In this case, my favourite potential outcome looks possible: Gordon Brown remains PM and introduces electoral reform in the Queens speech. This is in the interest of everyone except the two main parties, so it gets through. Immediately afterwards, the Conservatives propose a vote of no confidence in the government and we get another election, with a better voting system.
Attractive, but I don't think it's practical. PR has all sorts of knock-on effects, which need to be organised (moving of constituency boundaries, changes to the roles and responsibilities of MPs etc.). I heard a bod on the radio explaining that it would take a whole parliamentary term (by which I assume he meant 4-5 years) to arrange this.
2/ The conservatives and Liberal democrats do a deal, and make a joint platform. This is the only one that has got any possiblity of lasting. The tricky part is as the 3rd Party the Liberal Democrats want some form of proportial representation (which would double their seats in parlament). The conservatives don't want that at all. They like the current system. I don't know what is going to happen here. I guess the Lib Dems will blink "for the good of the coutry", and a deal will be done.
The other sticking point for the Lib Dems is Europe. They are very pro, the Conservatives are very anti.
There's strong public campaigns at the moment for the Lib Dems not to compromise on electoral reform -- after all this is a once in a generation opportunity.
Electoral reform is the one thing I want to see achieved in this parliament.
They're called "mini-series". See Band of Brothers or Angels in America. Yeah, they may not be as long as Lost, but they have a complete, well-though story.
I'd say a miniseries was similar in scope to a novel, and often they're adapted from them. In the UK, for example, Pride and Prejudice or Brideshead Revisited. A novel adapted into 11 TV episodes.
Lost is an example of something more than 6 times longer than that, and with that format comes extra responsibility. If we think of a piece as having fractal layers (e.g. in Lord of the rings: series, book, chapter, paragraph, sentence) -- the longer the piece, the more layers it needs in order that the reader/viewer doesn't lose interest.
You couldn't stretch Band of Brothers out to 6 series just by slowing down the way the story is revealed. It needs mini-closures, and mini-openings, paced to maintain interest.
I think you're doing Lost a disservice. Sure, it's not the first to do non-linear storytelling, and the article is daft to suggest it does.
But I think Lost is a fascinating form. An epic story told over the course of 121 hours (OK, ~90 hours + ad breaks), with an overall structure, a proper beginning, middle and end, and a kind of fractal-ness, in that each series also has a story arc, and to some extent so does each episode.
I have trouble thinking of anything else that's achieved this. Other TV series and comics tend to have an open ended structure, so it's beginning followed by endless "middle", and maybe a tacked on "end" when it gets cancelled (e.g. The Sopranos). Things like the X Factor, Prison Break, Heroes tease us with some kind of big potential denouement, but in reality the writers don't know what it is, and will churn out episodes until they're told to wrap it up. Novels are usually much shorter. Even the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy has less plot than Lost.
It's especially not fair to compare Lost with Heroes. Lost's writers claim to have always known how the overall story would work out -- and that appears to be true. With Heroes, it's pretty clear that they make it up as they go along.
Comics *usually* have the same open-endedness that TV series do. I'm sure some comic geek will tell me of a great comic with 200 issues in which the writer clearly knew how it would end, as he was writing the first issue -- but I don't know of one off the top of my head.
Oh, I would say The Shield pulled it off. So Lost is not quite unique.
The fact that people want to jailbreak their iPhone says one thing to me -- they shouldn't have bought it.
Think about it, it's a device that's broken out of the box, to the extent that in order to use it for the purpose you bought it for, you have to mend it. And the act of mending it invalidates the warranty!
Why not just buy something that does the job you want it to do in the first place? If Apple don't make such a device, buy one from someone else.
If everyone did this, perhaps market forces would cause Apple to make their platform less restrictive.
Honestly, that's my least favorite thing about having Steven Moffat write the show... he always wrote the really scary episodes, and I have no stomach for that sort of thing.
It's a children's program - you're going to have to man up;)
I'm not using Slashdot as a guide. I have no idea what correlation there is between/. users and warez. The argument comes from the UK Pirate Party, who were using government figures.
"And can you point out any place where some people actually honestly tried to implement communism on a national level?"
Is this a trick question? The bolsheviks were true communists and they've been followed by Mao, kim Jong Il and various other tin pot african, asian and south/central american dictatorships.
In fact the Bolsheviks never achieved the communist state they dreamt of.
