4 gig cards are not that expensive and they hold an amazing amount of stuff. Probably 8 gig cards will be pretty standard in a year or two. So just get the largest cards you can afford and you won't need to have lots of extra ones lying around.
My camera case has about 5 SD cards ranging from 512 megs to 2 gigs, and I really could replace them all with one or two 4GB cards. That's a lot of pictures (but we take a lot of video clips too).
Why someone needs extra SD cards for a phone is beyond me. My 512 meg micro sd is larger than I would ever want in my flip phone. I guess a smart phone with a 3 megapixel camera would warrant something more capacious. So a 4 gig card should do it.
This is really not rocket science. It's like those people who used to ask, how large a hard disk should I get with my new PC? Well, the answer was, and still is, as large as you can afford.
Until the security fence went up, thousands of people in Israel were killed by suicide bombs over the past ten years. This week is lopsided only if you ignore history.
And it's not a question of money. The Pals get plenty of cash grants from the U.N. and Saudi Arabia. They're not "desperate poor", they're one big welfare state. Heck, back in the day, Saddam Hussein was giving about $16,000 to each family of a successful suicide bomber. If Hamas weren't running Gaza, they would be trading with Israel and the world and actually making some money.
It's not a question of religion. There are over 5 million Jews in Israel but also over 2 million Muslims and quite a few Christians--all living together in peace. The Muslims have representation in government and the only difference is that they don't serve in the military (except for the Beduins).
It's more a question of land. The Pals want it, the Israelis won't give it, end of story.
Now what makes the situation more explosive is that the Iranians are exploiting the local Arabs to set up a military forward base in Gaza. They have taken Hamas fighters to Iran to train them in guerrilla tactics and missile tech. They are trying to duplicate their success with Hezbollah.
That is what this current fight is about--it's really Israel versus Iran, and you'll notice the local Arab governments have been unusually subdued. None of them wants Iran to gain another foothold in their back yard, and while they publicly condemn Israel as do the "useful idiots" in Europe, behind closed doors they are egging the Israelis on.
One time in the late 80s I was in the Harvard U. computer sales office (back when people bought computers through their university) just inquiring about prices.
The sales person told me that a very irate professor from Harvard Business School called her up and was yelling about the fact that his new Compaq luggable (suitcase-sized) PC wouldn't turn on.
She asked him if he had plugged it in and he shouted "You're not supposed to plug it in! It's a portable!" She suggested he try it nonetheless and he hung up on her. He did not call back, suggesting that the solution worked.
This probably doesn't make a lot of sense to younger people who are used to all sorts of battery-powered computer appliances, but back then it was very funny indeed!
buy.com usually has pretty good deals on memory cards and USB drives. I split my purchases between Amazon for general books, electronics, appliances, etc., and Buy.com for hot deals on electronics like memory.
What amazes me is how Amazon manages to offer the best deals time and again. Even a 40-lb ceiling fan/light which can be had through Home Depot and many other places still prices out $10-$20 cheaper at Amazon.
And I remember when Amazon was only about books.
Damn these internet businesses which make me buy so much stuff!!!
I take it that you are referring to Harold Pinter who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 the last male British writer to win this prize. This comment just shows how little you know about English literature. Pinter is indisputably the greatest living British playwright and in the view of many including myself, who has been seeing his plays since I was a child, the greatest living playwright in the English language. This indeed does qualify him as a leading contender for the prize which he so deservingly won.
The political controversy over the prize arose because while hospitalized by a serious infection he videotaped his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture "Art, Truth & Politics" from a wheelchair. It was a scathing attack on US war of aggression against Iraq. Any suggestion that the award was made for political reasons is both erroneous and unwarranted. The criticisms of Pinter were that he used his award as a vehicle to put forward his political views. But this comes from those whose job it is to viciously denounce anyone who condemns US foreign policy so in fact it is a compliment. What is a public intellectual for but to criticise the wrongdoings of those in power.
There's a trend with the Nobel committee to nominate people who are anti-American and anti-Zionist. This man fit the bill pretty well--a great writer and a Chomsky-esque, frothing at the mouth idiot.
Consider these pearls from his Nobel "speech", which had little to do with literature:
"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law."
"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?"
"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them."
The United States "also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain."
OK, moderators will probably rate this posting "troll" as they did my previous one, but that doesn't alter the fact that this man is twisted.
If he could devote one iota of his intellect to addressing the "systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless" crimes of Saddam Hussein, of Osama Bin Laden, of the Islamist imams who brainwash young men into killing themselves and hundreds of innocents along with them--if he displayed the slightest evenhandedness, I would say fine, he was a great playwright who had political opinions.
But he took the low road. The Nobel Prize is, or used to be, a highly prestigious award, and it is a shame that some of its recipients stoop to trashing their political opponents in their acceptance speeches.
Consider another "great" writer, Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel for literature in 1998. From a blog on the subject:
Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist who won the Literature Nobel in 1998, visited the Ramallah headquarters of the Palestinian Authority and the late Yasser Arafat (himself, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994). Saramago came out against the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, declaring "What is happening in Palestine is a crime which we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz." When an Israeli journalist asked him whether he knew of gas chambers in Israel-controlled lands, Saramago replied, "I hope this is not the case. There are so many things being done that have nothing to do with Nazism, but what is happening is more or less the same."
That a talented artist can display such an astonishing a lack of wisdom and understanding is dismaying, but even more dismaying is the fact that the Nobel committee looks past these issues, or perhaps agrees with them and uses them to promote their own, similar world view.
I agree with the parent. Psion PLC previously developed a product called the "netBook", although it is no longer in production. However a sister company or umbrella company "Psion Teklogix" appears to have a current product that uses the "netBook" name. Maybe someone else can tease out exactly what these companies have in common, but at any rate the term appears to be a valid trademark that is in current use.
Unfortunately for them, it has also become a common term and they may have trouble holding on to it. A similar situation occurred in the late 1980s for those old enough to remember: a PC manufacturer trademarked the term "Tower" as in Tower PC, an upright form factor for (what we used to call) IBM compatibles. The term quickly spread and the manufacturer threatened to sue several other PC makers. I remember that one in particular changed their product from "Tower 286" to "Power 286". (Yeah, I'm old:)) Needless to say, "tower" stuck as a common term and that company lost control of it.
This is not as egregious as someone trying to co-opt the term "google" or "xerox" for commercial gain, even though these words have nonetheless become household terms. Actually, about 20 years ago Xerox tried to get their name back by warning people not to say "xerox" as a verb, especially when it wasn't actually a Xerox machine. But they failed, just as they failed in several other wrong headed pursuits such as suing Apple for its GUI and suing Palm for using Graffiti.
I think the moral high road is simply to keep on innovating and don't worry so much about empty words. I'd love to see Psion come out with some innovative products; they've always been a good company. As a commenter put it on the article site, R&D is better than C&D.
I'm sorry to say, this SSP white paper is simply that--a piece of paper with a pie-in-the-sky proposal that is unlikely to get funded to the same extent as fusion energy by the DOE.
Since it's a space-based project, it should really be funded and organized by NASA, which after all knows something about orbital solar arrays, while the DOE is merely an umbrella bureaucracy without a clear mission. Jimmy Carter set it up, as I recall, and during the laissez-faire Republican administrations as well as the Clinton years, it has been primarily a custodian for regulating fission reactors and funding some research projects.
