It provides the potential of watching movies, reading, etc on a very convenient platform. What it does not do it run Flash or Silver-light. This means that unless Apple is going to open up a streaming service that is as convenient and comprehensive as Hulu or Netflix, it is only about 1/2 of the machine it could be. Not disrespect, but Youtube has almost nothing on it I find compelling enough to own any machine.
Here is the irony to me. Einstein won his noble prize for the Photoelectric effect. This effect has traditionally been see as on that requires the quantization of energy for sub atomic particles. This was 1905. This was based on idea of Max Planck in which he limited the available oscillations of light to solve the ultraviolet catastrophe, a mathematical result in which the unrestricted energy of a black body radiator would result in infinite energies. This did not any sense.
But someone, Einstein's other work, general relativity, that does result in infinities is assumed to be true. I was thinking we would have this fixed by now, and 2001-2010 would be as productive as 1901-1910. Perhaps the year 2000 was the beginning of a little dark age,and will have to wait a while for science to restart.
I think there is some credibility to that assertion. The thing the IRS needs to do is not prefill printed tax returns, but provide an online serve for those those people that file simple returns, especially those that get a refund. This site can confirm and collect information that is used to fill in forms automatically. If additional information is needed, or the precess is to be too complex, the user can still get partially filled forms. The user can print or the IRS can mail the forms to sign. Refund in the bank the next day if nothing is different than expects, or after the signed forms are in if more information is needed.
The problem is that this will put crooks like HR Block and Jackson Hewitt out of business. They will no longer be able to charge excessive fees for trivial work. They will no longer be able to be the loan sharks of the tax world, charging huge fees for money you would get anyway, in about as much time.
The benefit of this is reliable feedback. For instance, if an American works oversees, that money may not be taxed in the US. But,I believe,a form does have to be filed.I have seen cases where the tax prep people do not tell the customers this,just that taxes do not need to filed. For those that do not have an accountant, such a web site can prevent many mistakes that are made now. Any non interactive solution would not have such feedback and therefore would not be that userful.
Intuit probably would not be put our of business, as more complex taxes would not be so easy to pre-fill. These taxes depend on many pieces of information the IRS may not have, like medical bills and certain other write offs. But for sure now the HR Block can use every cent they have to promote like minded elected officials, we will not soon see an end to their deceptive practices.
If there is a tablet, it will have a cell data network. Some say this network is Verizon,though obviously it could be ATT. Some reports says Kindle has completely moved from Sprint to ATT, though the Table will be a much data intensive.
My feeling is that if the Tablet uses a network other than ATT,and if the user is to pay for access, then it would make sense that iPhone diversified the iPhone line up. My fear is that Apple may cave and modify the phone to meet the provider needs at the expense of user, although I don't think this is likely. Hopefully apple will just change the RF transceiver to work with Verizon of whatever. Presumably they have this component already in place for the alleged Tablet.
Of course this may mean that any such phones may not ship until the spring, This would make sense as any Verizon iPhone would exist solely to compete with a Verizon Nexus One. I myself would see no need to spend the extra money for Verizon, and would likely not get a tablet if it meant have a Verizon contract.
This is quite credible. I recall reading a situation in Britain where some first generation immigrants did not understand that in certain parts of England the sun was not as bright as in other places. When the mothers took the babies out for walks, everyone was covered and skin as not exposed to the sun. It was reported that issues related with vitamin D deficiencies were common in mothers and some babies.
I wonder if kids get any sun. I see my neighbors inside all the time, they even have an attached garage. Schools are limited recess to practice for federally mandated testing. It is little wonder that so many of the kids are little weakling(even compared to my geeks peer group).
The files are not going away, just relying less on a file name and more on association. Raskin's idea are useful, and not unique. The one key idea is the filesystem as a database, which would have made MS Vista what it was supposed to be, and would have made MS Windows 7 the preeminent touch screen interface.
There are really two issue with moving aways from folders and files. The biggest on is this is what many techies expect. The average user doesn't care, and in fact probably hates files. They just want to open a program and have the work the did there. Folders and files gets in the way of this. The second is that we do want to interchange data, and this has traditionally been done at the file level. Interfacing a database file system to something like NTFS or HFS or ext3 is probably a non trivial issue.
