Stephen King has said Clint Eastwood's 'Man with No Name' was his model for Roland Deschain. Obviously unless they do some insane CGI that's not going to happen. My guess would be a little known actor would be the best pick for the role.
You know, I'd be okay if they did a CGI Clint to make him younger, and used motion capture with the real Clint. I don't know if they could really pull it off, but it would be a worthwhile experiment.
If you want to see a preview of the future, look at the period table app on the iPad. You can touch the element samples, spin them around, even bring up a 3D viewer. You can pop up Wolfram Alpha and get various information about the element.
It's not a perfect vision of the future (there's a lot more they could have done), but it definitely gives hints about why a fast, color, touch interface on a slate just really is the Right Thing for learning.
Particularly when the commmon consensus is that decreased government regulation allowed large financial firms to increase their leverage (and thus short-term profits) by using extremely complex financial instruments to reduce their perceived risk.
Look up what was going on at the start of this, by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. There's a lot of partisan stuff, but if you dig through it all, regulations were set up to allow banks to take risks on low-income people. This is why banks were doing subprime loans in the first place -- because the government was guaranteeing them. Why not? If they don't have to take the risk, they're going to do it. Then do some research about how Bush actually tried to regulate the banks more, but was blocked from doing so.
I can't imagine what would make you think that the recession was caused by *excessive* government interference in the financial sector.
There's more than one kind of interference. One of the biggest problems is government-corporate partnerships, where the government is setting up backroom sweetheart deals in exchange for corporate party donations. It's total corruption. People just blindly see "deregulation", but it's more complex than that. It's not a "hands-off" policy by the government, it's a lack of restraining them AND setting up circumstances for corrupt profits at the expense of taxpayers.
Look, I hate Republicans AND Democrats. Republicans push corporatism at the expense of taxpayers, and Democrats push Unions and lobbyists at the expense of taxpayers. We need to stop doing ALL OF IT.
Yeah, yeah. See also: paranoid fears of Soviet-style "efficiency" back in the 1950s and 1960s, where people who didn't trust Capitalism wrung their hands at the thought of government planners "finally" creating the Perfect Society. Result: Collapse.
Then see the 1980s, where paranoid fears of Japan-style efficiency of "government / industry partnerships" where going to bury the West's economy, due to the efficiency of government planners really doing it right this time. Result: Collapse, and restructuring.
Now we have a banking collapse in the United States caused by government planners who wanted low-income people to be able to buy homes. And we're seeing more and more government / corporate "partnerships" (otherwise known as corruption). Result: Not quite collapse yet, but it's getting way too close for comfort.
It would be nice if people would learn that lightly regulated Capitalism, where the government acts as a referee and NOT as a partner, has produced the strongest economies. Unfortunately, the "invisible hand" is hard to understand. Having King Government in control of everything is easy to understand.
It also suggested that part of the reason for not watching soccer is a distaste for a draw - there has to be a winner, someone has to win and someone has to lose no matter how well the game is played.
First of all, American Football used to have draws, and people watched it just as much.
Second, why do people keep searching for some mystical explanation for why Americans don't watch soccer? It's not that complicated. The United States has a HUGE number of sports to watch. It's a mass market. Individuals gravitate to which sports are the most interesting to watch. The market has spoken. Soccer is less interesting to most individuals in the United States than other sports.
It really is that simple. I can go into the reasons *why* soccer is less interesting than other sports to me, but it's not because of some stupid reason like "it wasn't invented here."
You don't have to be liberal to be scared of Palin. I fear Palin because she represents that absolute worst of politicians. She is totally ignorant, yet is so arrogant that she thinks that ignorance makes her more legitimate and "real". She literally thinks that she doesn't have to know anything, because God will give her the answer through prayer.
I freaking HATE Palin. She is the absolute definition of a brainless demagogue.
You know what? You might be right. I think I did screw up my calculations. I think when I found the energy per square meter, I found the amount of energy at the surface of Earth, rather than space. I think you're right, I'm off by a factor of 10.
Here in Quebec 97% of our power comes from hydroelectricity.
And I would imagine that, like other significant hydro plants, you devastated the surrounding environment to build them.
But regardless, we're talking about the world's energy, not some city that happens to be sitting next to a hydro plant. Sure, some cities happen to be sitting next to a convenient source of power. But that hardly changes the overall question of with what to replace cheap carbon fuel.
I think you miscounted the number of digits in my user # (and my original one was actually in the 80,000s somewhere back in the late 90s prehistory), but regardless, just because wind has theoretical potential doesn't mean it has a practical potential.
