Just because you are unfamiliar with the real and significant scientific and engineering advances that were part of the shuttle effort, does not mean they do not exist.
You know, I am continually offended and amazed by the amount and quality of the scorn heaped on NASA by slashdot denizens. NASA did what it did, it's easy to look back thirty years and trash talk about how much better you could have done. The real evidence is that no one exceeded or even came close to NASA's accomplishment with the initial shuttles, for many years afterwards.
Noone was keeping private industry from going into space in, say, 1985 or 1992. 1992 was a great year. How many private shuttle flights were there? How many?
If you think the manned space program is too bureaucratic now, well, your government agrees with you, and that's why its taking the steps it is taking. But history is pretty clear that when the shuttles were first designed and built, they were innovations.
It's a political stance, unburdened by facts, that if only the government oppressor, which consumes all resources and innovative ideas, were somehow to be pushed back, Ayn Rand's nephew would show up and build us a wonderful and lucrative train track to Mars. The truth is, we use government as a means to organize ourselves for several tasks we feel everyone should contribute to, be it defense or education or assurance of clean drinking water. NASA did things then, and continues to do things today, for which there is not an immediate payoff but that we feel there is value in doing. Are we always right? Assuredly not. The evidence is clear though that many of the things which NASA did first, others have followed.
See, you and I, we can just build a desktop system and, if what you say is true, there would be no problem.
But what about somebody like MY DAD, he hears about linux from the guys at work, decides to try it on his new, factory-built Windows PC? Where does this leave him?
I say this not euphemistically, I love my dad but he's a putz around computers, but I could easily imagine him and people like him attempting this. They'd basically be locked out, or screwed.
Let me be the first one in this thread to advocate for THE CASE FOR MARS by Robert Zubrin. They should skip the asteroid and the moon, and start sending robotic missions to Mars today. When the robots have manufactured a liveable environment (e.g. caves or lava tubes) and enough fuel for an emergency return trip, then you send the astronauts.
Yes, but in your example, an observer in the frame of reference of the neutrino itself would be traveling faster than the speed of light. That frame of reference would be going backwards in time.
I can point to transparent, legitimate reasons for most of these things you mention
cash for clunkers => trying to generate car sales to help Detroit out so we don't lose this domestic manufacturing base ACORN => encouraging people to register and to vote, who are legal to and who have an interest in the outcome Solyndra => trying to jumpstart a domestic solar panel industry 'Obamacare' => trying to make health care actually work for more Americans, which is what a lot of voters actually want
I'd say, if you are going to accuse someone of a crime, it's up to you to prove they did it. 'Corrupt' doesn't mean he simply did something you don't like.
P.S. none of this has anything to do with what the marginal tax rate should be. This is a simple pattern repeated throughout American politics - the left side makes legitimate, reasoned arguments ("The top marginal tax rate now is lower than it was during Reagan, lower than it was during Clinton - e.g. when we last had a balanced budget - and less than half what it was during the 1950s. We fought two major wars and the top wage earners were asked to make no sacrifices whatsoever.") The right, in answer, regurgitates a bunch of unrelated, unproven talking points from Drudge and talk radio.
I guess we get the public discourse, and the government, we deserve. At least my side is willing to recognize we have problems big enough that we need to find some middle ground and work together on them. Partisanship is a luxury we don't have the bandwidth for right now.
You may choose to vote, and to promote your views, however you like. Please try not to be offensive in doing so. It's telling that you posted this comment without any attribution. Would you write the same thing, in the same manner, if your family were reading it?
Free bonus fact: Obama didn't start the TSA - George W. Bush did.
Re:Printing metal in-place is not going to work.
on
Printing a Building
·
· Score: 1
Progress is going to be made mostly by people who research and try new things, and very seldom by people who say "That'll never work! Myuh myuh myuh!"
This. Lots of places anywhere in the US now could be had for much cheaper than building a new town from scratch. Because, whatever technologies they are vetting there, if they're not applicable to current housing, current communities, current ways of life, no one, or very few people at least, are going to consent to having their current homes leveled to make way for it, whatever the it is.
For that amount of money, they could probably give a slice to every homeless and/or unemployed person in America. But yeah, this is probably almost as good -
Uhm, lack imagination much? It's distressing the anti-nerd, anti-tech, anti-imagination tone of a lot of comments I see on/. these days.