Lenin replaced Tsarism with "the dictatorship of the proletariat" described as "An immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the rich: . . . and suppression by force, i.e. exclusion from democracy, for the exploiters and oppressors of the people — this is the change which democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism.”
Lenin, Trotsky etc. believed that there had to be some harsh times, during which enemies of the revolution had to be taken out of the equation (massacred, sent to the Gulag, whatever), during which the proletariat would be re-educated (to destroy the religion and royalism that was supposedly keeping them chained), creating the conditions under which a utopian communist state would emerge, as Marx and Engels predicted, whereupon the dictatorship could cease, not being required any more.
They were idealists, but they were ruthless idealists and they performed atrocities in pursuit of their dream. We can agree, I'm sure, that the anticipated ends did not justify the means. Then Stalin took over, a ruthless, paranoid, corrupt madman, and really wrecked the whole thing. It's likely however, that no matter who had been involved, they'd have succumbed to inevitable corruption and madness.
As the GP said, aside from some village sized communes, genuine communism has never been achieved.
Plenty of dictatorships modelled after the Soviet Union though. I'll give you that.
"software should be given away free no matter now much work went into it"
Nothing in RMS's credo says that.
Don't give anyone the software until you're paid for it. When you're paid for it, give them the software, the source, and the right to redistribute both.
Yes, you might need to charge more because there are fewer sales. Yes, it probably prevents you from getting wildly rich off a few months of coding. Tough. But look around, people are making an honest living on those terms.
Great analogy, because the "right" to have Welsh spoken in Welsh schools was always an emotive non-issue which only seriously affected the *very* small minority of Welsh people who don't (as opposed to won't) speak any English.
This isn't an appropriate place to have this discussion, but I don't want what you said there to be the last word. You seem to be saying that it's OK for the state to force people to be educated in their second language. OK for the state to pro-actively work to kill a language. Is it still Godwin's law if I mention the rich tapestry of languages Stalin destroyed? And we're not talking about immigrants who are bringing a non-indigenous language to the country.
Well if "sharing is good", why can't I use GPL code in my closed-source project? Stallman only wants to "share" on his own terms - same as everyone else.
A means to an end. Stallman would prefer it if there were no copyright, including on his own creations. As long as there *is* copyright, the GPL takes advantage of it.
His belief in free software is pragmatic. He wanted to hack a printer driver to make it email him when his job had printed. He was shocked when he was told that the source code wasn't his to mess with. His message is, don't buy software that doesn't come with source you can modify.
I do believe he undervalues programmers' skill, including his own. I don't think he realises how few people could create GCC, glibc etc. Partly, he gives it to the community because it came relatively easy to him. When programmers say "I should get big bucks for my creations", RMS, I believe, just doesn't consider their creation to be such an great achievement.
(Or perhaps he values programmers' skill correctly. There are a lot of programmers out there. We're not all irreplaceable.)
How is that any different to any other profession? Why are artists entitled to unequal and enforced support from their industry, and welders or seamstresses are not? What makes an unsuccessful artist more worthy than an unsuccessful teacher?
Just to add to the confusion, how do you define success?
A highly successful teacher (the children they teach grow up to be valuable members of society) might be poorly rewarded financially. A poor teacher might get a great salary (by gaming the system, for example).
An artist might be highly successful at what they set out to do. They might even by acclaimed by the critics, yet not earn very much in the marketplace.
It doesn't answer your question. But it adds nuance to it (and makes it harder to answer).
I have a much simpler argument: If a law is impossible or almost-impossible to enforce, there is something wrong with that law.
So in a hypothetical past where forensics are worthless and it's easy to get someone alone and slit their throat without getting caught, that there should not be a law against murder?
I think a much stronger argument is that when a huge segment of the population performs some act routinely without any sense of guilt, that's evidence that society as a whole doesn't consider it wrong. In a secular society, what can define right and wrong, except the consensus of the people? If the consensus is that something is not wrong, why is there a law against it?
When I was brought up in Wales in the 1980s, I felt that Cymdeithas yr Iaith (the Welsh Language Society) were making unreasonable demands in their campaigning. And I still do to an extent.
But, in the 1960s and earlier, the right for Welsh people to speak and learn in their mother tongue was a serious civil rights issue. By the 1980s things had improved greatly, largely thanks to the activities of Cymdeithas yr Iaith.
I think that by continuing to maintain pressure, perhaps for demands that are a step too far, they prevent the pendulum from swinging back to where it was in the 60s.