We do have to rethink this and everyone who thinks in 'files' will notice, just like everyone who thinks 'functions' might have trouble thinking in 'objects'. I think that Mac OS X and MS Windows are not the appropriate tablet interface, not only because of file system, but because the interface. In particular, the MS Windows reliance on a multibutton mouse makes it a bad table interface for the tablet. I expect my tablet interface to be made for a tablet, not just hacked from whatever old technology lying around. This is what made MS Windows earlier than NT bad. It was just a GUI hacked onto MS DOS.
It pretty much sounds like the Apple iPhone limitations. They won't allow something that simply duplicates the functionality of the Kindle, which is a generic reader. Apps have to do something more.
I also see offensive material, which again is the iPhone catchall for 'if we don't like, it won't be on the device.' I wonder if they are going to be as liberal in the active content evaluation as they are forbooks.
This is what I was thinking. The biggest threat to OSS is not forms of less open and more closed software, the two can coexist, but patents. Look at what is happening with phone and media devices. A patent to show a telephone number on a screen? A patent to let the user choose a TV show. How can OSS be written in this environment? Anything is going to violate a patent.
Google does not yet have a huge number of patents, but that will change in the future, and they will become likely become more general. Already, IIRC, they have patent on in game advertising. I can see a time when we might a OSS game engine that allows in context game advertising. I wonder if Google would sue.
In the olden days headlines were written to attract potential buyers to newspapers. Believe it or not, above the fold headlines and content were given away for free! People were allowed to crouch next to newpaper dispensers or sometimesnewstands and steal several paragraphs of entire articles.
Depending on the headlines and the news day, some of these thief's might come around and buy a newspaper(here is another amazing thing, once you put your money in, you could take as many as you wanted!).
This is no different. In many ways it is better. Instead of seeing only the above-the-fold headlines, users can see many headlines which may increase the chance that the user will 'buy a newspaper', in this case view the ads. The newspaper no longer has to deliver the physical product, procure space to market the product, and deal with broken machines. Furthermore,the user does not get to read more than a few sentences of content. All those costs are handled by the news aggregator.
Of course, if your headlines are crap, no one will buy. And, of course,there are many more headlines to write as each article must sell itself. More work for those that are willing to do the work to reach readers.
I know very few people who pay the WSJ on their own. I did many years back when life was easier and I had time to read 4 papers a day. Mostly, though, I think Murdoch is counting on subscribers to take the subscriptions and other costs of the WSJ as a cost of doing business, just like he assumes the viewers of Fox News will take the excessive commercials as the cost of getting the only accurate and unbiased news on television.
The NYT is often purchased as a personal subscription, so the dynamics are different. This is why the NYT is currently free. I think that most people only read a few articles a day, and I hope would not be affected by this change. For those that read more, then, a subscription does make sense. $50 a year rather than the WSJ $100 makes sense, or maybe a $75 a year version that goes out ad free. But I think ads bring in more than some would like the public to think, and frankly ads play a vital role for driving commerce at the local level.
This will keep content open to search engines. Occasional readers will not be effected, so there will not be the issue of the draconian pay wall. For those who wish to read it regularly, there will be an option to pay. I hope it will be $50 a year rather than $150-200. I must admit that more than $10 a month would put me off. I am sure that physical subscribers will get a free online subscription.
And for those who love the paper, and want to read it, but hate to pay(I am talking about those who read it every day but refuse to even register) I am sure there will be a way to scramble the data so it can be continued to be read for free.
OTOH, one can a promotion such as a free year to the NYT with the purchase of an Apple branded reading device.
Then simply looking at per subscriber spending would be a valid metric. That way the vendors could buy as much blow as they wanted for the acquisition department and then bill it through higher bids.
As it is, verizon is no longer the absolute leader. Sprint, ATT, even some of the small guys like boost and cricket have competitive products. All verizon can say is they have the premium product, and use the higher fees to maintain the premium product.
I suspect the issue is not spending, but the free space in cell towers and new cell towers, which I understand are not as easy to set, since everyone wants a cell phone, but no one wants a tower in the neighborhood. In places like NYC I can imagine that just finding real estate, much less real estate that one is allowed to attach to, is a major issue. It seems like at 15-25 billion, everyone is spending as much as they possible can.
Not blaming MS for IE is like not blaming Ford for the Pinto. In both cases the dangers of the product was/is well known. The consumer knows that, in the case of IE, that one should be careful with dangerous sites,and the user should know those dangerous sites. With the Pinto, it no real rear protection, so the driver should avoid other drivers that will collide with the rear of the car.