Sorry for the delay in answering your post. There's a lot I could extract, but I'll focus on this as representative...
...and through the LCD pane again (so every darkened LCD pixel has a distracting offset-shadow) and through the front pane again, The first two passes of reflection generate a noiseful glare that books do not have, reflecting light into your face that does not represent the intended image, and two more passes of partial reflection occur as light exists the LCD panel which simply creates interfering ambient light inside of the device, making the image still harder to see.
This is all hand-waving nonsense. Photons don't know remember their own history. "Two passes of reflections", "noiseful glare", etc, etc means nothing. Photons enter your eyes, and that's the end of the story when it comes to normal light. Frequency (color) and brightness. If an ipad puts out an identical amount of light as the book, then it's an identical amount of light. Period.
If you want to argue the contrast is better, I'll listen. If you want to argue the letter resolution is better on a book, I'll listen. But to argue that the nature of light is different from one to the other is Just Plain Wrong.
Or to put it another way, if I take a camera and take a picture of a book and a picture of an ipad at identical brightness levels, and then I cropped the bezel / border of each image so it was just a page image, you would not be able to tell which was the real book and which was the ipad (assuming the resolution of the photo didn't allow you to pick up pixels versus letters).
Like I said, I'll listen to a point about the *quality* of the text. But the idea that the *light* from an LCD is headache inducing at the same brightness levels as a book is completely absurd.
Wind energy this, Solar energy that. It's all fantasy dreamed up by hippies. It may or may not be able to meet a high percentage of our energy needs at some point in the future.
Wind and Solar will never meet a high percentage of our energy needs, at least not in the foreseeable technical future. People simply don't understand the scale of which modern society uses energy. I figured out not too long ago that to convert the world to solar power, using generous assumptions, it would take a space-based solar array the size of the entire state of California. And compared to space-based solar, wind power is a joke.
People need to figure out that there are only two viable sources of energy: burning carbon-based fuels, or nuclear. And nuclear probably means fission. It's entirely possible that fusion will never happen because of the insane engineering practical challenges that we haven't even started to try and deal with. We aren't even far enough along to hit those brick walls.
But we keep looking for the magical energy fairy to solve our problems...
E-ink. Really, its a lot nicer on the eyes than an LCD, yeah, some people can stare at text on an LCD with no problem, but for me, I tend to get headaches staring at an LCD for too long.
This is completely ridiculous. Exactly how do your eyes know the difference between reflected photons and backlit photons? Do the reflected photons go into your eyes in an "easier" way? If you're having trouble with an LCD, then TURN DOWN THE BRIGHTNESS to the level of a book. You are allowed to, you know.
I was having this debate with a friend of mine who claimed, "LCDs have a glare, and regular pages don't!" I then proceeded to hold my hand up to my iPad, which of course lit up my hand. I then grabbed a regular book with a light on it, put my hand up to the book, and lo and behold, it lit up my hand identically to the iPad, of course proving (as if I should have to) that light does in fact come from the book.
I *might* listen to a contrast argument, though that also fails when you do some actual thinking about it.
Of course, E-Ink does have a big advantage when reading outdoors, but that has nothing to do with whether there's some mystical headache factor.
I also am amazed in high school graduation ceremonies. Where I am from finishing high school was not something to be celebrated like it is here, it was something that was expected and seen more as a precursor to college.
You're misinterpreting the ceremony. A high school graduation is not about the accomplishment (such as it is), it's about the transition from being a child to an adult. It's a way of marking a significant step in life. Same with kindergarten or pre-school ceremonies.
But I have yet to be dissuaded from my opinion that in the US image is everything. It is not who you are that is important, but who you portray yourself to be.
I suspect that has more to do with your innate bigotry. If you look for that, then you will find it, and "prove" it to yourself.
So you claim that algae-based biodiesel is so stupidly simple, cheap and self-evident that it's laughable to even question it. So then, where is the cheap algae biodeisel plants that are replacing all the oil plants? Clearly if it's that superior, people are investing loads of money into it, and given that it's so simple to make it work, the fuel has to be flowing in quantity.
And yet, astonishingly, it isn't. Even after the original poster's claim that it's 20 year old technology. Is it just that the EEEEEEEVIL OIL COMPANIES are somehow blocking every single attempt to create these plants?
Or perhaps there are certain practicality questions that you simply don't want to deal with?
Yet, no oil company is building biodiesel plants, even though we literally have suitable technology twenty years old.