I think the same goes for Stallman. Many people benefit from Free Software. Many people would be satisfied for a less pure Free Software world than Stallman demands. But without Stallman's purist stance, the average would shift to a less free position. I wouldn't want that.
Could you imagine sitting on a bench, bus, or barstool and skyping from this thing? I hate to toss around the word "killer app," but I do believe that kind of functionality would turn heads.
Either:
- You hold the iPad up in the air, and look, um, unusual - Or the camera is detachable, and you hold that aloft - Or whoever you're talking to gets a lovely view of the underside of your chin and the contents of your nostrils.
Re:You're the first person I've read that gets it
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iPad Review
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I don't know what you're doing wrong to make wake-from-standby so slow. I've got a bog-standard Dell running XP, and it does fine. Shut the lid, it sleeps. Open it up, it wakes.
Literally no good way to deal with the power cord? If you're only consulting IMDB or your mail a couple of times a night, then run it off the battery.
Face it, you're inventing specious objections to just using the laptop you already own ("OMG, I'd have to carry it all the way from my car to my house!" -- "massively inconvenient"?) because you want to justify having a pointless new gizmo.
Yeah, if money was no object I'd get one to play with too. But it would be $500 (for the most basic model) to do *nothing* I'm not already doing on the laptop I already own.
Great for you -- you can afford one per householder. Not so great for people who are less rich than you.
Re:You're the first person I've read that gets it
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
Everyone wants to call it a fucking computer; it's not. It's not a laptop. It's not a replacement for a laptop or a desktop.
It's something to grab on the couch to look up a movie in IMDB, check the weather for tomorrow, send/check a simple email, play a simple game and so on. Sure, you CAN do all those things with a netbook/laptop/desktop, but not as conveniently or attractively as an iPad seems to make them.
But since most people who ever want to check IMDB/whatever already own a laptop, the cost of an iPad is a hell of a lot for a a tiny increase in attractiveness and convenience (I speak as someone who keeps his laptop within reach of the sofa).
What makes the laptop inconvenient? The heat coming out of the bottom of it (solved with a cushion) and the 4 seconds it takes to wake up and reconnect its WiFi. Is that worth $500 to fix?
Sometimes the value in something is not in what it is but in what it is not.
Now if I can only convince my wife it's something I need...
Let me undermine that. Nobody needs one.
Two valid reasons to buy one:
- You're rich and you like squandering money on nice toys -- nothing wrong with that.
- You're an app developer and you want to test an iPad app that will sell to rich people who like squandering money on nice toys.
Re:It's not a computer, it's a living-room applian
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iPad Review
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Ehh I still prefer reading the news at my dining room table. I also like to have my recipes with me in the kitchen, rather than down on my computer. I can definitely see the use for this.
They have these things nowadays called "laptops" (and netbooks).
Re:It's not a computer, it's a living-room applian
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iPad Review
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I don't think this ever will be, or is intended to be, a replacement computer, even for stuff as simple as writing emails.
... in which case I really don't see the point in it.
If you have a laptop, an iPad is an expensive and unnecessary add on. If you don't have a laptop... well, we're being told that the iPad is not an adequate substitute.
I think it can only get mainstream domestic success (depending on your definition of success!) if it evolves to become something someone could use as their only home computer.
On the other hand, I can think of lots of uses in factories, warehouses, retail etc.
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
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iPad Review
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you have to use keyboard every now and then to use web or to do basically anything. That's not going to change until we have good speech recognition.
Which doesn't bode well for the iPad, because the last thing you want to do is go around dictating everything on a device that's meant to be used on-the-go, in public.
Agreed, although I still think speech recognition is a handy option to have available.
I think for touch screen devices, some touch based text entry method -- other than an onscreen keyboard -- has to be the way forward. Handwriting recognition must be an option with today's CPU speeds, surely? Except for most people handwriting is much slower than typing. So how about a system that recognises handwriting, but also understands gestures/symbols that are designed to be fast to enter and unambiguous? Like Palm's Graffiti, for the 2010s.
We haven't been able to find any evidence of "real" higher spatial dimensions
Though superstring theory requires 10 or 11 dimensions of space (from what little I understand), so serious physicists really believe those dimensions might exist.
Slashdot Mirror
In this case, my favourite potential outcome looks possible: Gordon Brown remains PM and introduces electoral reform in the Queens speech. This is in the interest of everyone except the two main parties, so it gets through. Immediately afterwards, the Conservatives propose a vote of no confidence in the government and we get another election, with a better voting system.