Check the coverage maps for where you expect to be. For the places I normally hang and travel, ATT provides very good coverage, even 3G. This may or may not be true for others.
We also have a sprint phone because it provides some options that are useful. I have a cricket data device because they have a very reasonable no contract plan for data. Speeds are very good but coverage is not. I can use it in 90% of the time.
The other issue is that Verizon is not GSM, which makes it incompatible with most of the rest of the world.
Pat Robertson would agree with you. Perhaps England, along with Haiti, made a deal with the devil and deserves the horrible deaths of women and children that such a deal brings. I am sure that according to Robertson, such a deal would be factual. After all, I believe it was King Henry VIII that left the church for a divorce. This would be enough to annihilate a country in anyone's book.
There are many complaints about government interference in free enterprise, but I think the financial crisis, in which banks loaned money to people with no income with the assumption that they would flip these properties, or cash out the equity as the property appreciated, and therefore the knowledge that the buyers had no stake in the property, and this crisis in Hatia, pretty much shows that one function of government is to develop and enforce proper standards to insure the security of the country.
The reports indicate that Hatia has received significant financial support from the international community in the past. The reports indicate that the government has not used this money wisely, i.e. to develop infrastructure and insure safety. The reports indicate that money existed to make at least some building and some private dwelling safe, but such a thing was never done. We had people paying for modern building that would survive anything but earthquakes. At least the resources should have been put into place to make building that did not immediately kill the occupants. I understand that money was not widely available, and Hatia barely has a government, but I think we can take some lessons on what the minimum responsibility of a government must be from this example.
I agree. There were tons of software programmable microcomputers with simple hardware interfaces when the Apple came out. There were absolutely tons of WIMP based computers around when the Mac came out. There were tons of digital media players that used high capacity microdrives rather than the then low capacity flash drives. And of course toms of phones that were connected to app stores and music not controlled by the telco. And of course we do have tons of tablet PCs, so Apple is going to have to do something to differentiate. I don't think it will be eyetracking, though how knows?
While I am every bit the conspiracy theorist, we do need to look at reality. The reality is that Google products are in infinite beta. They only have to work well enough to get by, and if data is lost it does mean the end of their business. No one is going to know if a server went down and the search results are different than if the serve was up. Mail accounts are deleted ad hoc, and they are only truly responsible for the few paying end users.
What does this mean? Cell phones are pretty much embedded devices that must work when they leave the factory floor. They can't easily be mussed with after the fact. This is less true of smart phones, but the standard policy of throwing code together to ship a product and then making it work does not really work with cell phones. People do not expect to debug phones in the way that we have to debug general purpose computers. We expect it to do what it does.
Even MS, who should know how to write code had trouble getting a reliable code base together. Apple barely did it, but people tend to be tolerant of less function if the machine is pretty, even I so do. But google, who, as far as I know, does not do 100% uptime embedded devices is competing against companies who have been doing this for maybe longer than the google founders have been alive.
It is only to be expected that they do not have the know how to integrate the components into a reliable stack. Reaching for conspiracy theories and collusion and copyright abuse is simply disrespecting the complexity of the job.
In any case, I think the intent of the story, which is to say that Google is double dipping is true. Anything over a $300 termination fee is excessive, especially since they are openly selling the unlocked version. There is simply no incentive for a person to buy the subsidized phone with the intention of breaking the contract. It in fact seems like a bait and switch scheme since it is so out of line with what consumers are used to, and these variances are evidently not prominently displayed on the purchase screen. It shows that there is something fundamentally flawed with their model if consumers are going to liable for 2X purchase price if the contract is broken.
It is a worse deal than an iPhone. No early termination fee if phone returned with 30 days, much better than a mere 2 weeks. The nexus one must have questionable quality if there only a two week trial period. Early termination fee is $175 versus $200, and is decremented $5 per month.
I always though the early termination fee was to recover subsidized cost of the phone. I never thought you had to return the phone. For instance, if someone lost a phone then the phone would not be able to be returned. I have seen statements of people canceling after 30 days and keeping the phone. If google is charging for the phone after 30 days, then they are, arguably, doing evil.