Yes the current incarnation is not much in terms of utility - but you wouldn't want to be commuting to work today in the first automobiles either. The notion here is to get the technology out into the hands of a bunch of self-motivated tinkerers and some of them will come up with useful, unforseen ideas. If you're an advocate for the free market, or American ingenuity, then you really shoudn't be taking issue with personal stereolithography.
OH GOD I am so tired of this argument - 'If it's worth doing then why isn't the private sector doing it, or funding it'. Private sector absolutely is beholden to the shareholders and the quarterly profit cycle. That's exactly why lots of tropical diseases that are imminently curable go unaddressed - oh, they don't have money? No new drugs for them.
If you were honest with yourself, you could fire up Wikipedia, or open up a history book, and make a list of 'things the government did first that private industry benefited from later'. Ok, here's my five second stab at that
- the interstate system - the internet - lots of immunizations and vaccines - GPS - MOSIS - sequencing the genome - clean water and air standards, which are nice
This magical thinking that if the government evaporated tomorrow, some guy in his garage would do all those things, somehow better and more efficiently, is a crutch for people who are uninterested in how the world really works. In effect, NASA IS PAYING private companies to develop and build the JWST - but twenty guys in twenty garages somewhere are not going to independently come up with twenty telescopes better than Perkins Elmer, Ball Aerospace, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman - who are all getting money as part of JWST, and, last time I checked, all ARE part of private industry. In fact, you might reasonably argue that it is reflexive dishonesty and underbidding by the commercial subcontractors (who have been conditioned to this by decades of working for the Pentagon) that has been the major driver of cost overruns. But hey, believe what you want -
The problem with Europa is that the interesting bits we want to get at are under (at least) 20 kilometers of ice. Whoever figures out how to breach that without destroying the environment beneath is going to be a winner in the big NASA lottery, and enable a lot of exciting exploration. Callisto probably has a similar subsurface ocean, for instance -
I'm all for Jungian synchronicity and all, but not really seeing the overt connection to cyber warfare. Also, it's probably fair to say the author is not a disinterested party, if he's trying to promote his own blog about these issues. Better to pose a big, apparently unsolvable problem, and direct everyone to your blog and/or your O'Reilly textbook for some solutions. The author's blog is subtitled "Evolving Hostilities in the Global Cyber Commons", and the OReilly book is entitled CYBER WARFARE.
"Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas," said Dr. Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center [...]
Take a look at Lisa Pratt, among today's panelists - her IU home page is kind of a big clue;
Lisa M. Pratt, Provost's Professor of Geological Sciences, Biogeochemistry
Research Interests:
Geomicrobiology of sulfate-reducing microorganisms Biotic and abiotic fractionation of sulfur isotopes in modern and ancient oceans and lakes Influence of wildfire on carbon isotopic excursions during the Cretaceous Fate of complex organic molecules on the surface of Mars
Ph.D., 1982, Geology, Princeton University
M.S., 1978, Geology, University of North Carolina
M.S., 1974, Botany, University of Illinois
B.A., 1972, Botany, University of North Carolina
By your definition, everyone is then a "bad user". Clueless individual users like my father-in-law are "bad users" and have no business using a Windows computer. And technology companies larded with full-on technology professionals are "bad users".
I think that, if Windows auto updates were a real solution, everyone would be using it, all the time. Yet slashdot is rife with stories about security vulnerabilities Windows (and their handmaiden of chaos, Adobe) have left uncorrected for all kinds of reasons (obsolescing some older piece of software, its part of the business model, etc.) And the IT at pretty much everywhere I've worked simply has not trusted it. Oh, look what just popped up on my calendar here, just while I was typing this;
. AUDIENCE: All Enterprise Managed Windows desktop and laptop system users
SUMMARY: As part of routine maintenance of Windows computers, patches to the Windows operating system and select Windows applications will be installed on Friday, 5/13/2011 starting at 2:00 am.
ACTION: These updates might require one or more reboot(s). If required, the reboot(s) will occur starting at 3:00 am on Friday, 5/13/2011. It is possible that additional reboots may still be required following 3:00 am; if so, a pop-up will appear asking you to reboot now or later. Please reboot at your earliest convenience.
