"Being a pocket computer" is something that should not rank 1st but 3rd or perhaps 4th. Get the most important stuff right first.
Hmm, I would say the opposite. To me it's much more important to have a smoothly functioning pocket computer than to have a cell phone. There are dozens of things a pocket computer is useful for (email and web access being just the two most obvious ones), whereas voice chat is just one more 'app' and one that I prefer not to use anyway, since email or text messages are generally more convenient.
Of course, we can agree that the ideal device would do all things well, so that one wouldn't have to make tradeoff decisions like this in the first place.
Gasp! You mean the Obama-messiah is less than divinely perfect? Whoa... gonna have to sit down... re-evaluate my religious beliefs...
Never fear, there's still the Paul-messiah to believe in! I'm convinced he would never let messy political realities factor into his political decisions...
You need to look at his actions, not his well spoken words.
I agree, but let's keep in mind that legislation is written by Congress, not the President. It seems to me that Congress needs to be held responsible for writing and passing the objectionable parts of the NDAA at least as much as the President is responsible for signing it.
If the law is bad in his opinion, it's his duty to veto it.
Agreed again, but note that the bill passed the Senate 86-13 and it passed the House 283-136, both of which are over the 2/3rds threshold for overriding a Presidential veto. Therefore a veto would not have been likely to prevent the bill from becoming law; it would simply have given Republicans a fresh club to beat the President with ("vetoed critical funding for Our Troops", "soft on terrorism", yada yada). Given that, I think Obama decided to cut his losses.
Hardly a profile in courage, I agree, but then again there is a point at which taking a principled stand starts to look an awful lot like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Actually only one or two percent of them are people I voted for (or event against). Most are representatives of other states.
they are supposed to represent your needs better than a random company
A congressperson who openly advocates against my interests versus a company (note: not a random company, a specific company) that openly advocates for my interests? I'll take the latter, I think.
If they are not the people that should be elected, just vote others, it's not that hard.
You'd think it wouldn't be, but it is. The problem is that (in the USA at least) in order to be elected, you need to spend LOTS of money on TV advertising. Which means you need to raise lots of money. Which means you have to promise things (implicitly, anyway) to wealthy, interested people, in return for those campaign donations. Which means you end up beholden to their interests at least as much to the interests of your voters.
The real solution here would be for people to realize that their television doesn't have their best interests at heart, and in fact that seeing a lot of political ads on TV for candidate X is a good indicator that candidate X has been bought and paid for by the people financing the ads and therefore will represent those people and not you after the election... but I don't really know how to get people to understand that. Err, maybe I could run an ad about it?;^)
wouldn't it make a lot more sense, body count wise, as well as both economically and environmentally, to just GET THE IDIOTS OFF THE ROAD!!!
The problem is, everyone is an idiot at some point. Nobody is perfect, and it only takes one second of inattention, distraction, or bad judgement to cause an accident. Even "excellent drivers" have a non-zero cognitive failure rate. So "getting the idiots off the road" means getting everyone off the road, which might be good for the environment, but probably wouldn't be so good for the economy.
Yes, I agree. So the bar for making a tablet that is better than doing that should be pretty low. The question remains: For $35, is it possible to make a tablet that meets that bar?
But you seem pretty content to tell us what we should or should not buy, and what we should be allowed to have, eh?
You are accusing me of writing things that I never wrote. I never told anyone what they should or should not buy, and I certainly never said anything about what people should not be allowed to have.
Having a cheap affordable tablet can help the government to distribute one in practically every village, and provide current information to those who would not have it otherwise.
That sounds great. The question remains: will a $35 tablet meet that need, or not? I can certainly imagine a $35 tablet that stops functioning after two weeks, or is so slow or unreliable that nobody can get it to do any useful work. Paying $35 for a brick would not do anyone any good.
It is incredible, how an arrogant know-it-all like you, who has no idea whatsoever about the ground realities in India, feels compelled to spout off his patronizing opinions in any case, without understanding the least bit what use these tablets are meant for. (hint : it is not for playing angry birds!).