There is so much potential for reaping energy savings on land, without having to resort to dangerous space flights and risky, massive construction projects in orbit, that it's amazing that this proposal is even being looked at by the transition team. I suspect this is fake news.
Don't get me wrong--I'm a total space nut, and I want to see us spending a trillion a year on space, and spread our civilization out to the planets before we blow this one away.
But when we can reap significant energy savings merely by painting the rooftops white of most government buildings, when we drive cars that have half or one third the fuel efficiency they could have, when we live in uninsulated buildings--it's ridiculous to proclaim that an SSP would solve our energy problems.
We should definitely build orbital facilities that would include solar arrays, perhaps to house dangerous manufacturing operations and to do zero-grav research, but this is not the most persuasive white paper that they are going to look at, I suspect.
Winning a Nobel prize in any field makes someone pretty much a guaranteed celebrity for the rest of their life. You want your future books to become best sellers? You want a tenured professorship at Harvard with your own research team, plum grad students, no undergraduate teaching duties, and dinner with the President and members of Congress? Win a Nobel.
I would say, the process is guaranteed to be flawed because they can't possibly single out the one person in every field who most deserves such an honor. In the arts, it's a rather arbitrary pick and seems to be colored by politics.
A couple of years ago they picked some writer in England because he was a leftist. They gave Jimmy Carter a prize for supposedly stopping the North Koreans from working on a nuclear bomb, and they just kept right on doing it. It doesn't hurt that Carter hates Israel and regularly visits groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Oh, for Israel haters it's probably fine but for those who are a bit more skeptical of Carter's intentions and methods, it has greatly demeaned the award.
The sciences are a bit different. But even there, it's difficult to tease out who exactly made complete and original innovations without relying heavily on the brilliant but unsung work of others. The most famous example is Watson, Crick, and Wilkins' discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. Their colleague Rosalind Franklin, who unfortunately died of cancer in 1958, played a key role in this discovery but is virtually unknown today because the Nobel prize is not awarded posthumously.
Einstein said that his accomplishments were "on the shoulders of giants" who came before him. Surely he was being humble but still, that is how science works, and Nobel encourages a notion in the general public's mind that scientists operate in a vacuum.
Thanks for the correction, I meant of course the Ares booster rocket and not the Orion craft itself.
I do question why Obama's team sees itself as fit to decide that an existing booster (Delta, Atlas) is more suitable than the upcoming Ares. As the article points out, these existing boosters are not really suitable for manned missions. It sounds like business as usual in Washington D.C., politicians meddling in technical matters. Wasn't Obama going to bring about a change to business as usual?
Getting back to space travel--clearly the Shuttle system, while spectacular in 1981, was a one trick pony. Yes, it's neat to have a craft that can return most of itself to land, but having accomplished this amazing feat, NASA should really have stepped back and taken a hard look at the economics before building a fleet of four ships (two of which were to blow up spectacularly, taking their crews with them). Having one shuttle system and many single use systems such as Apollo might have been a wiser compromise that gave the public its cool spaceship and gave NASA more flexibility.
I would agree with the poster above that space exploration should not rely on manned ships, but to cease manned flight would simply relinquish space to other global powers, notably Russia and China. Americans will be going to space fifty years from now; we'll either be doing it with our own ships or we'll be 2nd class passengers aboard foreign vessels, to go and visit the Chinese outposts on the Moon and in orbit. I'd rather stay in the game and be one of the leaders.
If I had the money, I'd buy the thing, set up a launch pad and a refueling station, and rent flights out to NASA. After all, they're retiring the shuttle five years too soon, so I figure I can make a few billion in rentals until the Orion starts up.
Except it sounds like Obama wants to kill the Orion project.
I can't understand how they could be so keen on throwing $500 billion at failed banks and mortgage deadbeats, yet they have no problem cutting NASA's $30 billion budget. And then there's Obama's national health insurance which is bound to cost a few hundred billion, if not a trillion or two when it's up and running.
Here's an idea: don't bail out the banks that made bad loans and investments, and let the mortgage deadbeats be foreclosed. That's the way our system is supposed to work. And take about $100 billion of that bailout money and put it into R&D, including space exploration. In the medium to long term, we will reap much richer economic rewards for such an investment.
Most people would view this commercial and think, wow, you can do all that with a phone? I want one!
By the time they have bought it and figured out how to run it, they'll long since have forgotten how speedy it looked in the advert.
Ads aren't supposed to be starkly realistic. Just think how awful they'd all be if they were.
For example, most car companies don't show you the sad realities of operating their vehicles in traffic. I think a realistic portrayal should include an occasional collision ("note how our driver is relatively unhurt, versus the critically injured passengers in the competition's car!").
GM would be more honest if they illustrated "fit and finish" problems in their vehicles. For example, driver gets in new Chevrolet Malibu, turns it on. Engine dies. Cut to scene at dealer's--"We back up our cars, sir; we'll have you out of here within two hours, and at no charge!"
Similarly, show a grandmother trying to turn on her new HP laptop and this "CHECKSUM FAILURE, PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE" screen appears. She calls HP and a nice man with a south Asian accent talks her through the problem (which involves reseating a SIMM).
In general, you almost NEVER encounter the kind of courteous, perfect service and incredible product quality as illustrated in ads. Ads don't reflect reality; they're a kind of allegorical story designed to make you want to buy the product while lying as much as they can get away with.
I think overall that they were just picking on Apple and the ad should have run.
Though most of these advances are tantalizingly close to realization, 5 years is still pretty ambitious.
In the past 15 years, speech recognition has certainly not gotten to the point where you can navigate hands-free except for rudimentary commands like ALT-LEFT or PAGEDOWN. You still need to train speech recognition parsers to your pronunciation, and they still get it wrong some of the time. Like everyone else, I would love for this technology to be perfected but I'm not holding my breath (so to speak). Maybe the author was taking the Iron Man movie a bit too seriously.
As for "perfect memory" I think in fact the opposite has occurred (see the recent Slashdot article on improving one's memory). People's attention spans and short term memory are deteriorating because of the information blitz. Although, the damage from passive web surfing is mediated by active participation in forums etc. Carrying around a PDA has been a mixed blessing; you get to the point where you don't bother to memorize anything because it's all in your device. That's OK as far as it goes, but you still need to exercise your memory or risk letting it decline, and PDAs do nothing to alleviate this problem.
Paint-on solar power--that's a great technology that has barely made it out of the lab. If it's implemented in the next 5 years, wonderful, but somehow it seems like a major infrastructure shift is needed to truly take advantage. I'd love to see every new house and commercial building outfitted with solar power, but it's not happening today even in fast-growing and sunny places like southern Arizona so this paint-on thing is probably even farther off. But, who knows what the next five years will bring. Obama may try to push through a mandate and then suddenly we'll see solar everywhere.
Realistically, in five years I would expect to see much smarter phones, like the iPhone 4.0 and gPhone 3.0 running on various networks including wi-fi and wimax as well as traditional cellular grids. Memory will be bigger and cheaper, and these gadgets will essentially be as smart as a present-day laptop. Laptops will be slimmer and smarter, too, and with longer lasting power supplies. Probably cars will be slightly smarter, with built-in GPS screens a common option (Toyota will probably be the first to make GPS a standard feature in all models) and traffic jam avoidance systems increasingly common. Eventually we'll doubtless have buried beacons in the roads that will alert motorists with properly equipped cars to impending collisions or congestion. But this kind of infrastructure will take years if not decades to install.