DETAILS: If your computer is not on at 2:00 am on Friday, 5/13/2011, the updates will install as soon as possible after 9:00 am on 5/13/2011, but will not force a reboot. If you have a laptop that is not attached to the network, in a loaner pool, or out in the field and would like to have it updated prior to the scheduled time, you may activate the patches via the [Some third party not Windows auto updates] Patch Management system as early as Thursday morning. If you need to install the patches prior to their availability in [that third party software], feel free to install the patches using Microsoft's Windows Update website. Please install all Critical and Important patches.
Please note: In some cases Microsoft makes changes to the patches that are distributed on the Windows Update web site. If the version of the patch installed on your system is not the most current version, the [third party] patch distribution software will reapply the patch and reboot your system if needed. If you would like to update your system prior to the schedule time, you can follow the directions posted here: http://someplace/services/desktop/security/PatchManagementSystemFAQs.htm .
That's fine, it's not like I'm doing any work on this PC that could be interrupted by multiple (and an apparently unpredicable number of) reboots. It's not inconvenient at all.
YET, even still, with a ginormous IT department, huge budget for IT, ruthless discipline, multiple networking choke points, and some skin in the game WRT national security and cyber warfare, my employer was hacked, thoroughly and repeatedly, by real adversaries, ah, but only through the Windows machines. Must be we are all "bad users". It couldn't be Windows.
My father-in-law got his XP desktop infected with some kind of scareware and it two full evenings of dorking around in order to get it working and online again, including rebuilding part of the registry. Now I'm not a Windows IT professional, but still, I'm a fairly bright guy, I have degrees in CSE and EE, I use computers fairly constantly. He was somewhat lax in keeping up with security, updates etc. Not the first time this happened to him, and every time it happens, I get called in to clean up and put him back on maintenance. There's a constant stream of security updates and patches for windows, and doubly so if you want to use Adobe products. GEEZ, it really is torture, frankly. (Forgive me for saying it, but my own OSX machines never ever have problems like this. And I don't pay for 3rd-party security either.)
The Windows stance seems to be that, if you would just do all these things, update when we ask you to, patch whenever we ask you to, buy a bunch of 3rd-party security products, choosing wisely, install them all, keep them patched and up-to-date and on maintenance, don't do anything unsafe in your browsing, keep all your settings on safe options, cleverly disregard all appeals for installs/updates/patches that are really trojans, eat all your vegetables, floss after every meal, then everything will be fine. There's always some little gotcha somewhere that eventually gets exploited. Contrast : for OSX, I get a popup every couple of weeks letting me know that updates are ready. I accept, they all get installed in the background, and I hardly even think of it. Never had a problem. The whole OSX value proposition, the business model frankly, is not about having menus and taskbars that are slightly cooler. OSX is in business today because Windows is sucky in exactly these ways, and people are tired of getting burned on the security issues and the overhead it incurs. Brin is exactly right.
Here's the bottom line - I get called, because of my career, to do IT fixes for my father, my sister, my father-in-law, my wife, my wife's uncle (and surely my own kids also in a few more years.) I'd gladly, GLADLY, pay $20/month per relative so as not to have to do any Windows support ever again. To me, it seems a bargain. IT support is not why I got into the business I'm in.
See, they should sue all the people who didn't download THE EXPENDABLES. I'd be happy to settle out of court, for a modest settlement, in order to avoid watching that movie.
Yeah I think the article and the actual source material are both pretty fuzzy on whether they've implemented a whole phone in this technology or merely the display. I'd say the display is nice but there's a long way from a display to the whole gadget, and a lot of the mass of your typical smart phone is devoted to things (battery, power management, flash) that are going to be hard to implement in the same flat, flexible tech.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because you are unfamiliar with the real and significant scientific and engineering advances that were part of the shuttle effort, does not mean they do not exist.
You know, I am continually offended and amazed by the amount and quality of the scorn heaped on NASA by slashdot denizens. NASA did what it did, it's easy to look back thirty years and trash talk about how much better you could have done. The real evidence is that no one exceeded or even came close to NASA's accomplishment with the initial shuttles, for many years afterwards.