You really need to deal with your anger better and stop name-calling. Even in India people will not use a tablet that doesn't work, and therefore even a $35 tablet will need to be usable. If stating that fact makes you so angry, perhaps you should ask yourself why.
Then... I have an idea -- why don't you go tell them that.
They already know how to run their lives, thank you very much. They don't need me to tell them anything.
It's easy for us first world residents to say they should be buying iPads
I never said anything about anyone buying an iPad. Perhaps you are confusing me with another poster. What I said was, any electronic device that you want people to use (and pay money for) has to be better than the non-electronic methods they already have.... otherwise they won't use it. I don't understand why that is such a difficult concept to get across.
I know this is hard to understand, but if you need to run an application to help you plant your crops, a device that doesn't happen to have a trendy metal bezel and won't play Angry Birds is still better than not planting your crops.
I know this is hard to understand, but people already have an application that helps them plant their crops. They've had it for generations. It's called asking the local farmers how to do it.
That is what any new device has to be better than.
If you were willing to spend several million dollars on a tablet, I'm sure you could get something dramatically better than any tablet currently on the market.
I'm not sure that's true. The amount of R&D already sunk into, say, an iPad is already much more than several million dollars. Starting over from scratch and then spending less on R&D than Apple (et al) have already spent is a good way to get an expensive product, but not necessarily a better one.
Of course if you're willing to start with an already-developed product, I suppose you could always do this...
So if you're an Indian for whom an iPad costs the equivalent of a year's salary you should go without altogether, rather than have the best-in-breed?
You're assuming that any device is necessarily better than no device. That's not a valid assumption. What any low-end device has to be better than is not nothing, but rather the low-tech alternatives (e.g. land line phones, libraries, talking to friends and neighbors, the phone book, etc). There have been many instances of devices that were sufficiently crappy that it was faster and easier to just ignore them and get your task done the old fashioned way.
Sounds like a plan - Since I can't afford a Porsche I'll stick with walking.
If the alternative was spending $1000 on a car that was terribly unreliable and left you stranded on a weekly basis, you'd likely find that walking was in fact a better idea. At least with walking you would know for sure when you would get to your destination, so you could plan out your day with some consistency.
Its sad though that we have to do program minds like this
What makes you think we have to? Unless Hitler is invading tomorrow, we don't "have to" do anything of the sort. We go to war because we choose to do so. (and come to think of it, that's even more sad)
Not until the movie comes out on DVD and BD. Sometimes this can take a whole year.
Okay, so there are up to 12 months worth of movies that may not be available to watch at home. On the other hand, there are about 70 years of movies that can be watched at home, and that set keeps growing over time.
Therefore the chances of not being able to find a movie worth watching except in a movie theater are small, and continue to shrink.
For example, Hop came out in April, and even in December there's no word of a DVD release.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
No new plot lines, but there are new people.
(Specifically, there's now an entire 'lost generation' of teenagers who hold the demented belief that the Star Wars prequels are in some way comparable to the original three)
How are people supposed to buy solar panels for the house when they are not even able to make the house payments.
By using the expected savings as collateral to finance the cost of installation.
As long as the panels can make enough power to pay for themselves over their lifespan, it's a net win to install them. There can be issues with how to structure the financing so that it works for all parties, but they are all resolveable ones.
Iowa will then get to see how much their "first in the nation" predictor factor means in places like California, New York, Florida and Illinois where Paul has a less broad appeal.
It seems to me that if the past few months have shown anything, it's that the Republican voters are searching desperately for a candidate that can excite people and beat Obama. That's why such wunderkinds as Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and even Donald freaking Trump have all had their day at the top of the polls... Republicans will support any not-Romney with a pulse at this point, at least until that person proves him/herself to be too incompetent to run a successful campaign.
Based on that, it seems perfectly plausible to me that a Paul victory in Iowa could well make him the nominee... he has the two necessary qualities: (1) he's not a complete disaster(*), and (2) he's not Mitt Romney.
(*) assuming he doesn't self-destruct like all the other flavors-of-the-week have done so far, of course
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.
Fortunately we in the USA live in a constitutional democracy, which means that the two wolves can vote for mutton as often as they like but their legislation will be thrown out as unconstitutional.