Attractive, but I don't think it's practical. PR has all sorts of knock-on effects, which need to be organised (moving of constituency boundaries, changes to the roles and responsibilities of MPs etc.). I heard a bod on the radio explaining that it would take a whole parliamentary term (by which I assume he meant 4-5 years) to arrange this.
2/ The conservatives and Liberal democrats do a deal, and make a joint platform. This is the only one that has got any possiblity of lasting. The tricky part is as the 3rd Party the Liberal Democrats want some form of proportial representation (which would double their seats in parlament). The conservatives don't want that at all. They like the current system. I don't know what is going to happen here. I guess the Lib Dems will blink "for the good of the coutry", and a deal will be done.
The other sticking point for the Lib Dems is Europe. They are very pro, the Conservatives are very anti.
There's strong public campaigns at the moment for the Lib Dems not to compromise on electoral reform -- after all this is a once in a generation opportunity.
Electoral reform is the one thing I want to see achieved in this parliament.
I don't think Lost would be possible to follow at all without the Lostpedia.
I don't think that's true at all. You could follow Lost perfectly well simply by watching it and paying attention.
Of course you get more from it by seeing what other people noticed - just like anything else with any depth at all.
They're called "mini-series". See Band of Brothers or Angels in America. Yeah, they may not be as long as Lost, but they have a complete, well-though story.
I'd say a miniseries was similar in scope to a novel, and often they're adapted from them. In the UK, for example, Pride and Prejudice or Brideshead Revisited. A novel adapted into 11 TV episodes.
Lost is an example of something more than 6 times longer than that, and with that format comes extra responsibility. If we think of a piece as having fractal layers (e.g. in Lord of the rings: series, book, chapter, paragraph, sentence) -- the longer the piece, the more layers it needs in order that the reader/viewer doesn't lose interest.
You couldn't stretch Band of Brothers out to 6 series just by slowing down the way the story is revealed. It needs mini-closures, and mini-openings, paced to maintain interest.
I think you're doing Lost a disservice. Sure, it's not the first to do non-linear storytelling, and the article is daft to suggest it does.
But I think Lost is a fascinating form. An epic story told over the course of 121 hours (OK, ~90 hours + ad breaks), with an overall structure, a proper beginning, middle and end, and a kind of fractal-ness, in that each series also has a story arc, and to some extent so does each episode.
I have trouble thinking of anything else that's achieved this. Other TV series and comics tend to have an open ended structure, so it's beginning followed by endless "middle", and maybe a tacked on "end" when it gets cancelled (e.g. The Sopranos). Things like the X Factor, Prison Break, Heroes tease us with some kind of big potential denouement, but in reality the writers don't know what it is, and will churn out episodes until they're told to wrap it up. Novels are usually much shorter. Even the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy has less plot than Lost.
It's especially not fair to compare Lost with Heroes. Lost's writers claim to have always known how the overall story would work out -- and that appears to be true. With Heroes, it's pretty clear that they make it up as they go along.
Comics *usually* have the same open-endedness that TV series do. I'm sure some comic geek will tell me of a great comic with 200 issues in which the writer clearly knew how it would end, as he was writing the first issue -- but I don't know of one off the top of my head.
Oh, I would say The Shield pulled it off. So Lost is not quite unique.
The fact that people want to jailbreak their iPhone says one thing to me -- they shouldn't have bought it.
Think about it, it's a device that's broken out of the box, to the extent that in order to use it for the purpose you bought it for, you have to mend it. And the act of mending it invalidates the warranty!
Why not just buy something that does the job you want it to do in the first place? If Apple don't make such a device, buy one from someone else.
If everyone did this, perhaps market forces would cause Apple to make their platform less restrictive.
When you ask legal questions, it's polite to mention which country you're in.
In the UK, and probably the rest of the EU, I suspect this would not be reasonable grounds for dismissal.
In the US, well, nothing would surprise me. Labour laws seem incredibly weak from the employee side.
Honestly, that's my least favorite thing about having Steven Moffat write the show... he always wrote the really scary episodes, and I have no stomach for that sort of thing.
It's a children's program - you're going to have to man up ;)
with a Jailbreak.
Yay! Give Apple a big chunk of your money, then immediately invalidate the warranty.
I'm not using Slashdot as a guide. I have no idea what correlation there is between /. users and warez. The argument comes from the UK Pirate Party, who were using government figures.