The thing I like about Spider man is that villains are subtle, and the hero is not really flawed, just normal. In this way we move from the tired formula of the tragic hero, or protagonist as Venture Bros are calling them, to the tragic antagonist. We end up with someone that we would be better off without, that we can mostly conformably vanquish. This to me is good. It allows character development to occur. If we are going to focus on the protagonist for every movie, with lower dimensional cartoon villains, then it becomes difficult to make sequels that are not just retellings of the previous movie. Look at The Wrath of Khan. It was a good star trek movie, in the was that many of TOS were very good, because it focused on a character outside of the normal cast. We also see that people want to see Bond, or Doctor Who for that matter, battle the interesting antagonist. Sure they are still Superheroes, but comfortable enough with their status not to be stuck up Superheroes.
Buck Rogers, itself a renake, is pretty typical. The writers appeared to have trouble coming up with enough new material, so it sank the first season(Las Vegas in Spaaaace!). It was completely remade for season two. I am not sure what they would do with it now, though I am surprised no one has taken it to cable.
We have other lesser known shows that are might work equally fine, like VR.5. As silly as it was, it was a pretty good show, at least for the mid 90's.
I would be happy to see Blake's 7 on DVD, even if it were $100 for the series. I think the producer think the US is not financially viable.
I think that characterization is something that many Sci Fi shows do not concentrate on, perhaps because it is not something the masses want, as well as one needs really good actors to pull off. Paul Darrow did an excelent job. But then again sometimes you just need to add another pretty woman, in the form of Jacqueline Pearce.
Blake's 7, like Firefly, are wonderful ideas, but it was just hard to make them a series, and keep the actors interested. We see this on other shows like Moonlighting, where a really esoteric rythm was very difficult to maintain. Such a rhythm is much more sustainable at 6-12 episodes per seasons/series rather than 18-24. In fact, I would be quite happy with Dollhouse staying of the air with 12 episode plus an epitaph.
What we had when I was kid, which was great, was the comedies in space. The wrong people on the wrong ship. Star Trek made the western in space in the norm.
Screens have become much more durable. My Palm V screen broke even though it was in a good leather case. My keys happened to be in the exact wrong position and, with the body mass, shattered the screen. This was one of the reasons why I went to flip phone. Still broke the little outer screen, though. OTOH, my old iPhone, in my pocket with no protection for a couple years, had no issue. I have seen similar strength on other phones. If I were worried about anything on the new phones, it would the thin plastic shell.
Slashdot Mirror
It provides the potential of watching movies, reading, etc on a very convenient platform. What it does not do it run Flash or Silver-light. This means that unless Apple is going to open up a streaming service that is as convenient and comprehensive as Hulu or Netflix, it is only about 1/2 of the machine it could be. Not disrespect, but Youtube has almost nothing on it I find compelling enough to own any machine.
But someone, Einstein's other work, general relativity, that does result in infinities is assumed to be true. I was thinking we would have this fixed by now, and 2001-2010 would be as productive as 1901-1910. Perhaps the year 2000 was the beginning of a little dark age,and will have to wait a while for science to restart.
The problem is that this will put crooks like HR Block and Jackson Hewitt out of business. They will no longer be able to charge excessive fees for trivial work. They will no longer be able to be the loan sharks of the tax world, charging huge fees for money you would get anyway, in about as much time.
The benefit of this is reliable feedback. For instance, if an American works oversees, that money may not be taxed in the US. But,I believe,a form does have to be filed.I have seen cases where the tax prep people do not tell the customers this,just that taxes do not need to filed. For those that do not have an accountant, such a web site can prevent many mistakes that are made now. Any non interactive solution would not have such feedback and therefore would not be that userful.
Intuit probably would not be put our of business, as more complex taxes would not be so easy to pre-fill. These taxes depend on many pieces of information the IRS may not have, like medical bills and certain other write offs. But for sure now the HR Block can use every cent they have to promote like minded elected officials, we will not soon see an end to their deceptive practices.
My feeling is that if the Tablet uses a network other than ATT,and if the user is to pay for access, then it would make sense that iPhone diversified the iPhone line up. My fear is that Apple may cave and modify the phone to meet the provider needs at the expense of user, although I don't think this is likely. Hopefully apple will just change the RF transceiver to work with Verizon of whatever. Presumably they have this component already in place for the alleged Tablet.
Of course this may mean that any such phones may not ship until the spring, This would make sense as any Verizon iPhone would exist solely to compete with a Verizon Nexus One. I myself would see no need to spend the extra money for Verizon, and would likely not get a tablet if it meant have a Verizon contract.
