Sometimes, I wonder what Bradbury thought of the modern e-book reader as exemplified by the Amazon Kindle series of e-book readers.
It's been said that many older people are now reading books again, thanks to the Kindle's ability to increase text size to accommodate older readers with vision problems. I like the Kindle for another reason: no more holding or propping up a heavy hardback book, one that often weighs several times more than the current Kindle models (let alone the iPad 2!).
I think for the people who do want decent battery life, the new Transformer running the latest low-power Core i3 CPU, built-in Ivy Bridge graphics, and 4 GB of RAM is all they need. Unlike Intel's past built-in graphics chips, the HD 4000 GPU built into the Ivy Bridge chipset is no slouch at even 3-D graphics, so for most users there is no significant advantage to offering an additional GPU unit.
I think even with the 70-100 megabit/second download speeds you find in Japan, South Korea and parts of Europe, it's still better to have an optical drive because nowadays, a PlayStation 3 game stored on essentially a Blu-ray data disc could have as much as 23-24 GB of program code, and that's pretty daunting to download even with superfast connections.
Actually, Falcon Heavy is important because at 53 tons into low Earth orbit (LEO) payload capacity, that's enough to launch components of a spaceship using _nuclear_ propulsion. And that means with nuclear rockets, instead of nine-month transit time to Mars, we maybe talking as little as 45 days!:-) With that short transit time, the need for consumables and radiation protection will be lower, substantially lightening the weight of the spacecraft going to Mars. And it could means it'll even be cheaper to eventually establish a permanent presence on that planet, too.
I'd almost agree, but with IE 10.0 due in a few months, if you can write HTML 5.0 apps, it should run under IE 10.0 with its pretty good HTML 5.0 compatibility.
I also blame the radical womens' rights movement, too.
We've now reached the point legally that _any_ remark or "seeing a person the wrong way" could be construed as sexual harassment and as a result, men are having trouble even going out on dates! As a result, even women of college age are openly wondering why they've having trouble dating men, mostly because men so concerned about the legal ramifications of even going out on a date.
By the way, there is a MAJOR reason why usage of Internet Explorer is falling: it lacks automatic spell check. I've read a lot of web browser users have switched to Firefox or Chrome in Windows XP/Vista/7 because IE 8.0 (Windows XP) and IE 9.0 (Vista/7) lack the ability to check spelling.
However, IE 10.0 for Windows 7 and 8 does include spell-checking for the first time, and that may dissuade a good number of users from using alternatives. And unlike IE 8.0 and 9.0, IE 10.0 is WAY more HTML 5.0 compliant, too.
You are correct. To clean up a turbodiesel engine, you need a combination of diesel particulate filters and urea liquid injection into the exhaust stream to chemically "break up" the NOx gases to a simpler form that is easily removed by standard catalytic converters. Developed originally by Mercedes-Benz under trademark name "BlueTec," it's a pretty expensive system of exhaust emission control, hence the reason why such systems have been limited to higher-end turbodiesel models.
Who wants to watch a blurry pirated version with questionable sound quality when by late this fall you can get it on 1080p high-defintion Blu-ray release with super high quality surround sound?
Here's the problem: the Lumia 900 is an GSM/LTE cellphone, not a CDMA/LTE cellphone. As such, the Lumia 900 can be engineered for GSM networks (which is essentially most of the world's cellphone networks!) that have added LTE functionality, for example Australia's own cellphone network with GSM and LTE.
The problem is that the Nokia Lumia 900--the only Windows Phone-based cellphone that has LTE support--works only on AT&T's GSM/LTE combo network for the US version. If the Lumia 900 included a version that worked on Verizon's CDMA/LTE network, that would be a different story!
Leo Laporte on the "This WEEK in Tech" and "MacBreak Weekly" podcasts have said several times over the last 5-6 years that the reason why Macs running OS X haven't been hit with malware was that until very recently, there wasn't enough Macs out there to justify the effort to write malware that can infect these machines.
But now, with the terrifying success of the "Flashback" malware, it's now open season on Mac users. As such, Apple may have to develop a true Internet security suite with automatic virus/malware definition protection updates akin to Microsoft's own Security Essentials 4.0 for Windows XP/Vista/7 so all Internet activity can be closely monitored and all virus and other malware activity immediately stopped in its tracks.