Sorry, I don't have a reference.
"And can you point out any place where some people actually honestly tried to implement communism on a national level?"
Is this a trick question? The bolsheviks were true communists and they've been followed by Mao, kim Jong Il and various other tin pot african, asian and south/central american dictatorships.
In fact the Bolsheviks never achieved the communist state they dreamt of.
Lenin replaced Tsarism with "the dictatorship of the proletariat" described as "An immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the rich: . . . and suppression by force, i.e. exclusion from democracy, for the exploiters and oppressors of the people — this is the change which democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism.”
Lenin, Trotsky etc. believed that there had to be some harsh times, during which enemies of the revolution had to be taken out of the equation (massacred, sent to the Gulag, whatever), during which the proletariat would be re-educated (to destroy the religion and royalism that was supposedly keeping them chained), creating the conditions under which a utopian communist state would emerge, as Marx and Engels predicted, whereupon the dictatorship could cease, not being required any more.
They were idealists, but they were ruthless idealists and they performed atrocities in pursuit of their dream. We can agree, I'm sure, that the anticipated ends did not justify the means. Then Stalin took over, a ruthless, paranoid, corrupt madman, and really wrecked the whole thing. It's likely however, that no matter who had been involved, they'd have succumbed to inevitable corruption and madness.
As the GP said, aside from some village sized communes, genuine communism has never been achieved.
Plenty of dictatorships modelled after the Soviet Union though. I'll give you that.
"software should be given away free no matter now much work went into it"
Nothing in RMS's credo says that.
Don't give anyone the software until you're paid for it. When you're paid for it, give them the software, the source, and the right to redistribute both.
Yes, you might need to charge more because there are fewer sales. Yes, it probably prevents you from getting wildly rich off a few months of coding. Tough. But look around, people are making an honest living on those terms.
Great analogy, because the "right" to have Welsh spoken in Welsh schools was always an emotive non-issue which only seriously affected the *very* small minority of Welsh people who don't (as opposed to won't) speak any English.
This isn't an appropriate place to have this discussion, but I don't want what you said there to be the last word. You seem to be saying that it's OK for the state to force people to be educated in their second language. OK for the state to pro-actively work to kill a language. Is it still Godwin's law if I mention the rich tapestry of languages Stalin destroyed? And we're not talking about immigrants who are bringing a non-indigenous language to the country.
Well if "sharing is good", why can't I use GPL code in my closed-source project? Stallman only wants to "share" on his own terms - same as everyone else.
A means to an end. Stallman would prefer it if there were no copyright, including on his own creations. As long as there *is* copyright, the GPL takes advantage of it.
I don't believe RMS is a communist.
His belief in free software is pragmatic. He wanted to hack a printer driver to make it email him when his job had printed. He was shocked when he was told that the source code wasn't his to mess with. His message is, don't buy software that doesn't come with source you can modify.
I do believe he undervalues programmers' skill, including his own. I don't think he realises how few people could create GCC, glibc etc. Partly, he gives it to the community because it came relatively easy to him. When programmers say "I should get big bucks for my creations", RMS, I believe, just doesn't consider their creation to be such an great achievement.
(Or perhaps he values programmers' skill correctly. There are a lot of programmers out there. We're not all irreplaceable.)
How is that any different to any other profession? Why are artists entitled to unequal and enforced support from their industry, and welders or seamstresses are not? What makes an unsuccessful artist more worthy than an unsuccessful teacher?
Just to add to the confusion, how do you define success?
A highly successful teacher (the children they teach grow up to be valuable members of society) might be poorly rewarded financially. A poor teacher might get a great salary (by gaming the system, for example).
An artist might be highly successful at what they set out to do. They might even by acclaimed by the critics, yet not earn very much in the marketplace.
It doesn't answer your question. But it adds nuance to it (and makes it harder to answer).
I have a much simpler argument: If a law is impossible or almost-impossible to enforce, there is something wrong with that law.
So in a hypothetical past where forensics are worthless and it's easy to get someone alone and slit their throat without getting caught, that there should not be a law against murder?
I think a much stronger argument is that when a huge segment of the population performs some act routinely without any sense of guilt, that's evidence that society as a whole doesn't consider it wrong. In a secular society, what can define right and wrong, except the consensus of the people? If the consensus is that something is not wrong, why is there a law against it?