Noone was keeping private industry from going into space in, say, 1985 or 1992. 1992 was a great year. How many private shuttle flights were there? How many?
If you think the manned space program is too bureaucratic now, well, your government agrees with you, and that's why its taking the steps it is taking. But history is pretty clear that when the shuttles were first designed and built, they were innovations.
It's a political stance, unburdened by facts, that if only the government oppressor, which consumes all resources and innovative ideas, were somehow to be pushed back, Ayn Rand's nephew would show up and build us a wonderful and lucrative train track to Mars. The truth is, we use government as a means to organize ourselves for several tasks we feel everyone should contribute to, be it defense or education or assurance of clean drinking water. NASA did things then, and continues to do things today, for which there is not an immediate payoff but that we feel there is value in doing. Are we always right? Assuredly not. The evidence is clear though that many of the things which NASA did first, others have followed.
See, you and I, we can just build a desktop system and, if what you say is true, there would be no problem.
But what about somebody like MY DAD, he hears about linux from the guys at work, decides to try it on his new, factory-built Windows PC? Where does this leave him?
I say this not euphemistically, I love my dad but he's a putz around computers, but I could easily imagine him and people like him attempting this. They'd basically be locked out, or screwed.
Let me be the first one in this thread to advocate for THE CASE FOR MARS by Robert Zubrin. They should skip the asteroid and the moon, and start sending robotic missions to Mars today. When the robots have manufactured a liveable environment (e.g. caves or lava tubes) and enough fuel for an emergency return trip, then you send the astronauts.
My vote is for solar sails, if you can give the sheet some rigidity and reflectivity.
Yes, but in your example, an observer in the frame of reference of the neutrino itself would be traveling faster than the speed of light. That frame of reference would be going backwards in time.
This. Mod parent up please!
I can point to transparent, legitimate reasons for most of these things you mention
cash for clunkers => trying to generate car sales to help Detroit out so we don't lose this domestic manufacturing base
ACORN => encouraging people to register and to vote, who are legal to and who have an interest in the outcome
Solyndra => trying to jumpstart a domestic solar panel industry
'Obamacare' => trying to make health care actually work for more Americans, which is what a lot of voters actually want
I'd say, if you are going to accuse someone of a crime, it's up to you to prove they did it. 'Corrupt' doesn't mean he simply did something you don't like.
P.S. none of this has anything to do with what the marginal tax rate should be. This is a simple pattern repeated throughout American politics - the left side makes legitimate, reasoned arguments ("The top marginal tax rate now is lower than it was during Reagan, lower than it was during Clinton - e.g. when we last had a balanced budget - and less than half what it was during the 1950s. We fought two major wars and the top wage earners were asked to make no sacrifices whatsoever.") The right, in answer, regurgitates a bunch of unrelated, unproven talking points from Drudge and talk radio.
I guess we get the public discourse, and the government, we deserve. At least my side is willing to recognize we have problems big enough that we need to find some middle ground and work together on them. Partisanship is a luxury we don't have the bandwidth for right now.
This.
You may choose to vote, and to promote your views, however you like. Please try not to be offensive in doing so. It's telling that you posted this comment without any attribution. Would you write the same thing, in the same manner, if your family were reading it?
Free bonus fact: Obama didn't start the TSA - George W. Bush did.
Progress is going to be made mostly by people who research and try new things, and very seldom by people who say "That'll never work! Myuh myuh myuh!"
This. Lots of places anywhere in the US now could be had for much cheaper than building a new town from scratch. Because, whatever technologies they are vetting there, if they're not applicable to current housing, current communities, current ways of life, no one, or very few people at least, are going to consent to having their current homes leveled to make way for it, whatever the it is.
For that amount of money, they could probably give a slice to every homeless and/or unemployed person in America. But yeah, this is probably almost as good -
Uhm, lack imagination much? It's distressing the anti-nerd, anti-tech, anti-imagination tone of a lot of comments I see on /. these days.
Yes the current incarnation is not much in terms of utility - but you wouldn't want to be commuting to work today in the first automobiles either. The notion here is to get the technology out into the hands of a bunch of self-motivated tinkerers and some of them will come up with useful, unforseen ideas. If you're an advocate for the free market, or American ingenuity, then you really shoudn't be taking issue with personal stereolithography.