I wonder if kids get any sun. I see my neighbors inside all the time, they even have an attached garage. Schools are limited recess to practice for federally mandated testing. It is little wonder that so many of the kids are little weakling(even compared to my geeks peer group).
There are really two issue with moving aways from folders and files. The biggest on is this is what many techies expect. The average user doesn't care, and in fact probably hates files. They just want to open a program and have the work the did there. Folders and files gets in the way of this. The second is that we do want to interchange data, and this has traditionally been done at the file level. Interfacing a database file system to something like NTFS or HFS or ext3 is probably a non trivial issue.
We do have to rethink this and everyone who thinks in 'files' will notice, just like everyone who thinks 'functions' might have trouble thinking in 'objects'. I think that Mac OS X and MS Windows are not the appropriate tablet interface, not only because of file system, but because the interface. In particular, the MS Windows reliance on a multibutton mouse makes it a bad table interface for the tablet. I expect my tablet interface to be made for a tablet, not just hacked from whatever old technology lying around. This is what made MS Windows earlier than NT bad. It was just a GUI hacked onto MS DOS.
I also see offensive material, which again is the iPhone catchall for 'if we don't like, it won't be on the device.' I wonder if they are going to be as liberal in the active content evaluation as they are for books.
Google does not yet have a huge number of patents, but that will change in the future, and they will become likely become more general. Already, IIRC, they have patent on in game advertising. I can see a time when we might a OSS game engine that allows in context game advertising. I wonder if Google would sue.
Depending on the headlines and the news day, some of these thief's might come around and buy a newspaper(here is another amazing thing, once you put your money in, you could take as many as you wanted!).
This is no different. In many ways it is better. Instead of seeing only the above-the-fold headlines, users can see many headlines which may increase the chance that the user will 'buy a newspaper', in this case view the ads. The newspaper no longer has to deliver the physical product, procure space to market the product, and deal with broken machines. Furthermore,the user does not get to read more than a few sentences of content. All those costs are handled by the news aggregator.
Of course, if your headlines are crap, no one will buy. And, of course,there are many more headlines to write as each article must sell itself. More work for those that are willing to do the work to reach readers.
The NYT is often purchased as a personal subscription, so the dynamics are different. This is why the NYT is currently free. I think that most people only read a few articles a day, and I hope would not be affected by this change. For those that read more, then, a subscription does make sense. $50 a year rather than the WSJ $100 makes sense, or maybe a $75 a year version that goes out ad free. But I think ads bring in more than some would like the public to think, and frankly ads play a vital role for driving commerce at the local level.
And for those who love the paper, and want to read it, but hate to pay(I am talking about those who read it every day but refuse to even register) I am sure there will be a way to scramble the data so it can be continued to be read for free.
OTOH, one can a promotion such as a free year to the NYT with the purchase of an Apple branded reading device.
As it is, verizon is no longer the absolute leader. Sprint, ATT, even some of the small guys like boost and cricket have competitive products. All verizon can say is they have the premium product, and use the higher fees to maintain the premium product.
I suspect the issue is not spending, but the free space in cell towers and new cell towers, which I understand are not as easy to set, since everyone wants a cell phone, but no one wants a tower in the neighborhood. In places like NYC I can imagine that just finding real estate, much less real estate that one is allowed to attach to, is a major issue. It seems like at 15-25 billion, everyone is spending as much as they possible can.
ping to iceland is a little over 150 ms. ping to slashdot is over 100 ms less than that. Travel time accounts for less than 1/2 of the difference.
Not blaming MS for IE is like not blaming Ford for the Pinto. In both cases the dangers of the product was/is well known. The consumer knows that, in the case of IE, that one should be careful with dangerous sites,and the user should know those dangerous sites. With the Pinto, it no real rear protection, so the driver should avoid other drivers that will collide with the rear of the car.
I also like the fact that MKV containers can store multiple subtitles. I have only used m4v and mrkv containers of late.
We also have a sprint phone because it provides some options that are useful. I have a cricket data device because they have a very reasonable no contract plan for data. Speeds are very good but coverage is not. I can use it in 90% of the time.
The other issue is that Verizon is not GSM, which makes it incompatible with most of the rest of the world.
Pat Robertson would agree with you. Perhaps England, along with Haiti, made a deal with the devil and deserves the horrible deaths of women and children that such a deal brings. I am sure that according to Robertson, such a deal would be factual. After all, I believe it was King Henry VIII that left the church for a divorce. This would be enough to annihilate a country in anyone's book.
