not saying they made the right tradeoffs, only that I consider it extremely unlikely that a commercial organisation with massive resources, launching a major new product, would fail to anticipate and work through the implications of their decisions for each of their potential target markets.
BTW, I think there are some enterprise markets that the iPad is not an obvious competitor for, at least at present: Fedex et al is one, due to the ruggedness, machine vision and requirement for pen-based signatures. However, there are some completely new large markets that the iPad is the only game in town for. The ability of the device to provide an interface that is completely designed for a particular purpose makes a big difference at that size.
Those were two dumbass comments you made:
1) You can choose to sync manually from your music collection. But if you don't want to bother, you don't have to.
2) He meant update your content, not your software. You know, update your iPod with photos you've taken on your camera and downloaded onto your computer. (Additionally, you obviously don't *need* to update your iPod software, but you may well want to. And it happens only a couple of times a year)
Erm, these are the same issues that iPhone enterprise deployments have faced -- the answers are going to be pretty similar -- apps for enterprises are managed and deployed by the app-writers (ie the enterprise) -- they're not on the AppStore.
To quote from Apple's literature:
"The process for deploying your own applications is:
 Register for enterprise development with Apple.
 Sign your applications using your certificate.
 Create an enterprise distribution provisioning profile that authorizes devices to use
applications you've signed.
 Deploy the application and the enterprise distribution provisioning profile to your
users' computers.
 Instruct users to install the application and profile using iTunes."
I sort of agree, and I sort of don't.
I think computing for end users breaks down into two categories:
- Task-centric stuff like movies, photos etc. Broadly consumer-oriented.
- Document-centric stuff like slide decks, word documents, spreadsheets, etc. Broadly business-oriented.
There are plenty of shops offering similar services in the UK. Additionally, because people are paid monthly rather than weekly, cash flow crises are less frequent.
Lots of people here suggesting electronic funds transfer, but they're all talking about it as if it were a one-time transaction. Typically, however, it would be set up as a standing order -- ie a one time instruction to pay a set amount on a regular date (either for a certain number of transactions or "until further notice"). And it's free.
US banks make UK banks look consumer-friendly, and that's a really special trick! You guys need some overseas competition.
The weird bit to UK ears in your story is the first sentence of your second paragraph: UK companies almost invariably pay their staff's salaries by electronic funds transfer (and almost always on a monthly basis too).
You're taking a very US-centric view of the world. In other countries:
1) Phone banking is perfectly feasible. Even from the middle of fields.
2) So is using a wireless PIN-pad -- which are cheap enough now for small businesses to own.
3) Cheques in the UK incur costs for businesses, just as card payments do (and indeed, just as cash handling does). To take an example, Barclays charges 15p for an epayment, between 19 and 28p for cheque payments, and between 48 and 55p per £100 of cash deposited.
There is much to regret about the encroachment of ebanking, including as you point out, the growing power of credit card companies. However, there really are some gains as well, including greater convenience and utility.
I agree with you that the other poster's language was intemperate...but I can also tell you that from overseas, the US approach to banking looks very odd indeed. I haven't written a cheque to a friend or family member in years. If I want or need to give someone money, I do an electronic funds transfer. It takes place on the same day and it's incredibly straightforward. All you need is the sort code (unique branch identifier) and the account number of the person you're transferring the money to -- plus your authenticators to transfer the money, which vary from bank to bank, but typically include a username and two passwords, and increasingly, a
token-based authenticator as well. The sort code and account number are deliberately designed to be inadequate for identity theft -- they don't provide any information that an attacker can use to gain access to your account.
Typical use cases:
1) A group of 19 of us are going on holiday this summer. We need a deposit from everyone for the villa, so my wife emails everyone the sort code and account number, and everyone does an electronic funds transfer.
2) I pay across money each month from my Barclays account to our joint First Direct account to cover business expenses incurred on my credit card. Again, done via e-banking.
I think that, by and large, people have calculated that the additional risks of identity theft are worth incurring given the enormous additional utility of being able to bank electronically (which in my book, means making e-payments). And I say that as a big fan of Ross Anderson.
It's always been harder to attack an airplane than to attack an airport, yet terrorists by and large have not done so. That is mostly because attacks on airplanes are higher profile than attacks on airports.