Socially we'll see more people looking for community online while ignoring their physical neighbors. This will be disruptive to physical neighborhoods as the world becomes increasingly virtual and distances are lessened.
There is evidence that physical exercise helps to improve memory. It's not known exactly why, but one can speculate that enhanced circulation will bring more oxygen and nutrients to the brain, keeping neurons well fed.
Also, using the brain is strongly correlated with intellectual acuity:
Do calculations in your head. E.g. add up grocery prices at the store.
Use mnemonics. E.g., your friend introduces his two sons Sam and Bill. Bil l is the ol der one.
Read books. Unlike the single-screen attention span required for web reading, books require a longer span. Think about the book and discuss it with friends afterwards.
Get off google. Looking things up that you "used to know" encourages mental laziness. Make yourself really think back and reconstruct (i.e., refresh old neural pathways) and you will be surprised at how much you can remember.
Meditation, prayer, yoga, hypnosis. These are activities that turn off the mental chatter and help improve concentration.
Challenge your mind. My mother-in-law, in her 70s, does a sudoku puzzle every day. There is evidence that such exercises contribute to improved acuity. Sudoku, crosswords, other puzzles all can be helpful.
Review. First thing in the morning, look at your schedule, look over the specs, study the code, whatever info you might find helpful to recall later that day, instead of reading the Times or the sports news.
Get off drugs. Reduce coffee and alcohol intake and detox your brain. Especially, alcohol and recreational drugs have a numbing effect on the mind and destroy memory capacity.
Herbal supplements. This is controversial at this time. Some claim positive effects from gingko and other herbal extracts, and others claim no effects have been found. It may help you.
Good luck! The brain does change over time, but it's possible to youthen your brain through conscious effort. Ultimately you can enjoy the advantages of the wisdom born of age and a strong intellect and clear memory.
What about all those companies that paid those don't-sue-us fees to SCO back in 2002? Are they going to step forward and demand their money back, now that the entire basis for this shakedown has been invalidated? And what about companies like Chrysler which also won against SCO? It seems to me they didn't get as much press as the IBM-SCO case did.
One might also ask, whither Microsoft, now that their $86 million investment in Baystar has turned out to be a complete waste. Shouldn't some executive's head roll for this? God, if someone can waste that much money at Microsoft and get away with it, they must be either Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates, either of whom is too powerful to reprimand.
I will say, SCO in its day was very intimidating, with Darl Bride as an eloquent and persuasive spokesman. His pronouncements sounded factual and reasonable, until people like Groklaw looked behind the curtain and showed us the truth. Well, it's just a testament to the power and resiliency of the open source community that Linux and friends will be around long after the world has forgotten what SCO was.
Correct, someone is misusing "defect" here. The Soviets were more fearsome enemies than the Allies. The German scientists obviously concluded that helping the Allies in the post-WWII era would be better for Germany than helping the USSR (or doing nothing).
Indeed, history shows that Von Braun and the others did the right thing by siding with the U.S. Western Germany was protected by the American nuclear umbrella and allowed to prosper while its Soviet half withered.
Germany has never really recovered its pre-war aerospace prowess. At one time, they made the best fighter jets, the best rockets, and pretty much the best in every engineering and medical field, and after the war they just lost it, as though they were afraid to excel in these fields anymore.
As for the Chinese, I agree with a previous poster that this is more of a case of industrial espionage than actual treason. But, military and industry are intimately connected in China, perhaps more than in the U.S., and any rocket tech that they acquire will almost certainly be put to military use.
The Chinese are so hungry for technology and they are acquiring it so rapidly even as the U.S. declines in industrial and scientific ability that it seems only a matter of time before they basically take over as the world super power, while the U.S. degenerates into a post-industrial welfare state like France or Britain.
If China were a democracy with some real checks and balances, this might be OK, but unfortunately they have not evolved their system to that level yet. Even the U.S. makes mistakes, but the pendulum does swing and there is a sense of accountability that simply doesn't exist in China yet.
Honestly I don't understand the point of these rudimentary attempts at book and newspaper replacements. Until they can COMPLETELY REPLICATE the look and feel of a book or newspaper in its flexibility, durability, persistence (won't die when the battery dies), and cost, there's little point.
Today anyone can buy a basic laptop for $300, or even cheaper, that provides all the news and information one could ask for. Amazon with their kindle product, and this company, and several others out there have a lot of work to do. Why should I buy a Kindle when I have a perfectly good laptop and a palmtop or two (phone, PDA) that have basically the same technology?
Why have yet another device to learn to use, recharge, and replace when it breaks? We are now in the software age. The hardware platforms out there are pretty well established and are advancing very quickly. Niche efforts like this that attempt to create a specialized hardware platform are wide of the mark. I'm all for saving trees, but the replacement has to be approximately as good to succeed.
LCD displays are extremely sharp and clear today and the prices have really tumbled. I would expect in a couple of years to see standard LCD 20" displays well under $100, and premium displays costing what the mediocre ones cost today. CPU power to drive those displays is also increasing. Sorry but this laptop-like creation is just not a promising place to invest one's money. Better to build the economic and technical infrastructure for downloading books and articles that will make it worthwhile to the writers and the consumers alike. Ultimately it's all about software.
What we COULD do is dump the manned missions until we, as a society, evolve far beyond our primitive level of technology. Send machines, many machines, which would be both cost effective and expendable. The rush to send meat into space was understandable during the Cold War, but is not wise today.
Actually, the way to bring down the cost of sending humans into space is to simply do it. After the research has been done and the ships have been built, the cost of actually launching humans into space is relatively trivial.
Sitting back and waiting for the technology to magically appear is tantamount to giving up on developing said technology. Ancillary tech such as smaller and faster computers may come along anyway, but putting it all together requires a lot more integrative technology and hands on expertise.
And, take note that if we, the U.S., give up on manned flight as too expensive, there are other nations out there that will definitely continue. Do we want to settle for renting a 3rd class berth on Chinese and Russian ships for the next 50 years, after we pretty much pioneered the way?
As a fiscal conservative, I'd prefer less aggregate government spending because it is an inefficient way to accomplish the ends it is put to. However, given the spending spree the government is on, I find NASA far less objectionable than writing checks to citizens, bailouts, or WPAish "dig a ditch. now fill it in." economic "stimulus" plans. At least spend our money on something that might one day help us.
I agree. Bailing out deadbeats and loan sharks is a poor investment of our great-grandchildren's money (for they're the ones who will actually be paying for all this debt).
On the other hand, space research and development that requires huge capital expenditures is an excellent investment that will someday bring us a much larger economy and more prosperity for all. An active moon mining operation that is sending home tritium and other valuable substances would pay for itself in a few years, as would orbital low-grav biotech and nanotech manufacturing facilities.
Ultimately, over the next 50-100 years, the nations that go into space will be the major superpowers while those that remain on Earth will stagnate, much as the Spanish, British, and French became the dominant nations during the colonial era.
Obama has not demonstrated a keen interest in science so far, except for wanting to rescind Bush's restrictions on stem cell research. That's a good first step, but seeing as how it doesn't cost any money it's merely a symbolic one.
Obama, it should be noted, wanted to cut the space program to pay for his socialized preschool scheme. That plan was removed from his website during the campaign, probably because an advisor told him the space program is important.
I have little faith in the Democrats in general wanting to explore outer space. It seems as if they are so focused on social spending that space is a distant little blip on their radar. Oh, sure, there's a few thousand aerospace jobs out there that it would be nice to keep in this country rather than outsourced to China and India, but I wouldn't bet a lot on job security in the aerospace field right now.