(Of course, if you have three wolves and a sheep, the wolves might be able to amend the constitution to allow sheep slaughter... then all bets are off;^))
Each state holds it's own election -- not for president, though, but for the slate of people who will represent the state in the electoral collage. They're the ones who elect the president, not you.
The U.S. has theirs, China just went online, the Russians also have their own and the EU is also planning one. [...] What a huge waste of money and resources that could surely be spent in better ways.
Good point. Maybe the US, China, and the USSR could share a single collection of tanks and jet fighters as well. That would cut out a lot of redundancy, and also save fuel when a war started, since there would be no need to transport weaponry across the globe to fight -- it would all already be colocated together in the same hangar, so they could just start firing at each other right away.
Does anyone care if its realistic? Intel sure doesn't
Intel will care if the leaks create unrealistic expectations that their product can't meet. The result could be consumer rejection of an otherwise respectable product, because the public had been (mis)led to expect more than the product could actually deliver. (see: Itanium as replacement for x86)
So the "secret Intel propaganda strategy" only works if Intel actually has a reasonable chance of living up to their own unofficial hype. And based on their recent track record, they probably do.
the moon does not seem a logical place for aliens to drop off their stuff. If anything, it seems far more likely that the earth would be such a place, seeing as it has life already
Precisely why the lifeless moon is a better place. That way the local riff-raff is less likely to steal your stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
"Being a pocket computer" is something that should not rank 1st but 3rd or perhaps 4th. Get the most important stuff right first.
Hmm, I would say the opposite. To me it's much more important to have a smoothly functioning pocket computer than to have a cell phone. There are dozens of things a pocket computer is useful for (email and web access being just the two most obvious ones), whereas voice chat is just one more 'app' and one that I prefer not to use anyway, since email or text messages are generally more convenient.
Of course, we can agree that the ideal device would do all things well, so that one wouldn't have to make tradeoff decisions like this in the first place.
Gasp! You mean the Obama-messiah is less than divinely perfect? Whoa... gonna have to sit down... re-evaluate my religious beliefs...
Never fear, there's still the Paul-messiah to believe in! I'm convinced he would never let messy political realities factor into his political decisions...
You need to look at his actions, not his well spoken words.
I agree, but let's keep in mind that legislation is written by Congress, not the President. It seems to me that Congress needs to be held responsible for writing and passing the objectionable parts of the NDAA at least as much as the President is responsible for signing it.
If the law is bad in his opinion, it's his duty to veto it.
Agreed again, but note that the bill passed the Senate 86-13 and it passed the House 283-136, both of which are over the 2/3rds threshold for overriding a Presidential veto. Therefore a veto would not have been likely to prevent the bill from becoming law; it would simply have given Republicans a fresh club to beat the President with ("vetoed critical funding for Our Troops", "soft on terrorism", yada yada). Given that, I think Obama decided to cut his losses.
Hardly a profile in courage, I agree, but then again there is a point at which taking a principled stand starts to look an awful lot like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The coordinated effort of a group of companies/individuals to deny access to voting information in an effort to deny the vote.
Around here we don't call that election tampering, we call that Fox News.
Remember that they are people you voted for,
Actually only one or two percent of them are people I voted for (or event against). Most are representatives of other states.
they are supposed to represent your needs better than a random company
A congressperson who openly advocates against my interests versus a company (note: not a random company, a specific company) that openly advocates for my interests? I'll take the latter, I think.
If they are not the people that should be elected, just vote others, it's not that hard.
You'd think it wouldn't be, but it is. The problem is that (in the USA at least) in order to be elected, you need to spend LOTS of money on TV advertising. Which means you need to raise lots of money. Which means you have to promise things (implicitly, anyway) to wealthy, interested people, in return for those campaign donations. Which means you end up beholden to their interests at least as much to the interests of your voters.