Show me the reference where algae-based biodiesel plants will produce cheaper per-mile fuel than oil.
...Yet no energy company built out large PV installations...
And this is where we know you don't know what you're talking about. Do you realize how much land it takes to make a significant difference in power usage via solar power? Do the math. And then take that amount of land (which you will hand-wave as "put it out in the flyover country"), and destroy it environmentally. What, you think extracting all that sunlight doesn't have an effect?
The bottom line is that there are NUMEROUS people who would love to be the ones who "solve" our oil dependence by coming up with a new energy source. Really, there are. And they're not even taken out in back alleys and beaten by the oil companies. They simply fail EVERY TIME. Because there is no economical alternative to oil at this point. That's just the simple reality.
Actually, in Universe terms, the least accomplishment of any man is greater than the whole of the rest of creation. Intelligence is the pinnacle of what happens in the universe.
And smarter people, coordinated in teams, will have had years to build up defenses against such a pathogen.
That's like saying that once we have nuclear weapons, "smarter people, coordinated in teams, will have had years to build up defenses against such a" weapon. I don't see a defense against a nuclear bomb on the horizon. Our only defense (so far) is the fact that it takes government-level resources to make one (and not a single insane individual), and severe international restrictions. And I don't know about you, but I'm uncomfortable with having an insane individual in charge of North Korea right now. (But at least he doesn't have humanity-destroying power, only millions-of-people destroying power)
But I digress. It's always easier to destroy than to defend against destruction. And remember, the pathogen doomsday aggressor only has to be successful once. The pathogen doomsday defender has to be successful EVERY TIME, or else it's game over, and there's no second chance.
The obvious example is AIDS. But you're missing the point. The point isn't that that there exists a natural pathogen with these attributes, the point is whether it's possible to *engineer* a pathogen, and I don't see any reason that once we have genetic engineering down to a computer-like language that we can't do it.
That's not going to work, unless the space colony gets no visitors in that 20 year fuse time. And even if they didn't, it's highly likely they will still be dependent on the Earth for some sort of critical supplies. A dead Earth probably means a dead colony.
Except there are numerous examples of bugs that lie dormant in humans before triggering. That's why they are able to spread. It's an evolutionary success mechanism.
I've long thought that THIS is how intelligent life destroys itself. Basically, technology increases until the power to destroy all life can be used by a single insane individual.
Consider this. Let's say we have biology down to the level where a very intelligent person can design a lifeform using algorithmic programs. This person decides to destroy all human life, because they hate mankind (picture some enviro-nut). So he designs a pathogen that spreads through the air, and hides in the body. He wants it to spread everywhere, so he puts a 20 year fuse on it. After 20 years, the pathogen instantly kills the host. There's no way we would know about it, and there's nothing we could do about it.
Think no one would do that? Look at the Unibomber. If there's anyone who could've done it had he had access to the technology, it would have been that guy. I had a high-genius IQ. He was crazy. And he hated people.
Once we have this technology, all it takes is one nut to wipe out everyone. And honestly, I don't see how we can stop it. I hate to be pessimistic, but the inevitable march of technology means it will get cheaper and eventually fall in the hands of a nut.
The only things I can think of that can save us are full-body scanners that could catch anything trying to hide (fairly unlikely), or possibly real A.I. computers that are vastly more intelligent than human, and could instantly analyze diseases and find cures. Or perhaps a full-blown cure-all for mental illness. I don't know. But I'm fairly resigned to the fact that this is how the human race will end.
why do we always need to self-censor? Who said the web needs to be "family safe"? Why are companies voluntarily following 1950's morality codes that the FCC imposes on broadcasters?
Why do many neighborhood grocery stores not stock porn magazines? Who says grocery stores should be "family safe"? Why do the owners voluntarily follow 1950s morality codes?
Because it's their damn store, and they don't want to. They don't like it, they don't want to see it, and they don't want to deal with the people who supply it.
Freedom includes the freedom to sell what you want, not just buy what you want.
Were you were saying the same things about 1 terabyte drives five years ago?
And we're still saying the same things about 1 terabyte drives today. A VERY small percentage of people have anything close to 1 TB of data. In fact, I'd speculate that a very small percentage of people have over 100 GB, and the majority of people are certainly under 10 GB.
HPq traditionally has had great hard ward, but absolutely atrocious software. I have no idea why they are seemingly so incompetent with software, but it's true more often than it isn't. I remember even working with their medical devices back in the 90s. Just awful software, but bulletproof hardware (I don't know what it's like these days). But yeah, there are exceptions, but This one of the reasons I was leery of the slate. It looked interesting, but my gut feeling was that HP would screw it up.