Maybe we could instigate a letter writing campaign to convince our representatives and senators that the space program particularly benefits the poor and needy and people "of color", and they'll up the priorities a bit.
The article's linked testimony refers to China's plans to disrupt Taiwan, Japan, and the U.S. through cyber-ops. While this may sound like a frightening scenario, in reality they would never do this unless China's entire senior leadership went insane. Japan, Taiwan, and the U.S. represent a major percentage of investors and customers and an attack on any of these three or even just on Taiwan would precipitate a huge backlash against China.
An attempt to subjugate Taiwan through military force or psychological/cyber warfare as outlined in the testimony would result in American and, probably, Japanese retaliation in several steps. Step one: temporarily reduce or ban commerce with the PRC. The president could do this with an executive order probably for 30-90 days without the support of Congress. The Chinese stock market would crash, as would the markets of the U.S., Japan, Taiwan and probably most of the other major exchanges.
The Americans and Japanese can source their products elsewhere, but since China's primary economic activity at this time is building and exporting industrial goods, a halting of trade with its major trading partners would have a devastating impact. Factories would be forced to lay off workers, growth would cease, and hundreds of billions of dollars would be lost. Government revenues would be cut drastically. It's also worth noting that many mainland factories are actually owned and managed by Taiwan investors, and a disruption of the delicate relationship with Taiwan would force the government to confiscate all of these assets to keep them running, which would obviously discourage new foreign investment. If this went on too long, the already existing social unrest in China might well boil over. Today, China suffers annually from thousands of demonstrations against local authorities in the interior; most of these are hushed up and the shootings by police are simply covered up. This would be difficult to keep a lid on if it got more extensive, for example if hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in the cities suddenly could find no factory day work.
The Chinese could retaliate with an attempt to call in U.S. debt but this would damage the U.S. ability to purchase Chinese products and probably would sour Americans on purchasing anything "Made in China". To their credit, Americans rarely discriminate against any particular country these days, preferring to shop on price and quality rather than ethnic origin. But a tremendous patriotic fervor is lurking below the surface as demonstrated by events following 9/11, and avoiding the Made in China label is a simple, direct kind of action, even though it is not that easy to achieve given how most stuff is made over there right now.
A military retaliation is something the Chinese military mentions from time to time, apparently for internal consumption. One Chinese general boasted in the 1990s that China could nuke Los Angeles; the Clinton Administration silently ignored this provocative remark. It's not clear what the (presumptive) Obama administration would do but he's even more of a dove than Clinton was. However, a direct provocation such as a fighter plane buzzing an American aircraft carrier or the like might well touch off a firefight. No one can benefit from such a scenario, and of course an actual nuclear attack on an American city would probably mean the end of Chinese civilization.
In conclusion--a tempest in a teapot, but we should still stay prepared.
I think the average person, when they hear the expression "Google Phone", are going to think "innovative" and "creative". They're not going to think "Google is merely a search engine. They know nothing about phones." Google is a household brand name that has succeeded in the near miraculous feat of turning itself into a verb. No one says, "I'm gonna MSN Search that" or "I'm gonna iPhone you." But maybe people will start saying "I'm gonna google that on my phone".
Personally, as a geek and technology enthusiast, I can't wait for the G1 to hit the shelves, or actually its even better 2.0 successors and competitors. It would replace my digital camera for light uses, my iPod, my Nokia flip phone, my Palm pda, and my laptop for light uses. And it runs Linux! This is going to be my birthday present for an upcoming "divisible by 10" birthday. Bring'em on!
I agree that people should treat employees nicely and respectfully but sometimes an incompetent employee (worker bee, manager, whatever) needs to be let go for the good of the organization. Some people are simply a bad fit and they are damaging the place a lot more than helping it. You have to let them go.
Under those circumstances, such people may be tempted to leave a "going away" gift just to say "fuck you" to the employer, regardless of how well or poorly they may have been treated.
I witnessed this just this past summer on a contract job where one of the sys admins was fired for gross incompetence (it happened the day after the VP who had hired him left) and he was detected somewhere outside the building hacking into the system with his wireless laptop. It took them about a week to change all the passwords and close up all the back doors they could find, and get things back to relative normal.
I have seen this several times before, where a person was kept on long after they should have been fired, whether due to incompetent or negligent management or due to their fear of what he might do to the company if he got mad at them. Such people are rarely grateful for the company's misplaced loyalty; they will screw the company in a second no matter how well they were treated.
A well run company needs to have good people at the top of the org chart or it's going to just go rotten eventually. The good people will get sick of working with dipshits and they'll go find better jobs, which they can do because they're good. The incompetents and marginal ones will stay because they have fewer options.
Treat people really nicely, communicate really clearly, and maintain solid oversight of their work. Never let someone get a death grip on the company through his knowledge of passwords, etc. And when in doubt, send someone on his way.
This whole debate is rather silly. The blog quotes the academic dean of Harvard's med school as saying the second semester of organic chem should be more medically oriented. He didn't say organic chem should be eliminated. Others may say that but they must be very misinformed.
Organic chemistry is the foundation for biochemistry, just as general chemistry is the foundation for organic chemistry. The typical medical school or biological sciences grad school pathway is: general chem orgo biochem
Increasingly, medical schools are requiring biochem as a prerequisite. Once in med school, students study a lot of biochemistry as it relates to the human body. This is foundational knowledge to help us understand how drugs interact with the body, how metabolism and catabolism work, how cells are structured, how the nervous system communicates with the tissues, etc.
To eliminate organic chemistry would make it much more difficult if not impossible to teach proper biochemistry. How can you understand biochemistry if you don't understand polarity, oxidation/reduction, activation energy, etc.? General chem present this material but certainly not in the same depth as organic chem, at least as it applies to organic molecules.
There is a career path for those who don't want or need to study organic chemistry and subsequent topics: nursing. As for doctors, though, let them continue to study the hard sciences and, hopefully, also achieve a good wholistic understanding of health.
the odds of finding an answer on the Internet to a question have gone down, because the probability that the person with the answer to your question visits or has visited the web fora you visit has gone down.
While your statement is accurate with regards to specific websites, I would say that overall the modern Internet provides more answers than the old Usenet, albeit you do have to sift through some cruft to find pearls of wisdom.
I have found that in the past 3-4 years, I almost never need to post a question, because the internet has grown so enormous that someone else has already asked it. It's pretty amazing, actually. Some of the answers actually google right back to archived Usenet postings on Google Groups or listserve archives, and others come out of forums like LinuxQuestions.org or compilation sites like faqs.org.
There are lots of applications for a $10 fluid microscope chip.
- Restaurants. You could pour a few drops of your soup, or drink, or meat juice, into your cell phone gadget and it will tell you if there are nasty critters.
- Hospitals. Medical workers can do preliminary blood screenings at admission time--just do a thumb prick, and get a urine sample, and they can discover proteins, various microbes, cell counts (perhaps). This info can go right into the (electronic) chart before the patient has even finished filling out the paperwork.
- Home. Self-diagnosis kits. Test water for microorganisms. Other stuff I can't think of, probably--science kits, for example.
I notice this project is funded by DARPA. Another cool, practical invention from that amazing agency with a tiny budget. Who says you need to throw billions of dollars at a project to get incredible results? If anything, DARPA proves that the opposite is generally true.