OH GOD I am so tired of this argument - 'If it's worth doing then why isn't the private sector doing it, or funding it'. Private sector absolutely is beholden to the shareholders and the quarterly profit cycle. That's exactly why lots of tropical diseases that are imminently curable go unaddressed - oh, they don't have money? No new drugs for them.
If you were honest with yourself, you could fire up Wikipedia, or open up a history book, and make a list of 'things the government did first that private industry benefited from later'. Ok, here's my five second stab at that
- the interstate system
- the internet
- lots of immunizations and vaccines
- GPS
- MOSIS
- sequencing the genome
- clean water and air standards, which are nice
This magical thinking that if the government evaporated tomorrow, some guy in his garage would do all those things, somehow better and more efficiently, is a crutch for people who are uninterested in how the world really works. In effect, NASA IS PAYING private companies to develop and build the JWST - but twenty guys in twenty garages somewhere are not going to independently come up with twenty telescopes better than Perkins Elmer, Ball Aerospace, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman - who are all getting money as part of JWST, and, last time I checked, all ARE part of private industry. In fact, you might reasonably argue that it is reflexive dishonesty and underbidding by the commercial subcontractors (who have been conditioned to this by decades of working for the Pentagon) that has been the major driver of cost overruns. But hey, believe what you want -
The problem with Europa is that the interesting bits we want to get at are under (at least) 20 kilometers of ice. Whoever figures out how to breach that without destroying the environment beneath is going to be a winner in the big NASA lottery, and enable a lot of exciting exploration. Callisto probably has a similar subsurface ocean, for instance -
Plenty of oil in space. First up: ethane and methane harvesting on Titan (but watch out for those methane sharks) -
That second one. Load of bollocks.
I'm all for Jungian synchronicity and all, but not really seeing the overt connection to cyber warfare. Also, it's probably fair to say the author is not a disinterested party, if he's trying to promote his own blog about these issues. Better to pose a big, apparently unsolvable problem, and direct everyone to your blog and/or your O'Reilly textbook for some solutions. The author's blog is subtitled "Evolving Hostilities in the Global Cyber Commons", and the OReilly book is entitled CYBER WARFARE.
They have certainly found methane on Mars, and so far can't conclusively explain where it's coming from, or its periodic nature;
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/news/marsmethane.html
Here's the good bit;
"Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas," said Dr. Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center [...]
Take a look at Lisa Pratt, among today's panelists - her IU home page is kind of a big clue;
Lisa M. Pratt, Provost's Professor of Geological Sciences, Biogeochemistry
Research Interests:
Geomicrobiology of sulfate-reducing microorganisms
Biotic and abiotic fractionation of sulfur isotopes in modern and ancient oceans and lakes
Influence of wildfire on carbon isotopic excursions during the Cretaceous
Fate of complex organic molecules on the surface of Mars
Ph.D., 1982, Geology, Princeton University
M.S., 1978, Geology, University of North Carolina
M.S., 1974, Botany, University of Illinois
B.A., 1972, Botany, University of North Carolina
"Begun these lighting wars have!" That's the line! Say it! Say it!
By your definition, everyone is then a "bad user". Clueless individual users like my father-in-law are "bad users" and have no business using a Windows computer. And technology companies larded with full-on technology professionals are "bad users".
I think that, if Windows auto updates were a real solution, everyone would be using it, all the time. Yet slashdot is rife with stories about security vulnerabilities Windows (and their handmaiden of chaos, Adobe) have left uncorrected for all kinds of reasons (obsolescing some older piece of software, its part of the business model, etc.) And the IT at pretty much everywhere I've worked simply has not trusted it. Oh, look what just popped up on my calendar here, just while I was typing this;
.
AUDIENCE:
All Enterprise Managed Windows desktop and laptop system users
SUMMARY:
As part of routine maintenance of Windows computers, patches to the Windows operating system and select Windows applications will be installed on Friday, 5/13/2011 starting at 2:00 am.
ACTION:
These updates might require one or more reboot(s). If required, the reboot(s) will occur starting at 3:00 am on Friday, 5/13/2011. It is possible that additional reboots may still be required following 3:00 am; if so, a pop-up will appear asking you to reboot now or later. Please reboot at your earliest convenience.