Slashdot Mirror
Stephen King has said Clint Eastwood's 'Man with No Name' was his model for Roland Deschain. Obviously unless they do some insane CGI that's not going to happen. My guess would be a little known actor would be the best pick for the role.
You know, I'd be okay if they did a CGI Clint to make him younger, and used motion capture with the real Clint. I don't know if they could really pull it off, but it would be a worthwhile experiment.
This man IS Roland. Who else has that granite weather-chiseled face?
It's not a perfect vision of the future (there's a lot more they could have done), but it definitely gives hints about why a fast, color, touch interface on a slate just really is the Right Thing for learning.
Particularly when the commmon consensus is that decreased government regulation allowed large financial firms to increase their leverage (and thus short-term profits) by using extremely complex financial instruments to reduce their perceived risk.
Look up what was going on at the start of this, by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. There's a lot of partisan stuff, but if you dig through it all, regulations were set up to allow banks to take risks on low-income people. This is why banks were doing subprime loans in the first place -- because the government was guaranteeing them. Why not? If they don't have to take the risk, they're going to do it. Then do some research about how Bush actually tried to regulate the banks more, but was blocked from doing so.
I can't imagine what would make you think that the recession was caused by *excessive* government interference in the financial sector.
There's more than one kind of interference. One of the biggest problems is government-corporate partnerships, where the government is setting up backroom sweetheart deals in exchange for corporate party donations. It's total corruption. People just blindly see "deregulation", but it's more complex than that. It's not a "hands-off" policy by the government, it's a lack of restraining them AND setting up circumstances for corrupt profits at the expense of taxpayers.
Look, I hate Republicans AND Democrats. Republicans push corporatism at the expense of taxpayers, and Democrats push Unions and lobbyists at the expense of taxpayers. We need to stop doing ALL OF IT.
Yeah, yeah. See also: paranoid fears of Soviet-style "efficiency" back in the 1950s and 1960s, where people who didn't trust Capitalism wrung their hands at the thought of government planners "finally" creating the Perfect Society. Result: Collapse.
Then see the 1980s, where paranoid fears of Japan-style efficiency of "government / industry partnerships" where going to bury the West's economy, due to the efficiency of government planners really doing it right this time. Result: Collapse, and restructuring.
Now we have a banking collapse in the United States caused by government planners who wanted low-income people to be able to buy homes. And we're seeing more and more government / corporate "partnerships" (otherwise known as corruption). Result: Not quite collapse yet, but it's getting way too close for comfort.
It would be nice if people would learn that lightly regulated Capitalism, where the government acts as a referee and NOT as a partner, has produced the strongest economies. Unfortunately, the "invisible hand" is hard to understand. Having King Government in control of everything is easy to understand.
It also suggested that part of the reason for not watching soccer is a distaste for a draw - there has to be a winner, someone has to win and someone has to lose no matter how well the game is played.
First of all, American Football used to have draws, and people watched it just as much.
Second, why do people keep searching for some mystical explanation for why Americans don't watch soccer? It's not that complicated. The United States has a HUGE number of sports to watch. It's a mass market. Individuals gravitate to which sports are the most interesting to watch. The market has spoken. Soccer is less interesting to most individuals in the United States than other sports.
It really is that simple. I can go into the reasons *why* soccer is less interesting than other sports to me, but it's not because of some stupid reason like "it wasn't invented here."
Why are liberals so scared of Palin...
You don't have to be liberal to be scared of Palin. I fear Palin because she represents that absolute worst of politicians. She is totally ignorant, yet is so arrogant that she thinks that ignorance makes her more legitimate and "real". She literally thinks that she doesn't have to know anything, because God will give her the answer through prayer.
I freaking HATE Palin. She is the absolute definition of a brainless demagogue.
You know what? You might be right. I think I did screw up my calculations. I think when I found the energy per square meter, I found the amount of energy at the surface of Earth, rather than space. I think you're right, I'm off by a factor of 10.
Ah well, you win some, you lose some. :)
Here in Quebec 97% of our power comes from hydroelectricity.
And I would imagine that, like other significant hydro plants, you devastated the surrounding environment to build them.
But regardless, we're talking about the world's energy, not some city that happens to be sitting next to a hydro plant. Sure, some cities happen to be sitting next to a convenient source of power. But that hardly changes the overall question of with what to replace cheap carbon fuel.