Slashdot Mirror
4 gig cards are not that expensive and they hold an amazing amount of stuff. Probably 8 gig cards will be pretty standard in a year or two. So just get the largest cards you can afford and you won't need to have lots of extra ones lying around.
My camera case has about 5 SD cards ranging from 512 megs to 2 gigs, and I really could replace them all with one or two 4GB cards. That's a lot of pictures (but we take a lot of video clips too).
Why someone needs extra SD cards for a phone is beyond me. My 512 meg micro sd is larger than I would ever want in my flip phone. I guess a smart phone with a 3 megapixel camera would warrant something more capacious. So a 4 gig card should do it.
This is really not rocket science. It's like those people who used to ask, how large a hard disk should I get with my new PC? Well, the answer was, and still is, as large as you can afford.
Until the security fence went up, thousands of people in Israel were killed by suicide bombs over the past ten years. This week is lopsided only if you ignore history.
And it's not a question of money. The Pals get plenty of cash grants from the U.N. and Saudi Arabia. They're not "desperate poor", they're one big welfare state. Heck, back in the day, Saddam Hussein was giving about $16,000 to each family of a successful suicide bomber. If Hamas weren't running Gaza, they would be trading with Israel and the world and actually making some money.
It's not a question of religion. There are over 5 million Jews in Israel but also over 2 million Muslims and quite a few Christians--all living together in peace. The Muslims have representation in government and the only difference is that they don't serve in the military (except for the Beduins).
It's more a question of land. The Pals want it, the Israelis won't give it, end of story.
Now what makes the situation more explosive is that the Iranians are exploiting the local Arabs to set up a military forward base in Gaza. They have taken Hamas fighters to Iran to train them in guerrilla tactics and missile tech. They are trying to duplicate their success with Hezbollah.
That is what this current fight is about--it's really Israel versus Iran, and you'll notice the local Arab governments have been unusually subdued. None of them wants Iran to gain another foothold in their back yard, and while they publicly condemn Israel as do the "useful idiots" in Europe, behind closed doors they are egging the Israelis on.
One time in the late 80s I was in the Harvard U. computer sales office (back when people bought computers through their university) just inquiring about prices.
The sales person told me that a very irate professor from Harvard Business School called her up and was yelling about the fact that his new Compaq luggable (suitcase-sized) PC wouldn't turn on.
She asked him if he had plugged it in and he shouted "You're not supposed to plug it in! It's a portable!" She suggested he try it nonetheless and he hung up on her. He did not call back, suggesting that the solution worked.
This probably doesn't make a lot of sense to younger people who are used to all sorts of battery-powered computer appliances, but back then it was very funny indeed!
buy.com usually has pretty good deals on memory cards and USB drives. I split my purchases between Amazon for general books, electronics, appliances, etc., and Buy.com for hot deals on electronics like memory.
What amazes me is how Amazon manages to offer the best deals time and again. Even a 40-lb ceiling fan/light which can be had through Home Depot and many other places still prices out $10-$20 cheaper at Amazon.
And I remember when Amazon was only about books.
Damn these internet businesses which make me buy so much stuff!!!
I take it that you are referring to Harold Pinter who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 the last male British writer to win this prize. This comment just shows how little you know about English literature. Pinter is indisputably the greatest living British playwright and in the view of many including myself, who has been seeing his plays since I was a child, the greatest living playwright in the English language. This indeed does qualify him as a leading contender for the prize which he so deservingly won.
The political controversy over the prize arose because while hospitalized by a serious infection he videotaped his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture "Art, Truth & Politics" from a wheelchair. It was a scathing attack on US war of aggression against Iraq. Any suggestion that the award was made for political reasons is both erroneous and unwarranted. The criticisms of Pinter were that he used his award as a vehicle to put forward his political views. But this comes from those whose job it is to viciously denounce anyone who condemns US foreign policy so in fact it is a compliment. What is a public intellectual for but to criticise the wrongdoings of those in power.
There's a trend with the Nobel committee to nominate people who are anti-American and anti-Zionist. This man fit the bill pretty well--a great writer and a Chomsky-esque, frothing at the mouth idiot.
Consider these pearls from his Nobel "speech", which had little to do with literature:
"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law."
"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?"
"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them."
The United States "also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain."
OK, moderators will probably rate this posting "troll" as they did my previous one, but that doesn't alter the fact that this man is twisted.
If he could devote one iota of his intellect to addressing the "systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless" crimes of Saddam Hussein, of Osama Bin Laden, of the Islamist imams who brainwash young men into killing themselves and hundreds of innocents along with them--if he displayed the slightest evenhandedness, I would say fine, he was a great playwright who had political opinions.
But he took the low road. The Nobel Prize is, or used to be, a highly prestigious award, and it is a shame that some of its recipients stoop to trashing their political opponents in their acceptance speeches.
Consider another "great" writer, Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel for literature in 1998. From a blog on the subject:
That a talented artist can display such an astonishing a lack of wisdom and understanding is dismaying, but even more dismaying is the fact that the Nobel committee looks past these issues, or perhaps agrees with them and uses them to promote their own, similar world view.
I agree with the parent. Psion PLC previously developed a product called the "netBook", although it is no longer in production. However a sister company or umbrella company "Psion Teklogix" appears to have a current product that uses the "netBook" name. Maybe someone else can tease out exactly what these companies have in common, but at any rate the term appears to be a valid trademark that is in current use.
Unfortunately for them, it has also become a common term and they may have trouble holding on to it. A similar situation occurred in the late 1980s for those old enough to remember: a PC manufacturer trademarked the term "Tower" as in Tower PC, an upright form factor for (what we used to call) IBM compatibles. The term quickly spread and the manufacturer threatened to sue several other PC makers. I remember that one in particular changed their product from "Tower 286" to "Power 286". (Yeah, I'm old :)) Needless to say, "tower" stuck as a common term and that company lost control of it.
This is not as egregious as someone trying to co-opt the term "google" or "xerox" for commercial gain, even though these words have nonetheless become household terms. Actually, about 20 years ago Xerox tried to get their name back by warning people not to say "xerox" as a verb, especially when it wasn't actually a Xerox machine. But they failed, just as they failed in several other wrong headed pursuits such as suing Apple for its GUI and suing Palm for using Graffiti.
I think the moral high road is simply to keep on innovating and don't worry so much about empty words. I'd love to see Psion come out with some innovative products; they've always been a good company. As a commenter put it on the article site, R&D is better than C&D.
I'm sorry to say, this SSP white paper is simply that--a piece of paper with a pie-in-the-sky proposal that is unlikely to get funded to the same extent as fusion energy by the DOE.
Since it's a space-based project, it should really be funded and organized by NASA, which after all knows something about orbital solar arrays, while the DOE is merely an umbrella bureaucracy without a clear mission. Jimmy Carter set it up, as I recall, and during the laissez-faire Republican administrations as well as the Clinton years, it has been primarily a custodian for regulating fission reactors and funding some research projects.
There is so much potential for reaping energy savings on land, without having to resort to dangerous space flights and risky, massive construction projects in orbit, that it's amazing that this proposal is even being looked at by the transition team. I suspect this is fake news.
Don't get me wrong--I'm a total space nut, and I want to see us spending a trillion a year on space, and spread our civilization out to the planets before we blow this one away.
But when we can reap significant energy savings merely by painting the rooftops white of most government buildings, when we drive cars that have half or one third the fuel efficiency they could have, when we live in uninsulated buildings--it's ridiculous to proclaim that an SSP would solve our energy problems.