When I was brought up in Wales in the 1980s, I felt that Cymdeithas yr Iaith (the Welsh Language Society) were making unreasonable demands in their campaigning. And I still do to an extent.
But, in the 1960s and earlier, the right for Welsh people to speak and learn in their mother tongue was a serious civil rights issue. By the 1980s things had improved greatly, largely thanks to the activities of Cymdeithas yr Iaith.
I think that by continuing to maintain pressure, perhaps for demands that are a step too far, they prevent the pendulum from swinging back to where it was in the 60s.
I think the same goes for Stallman. Many people benefit from Free Software. Many people would be satisfied for a less pure Free Software world than Stallman demands. But without Stallman's purist stance, the average would shift to a less free position. I wouldn't want that.
Could you imagine sitting on a bench, bus, or barstool and skyping from this thing? I hate to toss around the word "killer app," but I do believe that kind of functionality would turn heads.
Either:
- You hold the iPad up in the air, and look, um, unusual
- Or the camera is detachable, and you hold that aloft
- Or whoever you're talking to gets a lovely view of the underside of your chin and the contents of your nostrils.
I don't know what you're doing wrong to make wake-from-standby so slow. I've got a bog-standard Dell running XP, and it does fine. Shut the lid, it sleeps. Open it up, it wakes.
Literally no good way to deal with the power cord? If you're only consulting IMDB or your mail a couple of times a night, then run it off the battery.
Face it, you're inventing specious objections to just using the laptop you already own ("OMG, I'd have to carry it all the way from my car to my house!" -- "massively inconvenient"?) because you want to justify having a pointless new gizmo.
Yeah, if money was no object I'd get one to play with too. But it would be $500 (for the most basic model) to do *nothing* I'm not already doing on the laptop I already own.
Great for you -- you can afford one per householder.
Not so great for people who are less rich than you.
Everyone wants to call it a fucking computer; it's not. It's not a laptop. It's not a replacement for a laptop or a desktop.
It's something to grab on the couch to look up a movie in IMDB, check the weather for tomorrow, send/check a simple email, play a simple game and so on. Sure, you CAN do all those things with a netbook/laptop/desktop, but not as conveniently or attractively as an iPad seems to make them.
But since most people who ever want to check IMDB/whatever already own a laptop, the cost of an iPad is a hell of a lot for a a tiny increase in attractiveness and convenience (I speak as someone who keeps his laptop within reach of the sofa).
What makes the laptop inconvenient? The heat coming out of the bottom of it (solved with a cushion) and the 4 seconds it takes to wake up and reconnect its WiFi. Is that worth $500 to fix?
Sometimes the value in something is not in what it is but in what it is not.
Now if I can only convince my wife it's something I need...
Let me undermine that. Nobody needs one.
Two valid reasons to buy one:
- You're rich and you like squandering money on nice toys -- nothing wrong with that.
- You're an app developer and you want to test an iPad app that will sell to rich people who like squandering money on nice toys.
Ehh I still prefer reading the news at my dining room table. I also like to have my recipes with me in the kitchen, rather than down on my computer. I can definitely see the use for this.
They have these things nowadays called "laptops" (and netbooks).
I don't think this ever will be, or is intended to be, a replacement computer, even for stuff as simple as writing emails.
... in which case I really don't see the point in it.
If you have a laptop, an iPad is an expensive and unnecessary add on.
If you don't have a laptop... well, we're being told that the iPad is not an adequate substitute.
I think it can only get mainstream domestic success (depending on your definition of success!) if it evolves to become something someone could use as their only home computer.
On the other hand, I can think of lots of uses in factories, warehouses, retail etc.
you have to use keyboard every now and then to use web or to do basically anything. That's not going to change until we have good speech recognition.
Which doesn't bode well for the iPad, because the last thing you want to do is go around dictating everything on a device that's meant to be used on-the-go, in public.
Agreed, although I still think speech recognition is a handy option to have available.
I think for touch screen devices, some touch based text entry method -- other than an onscreen keyboard -- has to be the way forward. Handwriting recognition must be an option with today's CPU speeds, surely? Except for most people handwriting is much slower than typing. So how about a system that recognises handwriting, but also understands gestures/symbols that are designed to be fast to enter and unambiguous? Like Palm's Graffiti, for the 2010s.
We haven't been able to find any evidence of "real" higher spatial dimensions
Though superstring theory requires 10 or 11 dimensions of space (from what little I understand), so serious physicists really believe those dimensions might exist.