The real solution here would be for people to realize that their television doesn't have their best interests at heart, and in fact that seeing a lot of political ads on TV for candidate X is a good indicator that candidate X has been bought and paid for by the people financing the ads and therefore will represent those people and not you after the election... but I don't really know how to get people to understand that. Err, maybe I could run an ad about it? ;^)
not another we'll-never-see-it solar breakthrough. I suppose highly-efficient batteries, flying cars, and fusion power will be the next stories.
Yes, you will probably see more technology articles on Slashdot. If you don't like technology articles, there are other sites. that don't have them.
ps you forgot to mention the space elevator stories ;^)
wouldn't it make a lot more sense, body count wise, as well as both economically and environmentally, to just GET THE IDIOTS OFF THE ROAD!!!
The problem is, everyone is an idiot at some point. Nobody is perfect, and it only takes one second of inattention, distraction, or bad judgement to cause an accident. Even "excellent drivers" have a non-zero cognitive failure rate. So "getting the idiots off the road" means getting everyone off the road, which might be good for the environment, but probably wouldn't be so good for the economy.
asking the locals fucking sucks./quote.
Yes, I agree. So the bar for making a tablet that is better than doing that should be pretty low. The question remains: For $35, is it possible to make a tablet that meets that bar?
(gratuitous insults ignored)
But you seem pretty content to tell us what we should or should not buy, and what we should be allowed to have, eh?
You are accusing me of writing things that I never wrote. I never told anyone what they should or should not buy, and I certainly never said anything about what people should not be allowed to have.
Having a cheap affordable tablet can help the government to distribute one in practically every village, and provide current information to those who would not have it otherwise.
That sounds great. The question remains: will a $35 tablet meet that need, or not? I can certainly imagine a $35 tablet that stops functioning after two weeks, or is so slow or unreliable that nobody can get it to do any useful work. Paying $35 for a brick would not do anyone any good.
It is incredible, how an arrogant know-it-all like you, who has no idea whatsoever about the ground realities in India, feels compelled to spout off his patronizing opinions in any case, without understanding the least bit what use these tablets are meant for. (hint : it is not for playing angry birds!).
You really need to deal with your anger better and stop name-calling. Even in India people will not use a tablet that doesn't work, and therefore even a $35 tablet will need to be usable. If stating that fact makes you so angry, perhaps you should ask yourself why.
Then... I have an idea -- why don't you go tell them that.
They already know how to run their lives, thank you very much. They don't need me to tell them anything.
It's easy for us first world residents to say they should be buying iPads
I never said anything about anyone buying an iPad. Perhaps you are confusing me with another poster. What I said was, any electronic device that you want people to use (and pay money for) has to be better than the non-electronic methods they already have.... otherwise they won't use it. I don't understand why that is such a difficult concept to get across.
I know this is hard to understand, but if you need to run an application to help you plant your crops, a device that doesn't happen to have a trendy metal bezel and won't play Angry Birds is still better than not planting your crops.
I know this is hard to understand, but people already have an application that helps them plant their crops. They've had it for generations. It's called asking the local farmers how to do it.
That is what any new device has to be better than.
Sorry, did you just make the argument that autistic people are little more than apes?
I'll make that argument about people in general, if you like.
If you were willing to spend several million dollars on a tablet, I'm sure you could get something dramatically better than any tablet currently on the market.
I'm not sure that's true. The amount of R&D already sunk into, say, an iPad is already much more than several million dollars. Starting over from scratch and then spending less on R&D than Apple (et al) have already spent is a good way to get an expensive product, but not necessarily a better one.
Of course if you're willing to start with an already-developed product, I suppose you could always do this...
So if you're an Indian for whom an iPad costs the equivalent of a year's salary you should go without altogether, rather than have the best-in-breed?
You're assuming that any device is necessarily better than no device. That's not a valid assumption. What any low-end device has to be better than is not nothing, but rather the low-tech alternatives (e.g. land line phones, libraries, talking to friends and neighbors, the phone book, etc). There have been many instances of devices that were sufficiently crappy that it was faster and easier to just ignore them and get your task done the old fashioned way.
Sounds like a plan - Since I can't afford a Porsche I'll stick with walking.
If the alternative was spending $1000 on a car that was terribly unreliable and left you stranded on a weekly basis, you'd likely find that walking was in fact a better idea. At least with walking you would know for sure when you would get to your destination, so you could plan out your day with some consistency.