DETAILS:
If your computer is not on at 2:00 am on Friday, 5/13/2011, the updates will install as soon as possible after 9:00 am on 5/13/2011, but will not force a reboot. If you have a laptop that is not attached to the network, in a loaner pool, or out in the field and would like to have it updated prior to the scheduled time, you may activate the patches via the [Some third party not Windows auto updates] Patch Management system as early as Thursday morning. If you need to install the patches prior to their availability in [that third party software], feel free to install the patches using Microsoft's Windows Update website. Please install all Critical and Important patches.
For more detailed information regarding the Microsoft patches, please visit the following website:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms11-May.mspx
Please note: In some cases Microsoft makes changes to the patches that are distributed on the Windows Update web site. If the version of the patch installed on your system is not the most current version, the [third party] patch distribution software will reapply the patch and reboot your system if needed. If you would like to update your system prior to the schedule time, you can follow the directions posted here:
http://someplace/services/desktop/security/PatchManagementSystemFAQs.htm
.
That's fine, it's not like I'm doing any work on this PC that could be interrupted by multiple (and an apparently unpredicable number of) reboots. It's not inconvenient at all.
YET, even still, with a ginormous IT department, huge budget for IT, ruthless discipline, multiple networking choke points, and some skin in the game WRT national security and cyber warfare, my employer was hacked, thoroughly and repeatedly, by real adversaries, ah, but only through the Windows machines. Must be we are all "bad users". It couldn't be Windows.
My father-in-law got his XP desktop infected with some kind of scareware and it two full evenings of dorking around in order to get it working and online again, including rebuilding part of the registry. Now I'm not a Windows IT professional, but still, I'm a fairly bright guy, I have degrees in CSE and EE, I use computers fairly constantly. He was somewhat lax in keeping up with security, updates etc. Not the first time this happened to him, and every time it happens, I get called in to clean up and put him back on maintenance. There's a constant stream of security updates and patches for windows, and doubly so if you want to use Adobe products. GEEZ, it really is torture, frankly. (Forgive me for saying it, but my own OSX machines never ever have problems like this. And I don't pay for 3rd-party security either.)
The Windows stance seems to be that, if you would just do all these things, update when we ask you to, patch whenever we ask you to, buy a bunch of 3rd-party security products, choosing wisely, install them all, keep them patched and up-to-date and on maintenance, don't do anything unsafe in your browsing, keep all your settings on safe options, cleverly disregard all appeals for installs/updates/patches that are really trojans, eat all your vegetables, floss after every meal, then everything will be fine. There's always some little gotcha somewhere that eventually gets exploited. Contrast : for OSX, I get a popup every couple of weeks letting me know that updates are ready. I accept, they all get installed in the background, and I hardly even think of it. Never had a problem. The whole OSX value proposition, the business model frankly, is not about having menus and taskbars that are slightly cooler. OSX is in business today because Windows is sucky in exactly these ways, and people are tired of getting burned on the security issues and the overhead it incurs. Brin is exactly right.
Here's the bottom line - I get called, because of my career, to do IT fixes for my father, my sister, my father-in-law, my wife, my wife's uncle (and surely my own kids also in a few more years.) I'd gladly, GLADLY, pay $20/month per relative so as not to have to do any Windows support ever again. To me, it seems a bargain. IT support is not why I got into the business I'm in.
Am I really the first one in this thread to suggest that maybe "Firebird" is an unfortunate choice of name for a 'pilot optional' aircraft? Really?
Forgive me for a moment for being thin-skinned, but "pawns of capitalism"? Oh, maybe as opposed to "grubbing lickspittles" (i.e.businessmen.)
See, they should sue all the people who didn't download THE EXPENDABLES. I'd be happy to settle out of court, for a modest settlement, in order to avoid watching that movie.
Yeah I think the article and the actual source material are both pretty fuzzy on whether they've implemented a whole phone in this technology or merely the display. I'd say the display is nice but there's a long way from a display to the whole gadget, and a lot of the mass of your typical smart phone is devoted to things (battery, power management, flash) that are going to be hard to implement in the same flat, flexible tech.