The reports indicate that Hatia has received significant financial support from the international community in the past. The reports indicate that the government has not used this money wisely, i.e. to develop infrastructure and insure safety. The reports indicate that money existed to make at least some building and some private dwelling safe, but such a thing was never done. We had people paying for modern building that would survive anything but earthquakes. At least the resources should have been put into place to make building that did not immediately kill the occupants. I understand that money was not widely available, and Hatia barely has a government, but I think we can take some lessons on what the minimum responsibility of a government must be from this example.
I agree. There were tons of software programmable microcomputers with simple hardware interfaces when the Apple came out. There were absolutely tons of WIMP based computers around when the Mac came out. There were tons of digital media players that used high capacity microdrives rather than the then low capacity flash drives. And of course toms of phones that were connected to app stores and music not controlled by the telco. And of course we do have tons of tablet PCs, so Apple is going to have to do something to differentiate. I don't think it will be eyetracking, though how knows?
What does this mean? Cell phones are pretty much embedded devices that must work when they leave the factory floor. They can't easily be mussed with after the fact. This is less true of smart phones, but the standard policy of throwing code together to ship a product and then making it work does not really work with cell phones. People do not expect to debug phones in the way that we have to debug general purpose computers. We expect it to do what it does.
Even MS, who should know how to write code had trouble getting a reliable code base together. Apple barely did it, but people tend to be tolerant of less function if the machine is pretty, even I so do. But google, who, as far as I know, does not do 100% uptime embedded devices is competing against companies who have been doing this for maybe longer than the google founders have been alive.
It is only to be expected that they do not have the know how to integrate the components into a reliable stack. Reaching for conspiracy theories and collusion and copyright abuse is simply disrespecting the complexity of the job.
It is a worse deal than an iPhone. No early termination fee if phone returned with 30 days, much better than a mere 2 weeks. The nexus one must have questionable quality if there only a two week trial period. Early termination fee is $175 versus $200, and is decremented $5 per month.
I always though the early termination fee was to recover subsidized cost of the phone. I never thought you had to return the phone. For instance, if someone lost a phone then the phone would not be able to be returned. I have seen statements of people canceling after 30 days and keeping the phone. If google is charging for the phone after 30 days, then they are, arguably, doing evil.
The thing I like about Spider man is that villains are subtle, and the hero is not really flawed, just normal. In this way we move from the tired formula of the tragic hero, or protagonist as Venture Bros are calling them, to the tragic antagonist. We end up with someone that we would be better off without, that we can mostly conformably vanquish. This to me is good. It allows character development to occur. If we are going to focus on the protagonist for every movie, with lower dimensional cartoon villains, then it becomes difficult to make sequels that are not just retellings of the previous movie. Look at The Wrath of Khan. It was a good star trek movie, in the was that many of TOS were very good, because it focused on a character outside of the normal cast. We also see that people want to see Bond, or Doctor Who for that matter, battle the interesting antagonist. Sure they are still Superheroes, but comfortable enough with their status not to be stuck up Superheroes.
We have other lesser known shows that are might work equally fine, like VR.5. As silly as it was, it was a pretty good show, at least for the mid 90's.
I think that characterization is something that many Sci Fi shows do not concentrate on, perhaps because it is not something the masses want, as well as one needs really good actors to pull off. Paul Darrow did an excelent job. But then again sometimes you just need to add another pretty woman, in the form of Jacqueline Pearce.
Blake's 7, like Firefly, are wonderful ideas, but it was just hard to make them a series, and keep the actors interested. We see this on other shows like Moonlighting, where a really esoteric rythm was very difficult to maintain. Such a rhythm is much more sustainable at 6-12 episodes per seasons/series rather than 18-24. In fact, I would be quite happy with Dollhouse staying of the air with 12 episode plus an epitaph.
What we had when I was kid, which was great, was the comedies in space. The wrong people on the wrong ship. Star Trek made the western in space in the norm.
Screens have become much more durable. My Palm V screen broke even though it was in a good leather case. My keys happened to be in the exact wrong position and, with the body mass, shattered the screen. This was one of the reasons why I went to flip phone. Still broke the little outer screen, though. OTOH, my old iPhone, in my pocket with no protection for a couple years, had no issue. I have seen similar strength on other phones. If I were worried about anything on the new phones, it would the thin plastic shell.