Its sad though that we have to do program minds like this
What makes you think we have to? Unless Hitler is invading tomorrow, we don't "have to" do anything of the sort. We go to war because we choose to do so. (and come to think of it, that's even more sad)
Not until the movie comes out on DVD and BD. Sometimes this can take a whole year.
Okay, so there are up to 12 months worth of movies that may not be available to watch at home. On the other hand, there are about 70 years of movies that can be watched at home, and that set keeps growing over time.
Therefore the chances of not being able to find a movie worth watching except in a movie theater are small, and continue to shrink.
For example, Hop came out in April, and even in December there's no word of a DVD release.
Exactly. If "Hop" is what they are pushing for $10 a person (plus another $6/person for popcorn), then people might as well stay home and spend $5 (total, for the whole family) to watch any of the dozens of previous iterations that are readily available.
For example, Song of the South came out in the 1940s but still hasn't come out on home video in North America.
Of course, Song of the South isn't playing in theaters either, so that's hardly a win for them.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
No new plot lines, but there are new people.
(Specifically, there's now an entire 'lost generation' of teenagers who hold the demented belief that the Star Wars prequels are in some way comparable to the original three)
what scares me is the lack of a "real" private address range (with nat) like we do now with ipv4.
Dunno what your threshold for "real" is, but Wikipedia mentions this... perhaps that would do.
How are people supposed to buy solar panels for the house when they are not even able to make the house payments.
By using the expected savings as collateral to finance the cost of installation.
As long as the panels can make enough power to pay for themselves over their lifespan, it's a net win to install them. There can be issues with how to structure the financing so that it works for all parties, but they are all resolveable ones.
Iowa will then get to see how much their "first in the nation" predictor factor means in places like California, New York, Florida and Illinois where Paul has a less broad appeal.
It seems to me that if the past few months have shown anything, it's that the Republican voters are searching desperately for a candidate that can excite people and beat Obama. That's why such wunderkinds as Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and even Donald freaking Trump have all had their day at the top of the polls... Republicans will support any not-Romney with a pulse at this point, at least until that person proves him/herself to be too incompetent to run a successful campaign.
Based on that, it seems perfectly plausible to me that a Paul victory in Iowa could well make him the nominee... he has the two necessary qualities: (1) he's not a complete disaster(*), and (2) he's not Mitt Romney.
(*) assuming he doesn't self-destruct like all the other flavors-of-the-week have done so far, of course
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.
Fortunately we in the USA live in a constitutional democracy, which means that the two wolves can vote for mutton as often as they like but their legislation will be thrown out as unconstitutional.
(Of course, if you have three wolves and a sheep, the wolves might be able to amend the constitution to allow sheep slaughter... then all bets are off ;^))
Each state holds it's own election -- not for president, though, but for the slate of people who will represent the state in the electoral collage. They're the ones who elect the president, not you.
A historical mistake that we are more than half way towards obviating.
The U.S. has theirs, China just went online, the Russians also have their own and the EU is also planning one. [...] What a huge waste of money and resources that could surely be spent in better ways.
Good point. Maybe the US, China, and the USSR could share a single collection of tanks and jet fighters as well. That would cut out a lot of redundancy, and also save fuel when a war started, since there would be no need to transport weaponry across the globe to fight -- it would all already be colocated together in the same hangar, so they could just start firing at each other right away.
Does anyone care if its realistic? Intel sure doesn't
Intel will care if the leaks create unrealistic expectations that their product can't meet. The result could be consumer rejection of an otherwise respectable product, because the public had been (mis)led to expect more than the product could actually deliver. (see: Itanium as replacement for x86)
So the "secret Intel propaganda strategy" only works if Intel actually has a reasonable chance of living up to their own unofficial hype. And based on their recent track record, they probably do.
the moon does not seem a logical place for aliens to drop off their stuff. If anything, it seems far more likely that the earth would be such a place, seeing as it has life already
Precisely why the lifeless moon is a better place. That way the local riff-raff is less likely to steal your stuff.