I think you miscounted the number of digits in my user # (and my original one was actually in the 80,000s somewhere back in the late 90s prehistory), but regardless, just because wind has theoretical potential doesn't mean it has a practical potential.
Sorry for the delay in answering your post. There's a lot I could extract, but I'll focus on this as representative...
This is all hand-waving nonsense. Photons don't know remember their own history. "Two passes of reflections", "noiseful glare", etc, etc means nothing. Photons enter your eyes, and that's the end of the story when it comes to normal light. Frequency (color) and brightness. If an ipad puts out an identical amount of light as the book, then it's an identical amount of light. Period.
If you want to argue the contrast is better, I'll listen. If you want to argue the letter resolution is better on a book, I'll listen. But to argue that the nature of light is different from one to the other is Just Plain Wrong.
Or to put it another way, if I take a camera and take a picture of a book and a picture of an ipad at identical brightness levels, and then I cropped the bezel / border of each image so it was just a page image, you would not be able to tell which was the real book and which was the ipad (assuming the resolution of the photo didn't allow you to pick up pixels versus letters).
Like I said, I'll listen to a point about the *quality* of the text. But the idea that the *light* from an LCD is headache inducing at the same brightness levels as a book is completely absurd.
Wind energy this, Solar energy that. It's all fantasy dreamed up by hippies. It may or may not be able to meet a high percentage of our energy needs at some point in the future.
Wind and Solar will never meet a high percentage of our energy needs, at least not in the foreseeable technical future. People simply don't understand the scale of which modern society uses energy. I figured out not too long ago that to convert the world to solar power, using generous assumptions, it would take a space-based solar array the size of the entire state of California. And compared to space-based solar, wind power is a joke.
People need to figure out that there are only two viable sources of energy: burning carbon-based fuels, or nuclear. And nuclear probably means fission. It's entirely possible that fusion will never happen because of the insane engineering practical challenges that we haven't even started to try and deal with. We aren't even far enough along to hit those brick walls.
But we keep looking for the magical energy fairy to solve our problems...
E-ink. Really, its a lot nicer on the eyes than an LCD, yeah, some people can stare at text on an LCD with no problem, but for me, I tend to get headaches staring at an LCD for too long.
This is completely ridiculous. Exactly how do your eyes know the difference between reflected photons and backlit photons? Do the reflected photons go into your eyes in an "easier" way? If you're having trouble with an LCD, then TURN DOWN THE BRIGHTNESS to the level of a book. You are allowed to, you know.
I was having this debate with a friend of mine who claimed, "LCDs have a glare, and regular pages don't!" I then proceeded to hold my hand up to my iPad, which of course lit up my hand. I then grabbed a regular book with a light on it, put my hand up to the book, and lo and behold, it lit up my hand identically to the iPad, of course proving (as if I should have to) that light does in fact come from the book.
I *might* listen to a contrast argument, though that also fails when you do some actual thinking about it.
Of course, E-Ink does have a big advantage when reading outdoors, but that has nothing to do with whether there's some mystical headache factor.
I also am amazed in high school graduation ceremonies. Where I am from finishing high school was not something to be celebrated like it is here, it was something that was expected and seen more as a precursor to college.
You're misinterpreting the ceremony. A high school graduation is not about the accomplishment (such as it is), it's about the transition from being a child to an adult. It's a way of marking a significant step in life. Same with kindergarten or pre-school ceremonies.
But I have yet to be dissuaded from my opinion that in the US image is everything. It is not who you are that is important, but who you portray yourself to be.
I suspect that has more to do with your innate bigotry. If you look for that, then you will find it, and "prove" it to yourself.
So you claim that algae-based biodiesel is so stupidly simple, cheap and self-evident that it's laughable to even question it. So then, where is the cheap algae biodeisel plants that are replacing all the oil plants? Clearly if it's that superior, people are investing loads of money into it, and given that it's so simple to make it work, the fuel has to be flowing in quantity.
And yet, astonishingly, it isn't. Even after the original poster's claim that it's 20 year old technology. Is it just that the EEEEEEEVIL OIL COMPANIES are somehow blocking every single attempt to create these plants?
Or perhaps there are certain practicality questions that you simply don't want to deal with?
Yet, no oil company is building biodiesel plants, even though we literally have suitable technology twenty years old.
Show me the reference where algae-based biodiesel plants will produce cheaper per-mile fuel than oil.