So we are told that privacy is not compromised because the people viewing the images are in another room and cannot tell who they're looking at. Well, they're going to need *someone* to know who they're looking at, or else there's no bloody point in this system. Specifically, they need to be able to say "Bob, the feller in the machine has got a gun on his left calf". And Bob needs to be able to say "OK, I'm on it. Keep me updated with news from the other queues".
Well, if they can tell Bob that, they can also say, "Hey Bob, this one's got a tiny dick. And that sexy fucking bitch who just went through with the baby had the biggest fucking nipples you've ever seen". And Bob can reply "Alright, I'm pulling her over. I'll find her name and you Google her"
This system has no meaningful privacy protections. The protection that's most likely to be effective for any one of us, is going to be the large volumes of passengers they are dealing with, which reduces the time available for them to take a prurient interest in one particular passenger.
You're really onto something with the idea of a vertical mount in the kitchen. But re your point about limited functionality, the iPad may not be to your taste (sorry, dreadful pun), but it provides significant functionality for just the scenario you described: in addition to recipe websites, there are lots of recipe apps already written, and with the iBooks app, you could look at real recipe books as well -- with the advantage of them not taking up work surface real estate, too. Gordon Ramsay already does "cook alongs"" based on the fact that people have tellies in their kitchen -- the large form factor for the iPad would make it easy for chefs to sell masterclass video guides.
In general, it's pretty clear that there are going to be apps that work on the iPad because of its size and touchscreen. Medical settings are another obvious area where the extra screen inches will make new apps really feasible.
Of course not. Many websites still work fine -- eg facebook. But owners of many major websites have decided that an app offers a *better way* of accessing the content than the website. They use the apps to provide additional functionality and more appropriate layout (this is in iPhone world). And anyway, most users tend to spend most of their time on a relatively limited number of websites -- a dozen or so -- thus, they are often happy to download apps to enhance the experience.
But you clearly *don't* get it. The iPad is crappy for geeks, but not necessarily crappy full-stop. And complaining about 4:3 form factor is just bizarre -- the iPad does more things than just play video and letterboxing is fine, and can you imagine what kind of useless device you'd have for everything besides video if it was 16:9? Or perhaps you'd be dissatisfied with anything less than 2.35:1? And complaining about the fact that you can't read it in bright sunlight is just beyond stupid -- obviously, you can only use eInk for a single-purpose device, and there are some advantages to emissive screens compared to paper, not least that you can read them in the dark -- which should be more important to you than reading in the light if you're a geek, no?
I think you think you're way more of a geek than you really are -- otherwise, you'd understand that the heart of engineering is balancing tradeoffs -- and you'd recognise that the design tradeoffs that Apple have made are to deliver a set of tradeoffs that they think their target market can live with.
They're not interested, to take your last lament, in being first-to-market in a category. They are interested in being the first to deliver devices that are readily picked up and used by people with little knowledge -- of whom there are many more than there are geeks.
When you're insulting people, it's helpful to only insult the people you don't like. By calling them fags, you're insulting both the Scientologists and gay people. I guess the OP may not care 'cos they may not like gay people, but it's still worth calling out. Replace the Fag in SciFag with a racial slur instead and you might get what I mean. (Although in your case, I'm not that hopeful -- see, an insult aimed just at you! Looks like it's possible to do that, after all)
Given their well-known homophobia, you could have chosen a slightly more appropriate insulting name...
You have no room for sympathies for both the mother *and* the dead child? That's an extraordinarily mean-minded position to take. I'm also not sure that you are expressing your sympathy to the child very well by sneering at their mother.
You're ready, on the basis of reading a single news report, to be sure that you *know* this is the fault of the mother? I wish I could live in a world as certain as yours is.
And you think she somehow poses a risk to your own personal safety? That's just narcissism, and pretty ridiculous narcissism.
You're not a fan of "forgive and forget"? Who are you to forgive or not forgive anyway? What on earth has it got to do with you? The child's father?
I always thought the most interesting moment in that story of a divergence between Heinlein's imagination and how things turned out was when Tex puts his phone in his bag to avoid answering the call -- Heinlein didn't anticipate off-switches, silent settings, or "ignore" buttons. But what he did imagine is truly amazing and extraordinarily believable / internally coherent.