We should definitely build orbital facilities that would include solar arrays, perhaps to house dangerous manufacturing operations and to do zero-grav research, but this is not the most persuasive white paper that they are going to look at, I suspect.
Winning a Nobel prize in any field makes someone pretty much a guaranteed celebrity for the rest of their life. You want your future books to become best sellers? You want a tenured professorship at Harvard with your own research team, plum grad students, no undergraduate teaching duties, and dinner with the President and members of Congress? Win a Nobel.
I would say, the process is guaranteed to be flawed because they can't possibly single out the one person in every field who most deserves such an honor. In the arts, it's a rather arbitrary pick and seems to be colored by politics.
A couple of years ago they picked some writer in England because he was a leftist. They gave Jimmy Carter a prize for supposedly stopping the North Koreans from working on a nuclear bomb, and they just kept right on doing it. It doesn't hurt that Carter hates Israel and regularly visits groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Oh, for Israel haters it's probably fine but for those who are a bit more skeptical of Carter's intentions and methods, it has greatly demeaned the award.
The sciences are a bit different. But even there, it's difficult to tease out who exactly made complete and original innovations without relying heavily on the brilliant but unsung work of others. The most famous example is Watson, Crick, and Wilkins' discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. Their colleague Rosalind Franklin, who unfortunately died of cancer in 1958, played a key role in this discovery but is virtually unknown today because the Nobel prize is not awarded posthumously.
Einstein said that his accomplishments were "on the shoulders of giants" who came before him. Surely he was being humble but still, that is how science works, and Nobel encourages a notion in the general public's mind that scientists operate in a vacuum.
Thanks for the correction, I meant of course the Ares booster rocket and not the Orion craft itself.
I do question why Obama's team sees itself as fit to decide that an existing booster (Delta, Atlas) is more suitable than the upcoming Ares. As the article points out, these existing boosters are not really suitable for manned missions. It sounds like business as usual in Washington D.C., politicians meddling in technical matters. Wasn't Obama going to bring about a change to business as usual?
Getting back to space travel--clearly the Shuttle system, while spectacular in 1981, was a one trick pony. Yes, it's neat to have a craft that can return most of itself to land, but having accomplished this amazing feat, NASA should really have stepped back and taken a hard look at the economics before building a fleet of four ships (two of which were to blow up spectacularly, taking their crews with them). Having one shuttle system and many single use systems such as Apollo might have been a wiser compromise that gave the public its cool spaceship and gave NASA more flexibility.
I would agree with the poster above that space exploration should not rely on manned ships, but to cease manned flight would simply relinquish space to other global powers, notably Russia and China. Americans will be going to space fifty years from now; we'll either be doing it with our own ships or we'll be 2nd class passengers aboard foreign vessels, to go and visit the Chinese outposts on the Moon and in orbit. I'd rather stay in the game and be one of the leaders.
If I had the money, I'd buy the thing, set up a launch pad and a refueling station, and rent flights out to NASA. After all, they're retiring the shuttle five years too soon, so I figure I can make a few billion in rentals until the Orion starts up.
Except it sounds like Obama wants to kill the Orion project.
I can't understand how they could be so keen on throwing $500 billion at failed banks and mortgage deadbeats, yet they have no problem cutting NASA's $30 billion budget. And then there's Obama's national health insurance which is bound to cost a few hundred billion, if not a trillion or two when it's up and running.
Here's an idea: don't bail out the banks that made bad loans and investments, and let the mortgage deadbeats be foreclosed. That's the way our system is supposed to work. And take about $100 billion of that bailout money and put it into R&D, including space exploration. In the medium to long term, we will reap much richer economic rewards for such an investment.
Wow, they really are bottom feeding now. I guess we can expect to see future headlines like these:
RIAA sues Alzheimer patient; he responded "What's a computer?"
DHS: RIAA suspected of links with Al Qaeda.
RIAA raids wedding reception, arrests groom for illegal downloads. Bride sues.
RIAA spokesman praises Mumbai attacks: "The gunmen targeted downloaders."
Space Piracy: RIAA sues NASA over bittorrent client they claim is running on ISS computer.
Foster care agencies warned by RIAA: downloaders are criminals regardless of adoption status.
RIAA sues Dell, HP, Acer for $10B: "computers are nothing but piracy tools".
RIAA accuses NYC opera company of infringement: "Aria sounds too similar to RIAA"
RIAA claims dead man's organs as compensation for "lifetime of piracy".
Most people would view this commercial and think, wow, you can do all that with a phone? I want one!
By the time they have bought it and figured out how to run it, they'll long since have forgotten how speedy it looked in the advert.
Ads aren't supposed to be starkly realistic. Just think how awful they'd all be if they were.
For example, most car companies don't show you the sad realities of operating their vehicles in traffic. I think a realistic portrayal should include an occasional collision ("note how our driver is relatively unhurt, versus the critically injured passengers in the competition's car!").
GM would be more honest if they illustrated "fit and finish" problems in their vehicles. For example, driver gets in new Chevrolet Malibu, turns it on. Engine dies. Cut to scene at dealer's--"We back up our cars, sir; we'll have you out of here within two hours, and at no charge!"
Similarly, show a grandmother trying to turn on her new HP laptop and this "CHECKSUM FAILURE, PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE" screen appears. She calls HP and a nice man with a south Asian accent talks her through the problem (which involves reseating a SIMM).
In general, you almost NEVER encounter the kind of courteous, perfect service and incredible product quality as illustrated in ads. Ads don't reflect reality; they're a kind of allegorical story designed to make you want to buy the product while lying as much as they can get away with.
I think overall that they were just picking on Apple and the ad should have run.
Though most of these advances are tantalizingly close to realization, 5 years is still pretty ambitious.
In the past 15 years, speech recognition has certainly not gotten to the point where you can navigate hands-free except for rudimentary commands like ALT-LEFT or PAGEDOWN. You still need to train speech recognition parsers to your pronunciation, and they still get it wrong some of the time. Like everyone else, I would love for this technology to be perfected but I'm not holding my breath (so to speak). Maybe the author was taking the Iron Man movie a bit too seriously.
As for "perfect memory" I think in fact the opposite has occurred (see the recent Slashdot article on improving one's memory). People's attention spans and short term memory are deteriorating because of the information blitz. Although, the damage from passive web surfing is mediated by active participation in forums etc. Carrying around a PDA has been a mixed blessing; you get to the point where you don't bother to memorize anything because it's all in your device. That's OK as far as it goes, but you still need to exercise your memory or risk letting it decline, and PDAs do nothing to alleviate this problem.
Paint-on solar power--that's a great technology that has barely made it out of the lab. If it's implemented in the next 5 years, wonderful, but somehow it seems like a major infrastructure shift is needed to truly take advantage. I'd love to see every new house and commercial building outfitted with solar power, but it's not happening today even in fast-growing and sunny places like southern Arizona so this paint-on thing is probably even farther off. But, who knows what the next five years will bring. Obama may try to push through a mandate and then suddenly we'll see solar everywhere.
Realistically, in five years I would expect to see much smarter phones, like the iPhone 4.0 and gPhone 3.0 running on various networks including wi-fi and wimax as well as traditional cellular grids. Memory will be bigger and cheaper, and these gadgets will essentially be as smart as a present-day laptop. Laptops will be slimmer and smarter, too, and with longer lasting power supplies. Probably cars will be slightly smarter, with built-in GPS screens a common option (Toyota will probably be the first to make GPS a standard feature in all models) and traffic jam avoidance systems increasingly common. Eventually we'll doubtless have buried beacons in the roads that will alert motorists with properly equipped cars to impending collisions or congestion. But this kind of infrastructure will take years if not decades to install.