And this is where we know you don't know what you're talking about. Do you realize how much land it takes to make a significant difference in power usage via solar power? Do the math. And then take that amount of land (which you will hand-wave as "put it out in the flyover country"), and destroy it environmentally. What, you think extracting all that sunlight doesn't have an effect?
The bottom line is that there are NUMEROUS people who would love to be the ones who "solve" our oil dependence by coming up with a new energy source. Really, there are. And they're not even taken out in back alleys and beaten by the oil companies. They simply fail EVERY TIME. Because there is no economical alternative to oil at this point. That's just the simple reality.
Actually, in Universe terms, the least accomplishment of any man is greater than the whole of the rest of creation. Intelligence is the pinnacle of what happens in the universe.
And smarter people, coordinated in teams, will have had years to build up defenses against such a pathogen.
That's like saying that once we have nuclear weapons, "smarter people, coordinated in teams, will have had years to build up defenses against such a" weapon. I don't see a defense against a nuclear bomb on the horizon. Our only defense (so far) is the fact that it takes government-level resources to make one (and not a single insane individual), and severe international restrictions. And I don't know about you, but I'm uncomfortable with having an insane individual in charge of North Korea right now. (But at least he doesn't have humanity-destroying power, only millions-of-people destroying power)
But I digress. It's always easier to destroy than to defend against destruction. And remember, the pathogen doomsday aggressor only has to be successful once. The pathogen doomsday defender has to be successful EVERY TIME, or else it's game over, and there's no second chance.
The obvious example is AIDS. But you're missing the point. The point isn't that that there exists a natural pathogen with these attributes, the point is whether it's possible to *engineer* a pathogen, and I don't see any reason that once we have genetic engineering down to a computer-like language that we can't do it.
That's not going to work, unless the space colony gets no visitors in that 20 year fuse time. And even if they didn't, it's highly likely they will still be dependent on the Earth for some sort of critical supplies. A dead Earth probably means a dead colony.
Except there are numerous examples of bugs that lie dormant in humans before triggering. That's why they are able to spread. It's an evolutionary success mechanism.
I've long thought that THIS is how intelligent life destroys itself. Basically, technology increases until the power to destroy all life can be used by a single insane individual.
Consider this. Let's say we have biology down to the level where a very intelligent person can design a lifeform using algorithmic programs. This person decides to destroy all human life, because they hate mankind (picture some enviro-nut). So he designs a pathogen that spreads through the air, and hides in the body. He wants it to spread everywhere, so he puts a 20 year fuse on it. After 20 years, the pathogen instantly kills the host. There's no way we would know about it, and there's nothing we could do about it.
Think no one would do that? Look at the Unibomber. If there's anyone who could've done it had he had access to the technology, it would have been that guy. I had a high-genius IQ. He was crazy. And he hated people.
Once we have this technology, all it takes is one nut to wipe out everyone. And honestly, I don't see how we can stop it. I hate to be pessimistic, but the inevitable march of technology means it will get cheaper and eventually fall in the hands of a nut.
The only things I can think of that can save us are full-body scanners that could catch anything trying to hide (fairly unlikely), or possibly real A.I. computers that are vastly more intelligent than human, and could instantly analyze diseases and find cures. Or perhaps a full-blown cure-all for mental illness. I don't know. But I'm fairly resigned to the fact that this is how the human race will end.
why do we always need to self-censor? Who said the web needs to be "family safe"? Why are companies voluntarily following 1950's morality codes that the FCC imposes on broadcasters?
Why do many neighborhood grocery stores not stock porn magazines? Who says grocery stores should be "family safe"? Why do the owners voluntarily follow 1950s morality codes?
Because it's their damn store, and they don't want to. They don't like it, they don't want to see it, and they don't want to deal with the people who supply it.
Freedom includes the freedom to sell what you want, not just buy what you want.
Were you were saying the same things about 1 terabyte drives five years ago?
And we're still saying the same things about 1 terabyte drives today. A VERY small percentage of people have anything close to 1 TB of data. In fact, I'd speculate that a very small percentage of people have over 100 GB, and the majority of people are certainly under 10 GB.
LOL...not quite awake this morning, as you can also tell by the typos.
HPq traditionally has had great hard ward, but absolutely atrocious software. I have no idea why they are seemingly so incompetent with software, but it's true more often than it isn't. I remember even working with their medical devices back in the 90s. Just awful software, but bulletproof hardware (I don't know what it's like these days). But yeah, there are exceptions, but This one of the reasons I was leery of the slate. It looked interesting, but my gut feeling was that HP would screw it up.