Socially we'll see more people looking for community online while ignoring their physical neighbors. This will be disruptive to physical neighborhoods as the world becomes increasingly virtual and distances are lessened.
Also, using the brain is strongly correlated with intellectual acuity:
Do calculations in your head. E.g. add up grocery prices at the store.
Use mnemonics. E.g., your friend introduces his two sons Sam and Bill. Bi l l is the o l der one.
Read books. Unlike the single-screen attention span required for web reading, books require a longer span. Think about the book and discuss it with friends afterwards.
Get off google. Looking things up that you "used to know" encourages mental laziness. Make yourself really think back and reconstruct (i.e., refresh old neural pathways) and you will be surprised at how much you can remember.
Meditation, prayer, yoga, hypnosis. These are activities that turn off the mental chatter and help improve concentration.
Challenge your mind. My mother-in-law, in her 70s, does a sudoku puzzle every day. There is evidence that such exercises contribute to improved acuity. Sudoku, crosswords, other puzzles all can be helpful.
Review. First thing in the morning, look at your schedule, look over the specs, study the code, whatever info you might find helpful to recall later that day, instead of reading the Times or the sports news.
Get off drugs. Reduce coffee and alcohol intake and detox your brain. Especially, alcohol and recreational drugs have a numbing effect on the mind and destroy memory capacity.
Herbal supplements. This is controversial at this time. Some claim positive effects from gingko and other herbal extracts, and others claim no effects have been found. It may help you.
Good luck! The brain does change over time, but it's possible to youthen your brain through conscious effort. Ultimately you can enjoy the advantages of the wisdom born of age and a strong intellect and clear memory.
What about all those companies that paid those don't-sue-us fees to SCO back in 2002? Are they going to step forward and demand their money back, now that the entire basis for this shakedown has been invalidated? And what about companies like Chrysler which also won against SCO? It seems to me they didn't get as much press as the IBM-SCO case did.
One might also ask, whither Microsoft, now that their $86 million investment in Baystar has turned out to be a complete waste. Shouldn't some executive's head roll for this? God, if someone can waste that much money at Microsoft and get away with it, they must be either Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates, either of whom is too powerful to reprimand.
I will say, SCO in its day was very intimidating, with Darl Bride as an eloquent and persuasive spokesman. His pronouncements sounded factual and reasonable, until people like Groklaw looked behind the curtain and showed us the truth. Well, it's just a testament to the power and resiliency of the open source community that Linux and friends will be around long after the world has forgotten what SCO was.
Correct, someone is misusing "defect" here. The Soviets were more fearsome enemies than the Allies. The German scientists obviously concluded that helping the Allies in the post-WWII era would be better for Germany than helping the USSR (or doing nothing).
Indeed, history shows that Von Braun and the others did the right thing by siding with the U.S. Western Germany was protected by the American nuclear umbrella and allowed to prosper while its Soviet half withered.
Germany has never really recovered its pre-war aerospace prowess. At one time, they made the best fighter jets, the best rockets, and pretty much the best in every engineering and medical field, and after the war they just lost it, as though they were afraid to excel in these fields anymore.
As for the Chinese, I agree with a previous poster that this is more of a case of industrial espionage than actual treason. But, military and industry are intimately connected in China, perhaps more than in the U.S., and any rocket tech that they acquire will almost certainly be put to military use.
The Chinese are so hungry for technology and they are acquiring it so rapidly even as the U.S. declines in industrial and scientific ability that it seems only a matter of time before they basically take over as the world super power, while the U.S. degenerates into a post-industrial welfare state like France or Britain.
If China were a democracy with some real checks and balances, this might be OK, but unfortunately they have not evolved their system to that level yet. Even the U.S. makes mistakes, but the pendulum does swing and there is a sense of accountability that simply doesn't exist in China yet.
Honestly I don't understand the point of these rudimentary attempts at book and newspaper replacements. Until they can COMPLETELY REPLICATE the look and feel of a book or newspaper in its flexibility, durability, persistence (won't die when the battery dies), and cost, there's little point.
Today anyone can buy a basic laptop for $300, or even cheaper, that provides all the news and information one could ask for. Amazon with their kindle product, and this company, and several others out there have a lot of work to do. Why should I buy a Kindle when I have a perfectly good laptop and a palmtop or two (phone, PDA) that have basically the same technology?
Why have yet another device to learn to use, recharge, and replace when it breaks? We are now in the software age. The hardware platforms out there are pretty well established and are advancing very quickly. Niche efforts like this that attempt to create a specialized hardware platform are wide of the mark. I'm all for saving trees, but the replacement has to be approximately as good to succeed.
LCD displays are extremely sharp and clear today and the prices have really tumbled. I would expect in a couple of years to see standard LCD 20" displays well under $100, and premium displays costing what the mediocre ones cost today. CPU power to drive those displays is also increasing. Sorry but this laptop-like creation is just not a promising place to invest one's money. Better to build the economic and technical infrastructure for downloading books and articles that will make it worthwhile to the writers and the consumers alike. Ultimately it's all about software.
What we COULD do is dump the manned missions until we, as a society, evolve far beyond our primitive level of technology. Send machines, many machines, which would be both cost effective and expendable. The rush to send meat into space was understandable during the Cold War, but is not wise today.
Actually, the way to bring down the cost of sending humans into space is to simply do it. After the research has been done and the ships have been built, the cost of actually launching humans into space is relatively trivial.
Sitting back and waiting for the technology to magically appear is tantamount to giving up on developing said technology. Ancillary tech such as smaller and faster computers may come along anyway, but putting it all together requires a lot more integrative technology and hands on expertise.
And, take note that if we, the U.S., give up on manned flight as too expensive, there are other nations out there that will definitely continue. Do we want to settle for renting a 3rd class berth on Chinese and Russian ships for the next 50 years, after we pretty much pioneered the way?
As a fiscal conservative, I'd prefer less aggregate government spending because it is an inefficient way to accomplish the ends it is put to. However, given the spending spree the government is on, I find NASA far less objectionable than writing checks to citizens, bailouts, or WPAish "dig a ditch. now fill it in." economic "stimulus" plans. At least spend our money on something that might one day help us.
I agree. Bailing out deadbeats and loan sharks is a poor investment of our great-grandchildren's money (for they're the ones who will actually be paying for all this debt).
On the other hand, space research and development that requires huge capital expenditures is an excellent investment that will someday bring us a much larger economy and more prosperity for all. An active moon mining operation that is sending home tritium and other valuable substances would pay for itself in a few years, as would orbital low-grav biotech and nanotech manufacturing facilities.
Ultimately, over the next 50-100 years, the nations that go into space will be the major superpowers while those that remain on Earth will stagnate, much as the Spanish, British, and French became the dominant nations during the colonial era.
Obama has not demonstrated a keen interest in science so far, except for wanting to rescind Bush's restrictions on stem cell research. That's a good first step, but seeing as how it doesn't cost any money it's merely a symbolic one.
Obama, it should be noted, wanted to cut the space program to pay for his socialized preschool scheme. That plan was removed from his website during the campaign, probably because an advisor told him the space program is important.
I have little faith in the Democrats in general wanting to explore outer space. It seems as if they are so focused on social spending that space is a distant little blip on their radar. Oh, sure, there's a few thousand aerospace jobs out there that it would be nice to keep in this country rather than outsourced to China and India, but I wouldn't bet a lot on job security in the aerospace field right now.
Maybe we could instigate a letter writing campaign to convince our representatives and senators that the space program particularly benefits the poor and needy and people "of color", and they'll up the priorities a bit.
The article's linked testimony refers to China's plans to disrupt Taiwan, Japan, and the U.S. through cyber-ops. While this may sound like a frightening scenario, in reality they would never do this unless China's entire senior leadership went insane. Japan, Taiwan, and the U.S. represent a major percentage of investors and customers and an attack on any of these three or even just on Taiwan would precipitate a huge backlash against China.
An attempt to subjugate Taiwan through military force or psychological/cyber warfare as outlined in the testimony would result in American and, probably, Japanese retaliation in several steps. Step one: temporarily reduce or ban commerce with the PRC. The president could do this with an executive order probably for 30-90 days without the support of Congress. The Chinese stock market would crash, as would the markets of the U.S., Japan, Taiwan and probably most of the other major exchanges.
The Americans and Japanese can source their products elsewhere, but since China's primary economic activity at this time is building and exporting industrial goods, a halting of trade with its major trading partners would have a devastating impact. Factories would be forced to lay off workers, growth would cease, and hundreds of billions of dollars would be lost. Government revenues would be cut drastically. It's also worth noting that many mainland factories are actually owned and managed by Taiwan investors, and a disruption of the delicate relationship with Taiwan would force the government to confiscate all of these assets to keep them running, which would obviously discourage new foreign investment. If this went on too long, the already existing social unrest in China might well boil over. Today, China suffers annually from thousands of demonstrations against local authorities in the interior; most of these are hushed up and the shootings by police are simply covered up. This would be difficult to keep a lid on if it got more extensive, for example if hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in the cities suddenly could find no factory day work.
The Chinese could retaliate with an attempt to call in U.S. debt but this would damage the U.S. ability to purchase Chinese products and probably would sour Americans on purchasing anything "Made in China". To their credit, Americans rarely discriminate against any particular country these days, preferring to shop on price and quality rather than ethnic origin. But a tremendous patriotic fervor is lurking below the surface as demonstrated by events following 9/11, and avoiding the Made in China label is a simple, direct kind of action, even though it is not that easy to achieve given how most stuff is made over there right now.
A military retaliation is something the Chinese military mentions from time to time, apparently for internal consumption. One Chinese general boasted in the 1990s that China could nuke Los Angeles; the Clinton Administration silently ignored this provocative remark. It's not clear what the (presumptive) Obama administration would do but he's even more of a dove than Clinton was. However, a direct provocation such as a fighter plane buzzing an American aircraft carrier or the like might well touch off a firefight. No one can benefit from such a scenario, and of course an actual nuclear attack on an American city would probably mean the end of Chinese civilization.
In conclusion--a tempest in a teapot, but we should still stay prepared.
I think the average person, when they hear the expression "Google Phone", are going to think "innovative" and "creative". They're not going to think "Google is merely a search engine. They know nothing about phones." Google is a household brand name that has succeeded in the near miraculous feat of turning itself into a verb. No one says, "I'm gonna MSN Search that" or "I'm gonna iPhone you." But maybe people will start saying "I'm gonna google that on my phone".
Personally, as a geek and technology enthusiast, I can't wait for the G1 to hit the shelves, or actually its even better 2.0 successors and competitors. It would replace my digital camera for light uses, my iPod, my Nokia flip phone, my Palm pda, and my laptop for light uses. And it runs Linux! This is going to be my birthday present for an upcoming "divisible by 10" birthday. Bring'em on!
I agree that people should treat employees nicely and respectfully but sometimes an incompetent employee (worker bee, manager, whatever) needs to be let go for the good of the organization. Some people are simply a bad fit and they are damaging the place a lot more than helping it. You have to let them go.
Under those circumstances, such people may be tempted to leave a "going away" gift just to say "fuck you" to the employer, regardless of how well or poorly they may have been treated.
I witnessed this just this past summer on a contract job where one of the sys admins was fired for gross incompetence (it happened the day after the VP who had hired him left) and he was detected somewhere outside the building hacking into the system with his wireless laptop. It took them about a week to change all the passwords and close up all the back doors they could find, and get things back to relative normal.
I have seen this several times before, where a person was kept on long after they should have been fired, whether due to incompetent or negligent management or due to their fear of what he might do to the company if he got mad at them. Such people are rarely grateful for the company's misplaced loyalty; they will screw the company in a second no matter how well they were treated.
A well run company needs to have good people at the top of the org chart or it's going to just go rotten eventually. The good people will get sick of working with dipshits and they'll go find better jobs, which they can do because they're good. The incompetents and marginal ones will stay because they have fewer options.
Treat people really nicely, communicate really clearly, and maintain solid oversight of their work. Never let someone get a death grip on the company through his knowledge of passwords, etc. And when in doubt, send someone on his way.
This whole debate is rather silly. The blog quotes the academic dean of Harvard's med school as saying the second semester of organic chem should be more medically oriented. He didn't say organic chem should be eliminated. Others may say that but they must be very misinformed.
Organic chemistry is the foundation for biochemistry, just as general chemistry is the foundation for organic chemistry. The typical medical school or biological sciences grad school pathway is:
general chem
orgo
biochem
Increasingly, medical schools are requiring biochem as a prerequisite. Once in med school, students study a lot of biochemistry as it relates to the human body. This is foundational knowledge to help us understand how drugs interact with the body, how metabolism and catabolism work, how cells are structured, how the nervous system communicates with the tissues, etc.
To eliminate organic chemistry would make it much more difficult if not impossible to teach proper biochemistry. How can you understand biochemistry if you don't understand polarity, oxidation/reduction, activation energy, etc.? General chem present this material but certainly not in the same depth as organic chem, at least as it applies to organic molecules.
There is a career path for those who don't want or need to study organic chemistry and subsequent topics: nursing. As for doctors, though, let them continue to study the hard sciences and, hopefully, also achieve a good wholistic understanding of health.
the odds of finding an answer on the Internet to a question have gone down, because the probability that the person with the answer to your question visits or has visited the web fora you visit has gone down.
While your statement is accurate with regards to specific websites, I would say that overall the modern Internet provides more answers than the old Usenet, albeit you do have to sift through some cruft to find pearls of wisdom.
I have found that in the past 3-4 years, I almost never need to post a question, because the internet has grown so enormous that someone else has already asked it. It's pretty amazing, actually. Some of the answers actually google right back to archived Usenet postings on Google Groups or listserve archives, and others come out of forums like LinuxQuestions.org or compilation sites like faqs.org.
There are lots of applications for a $10 fluid microscope chip.
- Restaurants. You could pour a few drops of your soup, or drink, or meat juice, into your cell phone gadget and it will tell you if there are nasty critters.
- Hospitals. Medical workers can do preliminary blood screenings at admission time--just do a thumb prick, and get a urine sample, and they can discover proteins, various microbes, cell counts (perhaps). This info can go right into the (electronic) chart before the patient has even finished filling out the paperwork.
- Home. Self-diagnosis kits. Test water for microorganisms. Other stuff I can't think of, probably--science kits, for example.
I notice this project is funded by DARPA. Another cool, practical invention from that amazing agency with a tiny budget. Who says you need to throw billions of dollars at a project to get incredible results? If anything, DARPA proves that the opposite is generally true.