More like since 1971, when the Mariner 9 orbiter found ancient dried up river beds. As such, Mars probably had life well beyond the simple single-cell lifeform stage in ancient times, but as the atmosphere got thinner, the surface life went away, but it's possible the simple-celled life still exists beneath the surface now.
Here's the simple reason why corporations engage in the behavior outlined in the New York Times article: _our income tax system based on Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code, encourages such activity_.
Thanks to all those complicated loopholes in the Internal Revenue Code and all the additional rulings that add up to around 70,000 pages of tax code, this is why you have millions of jobs, thousands of factories, hundreds of corporate headquarters, and possibly as high as US$15 TRILLION (!!!) in American-owned liquid assets out of the USA for tax avoidance reasons. Maybe it's time to gut the entire tax code and start all over again in one of two ways:
1) A 17% flat-rate no-loophole income tax, where the only loophole is a very generous initial earned income (wages and pensions) exemption to protect lower-income taxpayers (e.g., as high as US$46,000 for a two-adult/two legal dependent family), and get rid of the alternate minimum tax, estate tax, maybe the FICA tax, gift tax, marriage penalty, self-employment tax and taxation on bank account interest, capital gains and stock dividend payments. This is what Steve Forbes proposed back in 1996.
2) Completely phase out the income tax in favor of a 23% national consumption tax on all new goods and services sales, where business-to-business sales, used good sales, and college tuition are exempt from the tax. To help lower-income people, any legal household will get a monthly payment to cover the cost of the tax up to the Federally-defined poverty level (US$580 per month payment for the family I mentioned earlier). This is the FairTax proposal, H.R. 25/S. 13.
Under both of these proposals, American companies have all the incentive to keep as much of their liquid assets and operations in the USA as possible, since it is tax-advantageous to do so. An it also means vastly lower yearly tax compliance costs, meaning hundreds of billions of dollars spent per year in tax compliance are now freed up for more productive activities. In short, such a change will result in the next American economic boom.
What happened from this story is essentially a tiny version of what happened in 1908 when a fairly large meteor or faint comet fragment entered the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of probably over 32,000 mph and exploded 5-7 kilometers above the ground with the force of the warhead from the Russian R-36M ICBM--around 20 MT. That's why trees were blown down many miles from the center point of the explosion.
If I remember correctly, Volkswagen Chairman Martin Winterkorn predicted that by 2020, an electric car about the size of today's Volkswagen Golf with a battery pack almost the same volume size as the Golf's fuel tank could go 800 km (497 miles) on a single charge, thanks to dramatic improvements in lithium-ion and ultracapacitor battery designs. If Winterkorn's prediction becomes reality, this will be the beginning of the end of the age of petroleum-fueled automobiles, light trucks and SUV's. By 2025, people will be looking back at the "quaint old days" of fueling up a personal vehicle with gasoline or diesel fuel.:-)
The only reason why the USAF stuck with the TF33's up till now was the fact they could get plentiful engine spare parts from retired 707-320 models (the JT3D engine used on the 707-320B/C models is essentially the commercial variant of the military TF33 engine). But with the increasing cost of fuel, the B-52H needs more fuel-efficient engines, and an uprated PW2000 series engine makes the most sense.
Indeed, that's why the USAF went with the General Electric CF6-80 engine on the C-5M rebuild program--quieter, more takeoff thrust and lower fuel burn.
But the fact that Oracle is suing Google over the Java implementation in Android and Apple might be seriously considering a direct lawsuit against Google for Android copying much of the user interface of iOS, I'm not sure if this is a good idea for Nokia to embrace Android 4.0 and later.
As such, Android may be very popular now, but its murky legal status might stunt its growth prospects in the future. Meanwhile, Windows Phone 7.5 and the upcoming 8.0 uses the very unique Metro user interface, which appears to not violate any of the Apple patents and copyrights on the iOS touchscreen interface.
I do think that we could see B-52's get additional upgrades, notably:
1. An updated version of the Pratt & Whitney PW2000 series engine, probably uprated to 42,000 lb. thrust. Four of these engines will replace the eight P&W TF33's now used on the B-52H.
2. More electronics upgrades--made easier by the fact the plane is big enough to accommodate them.
3. With more powerful engines, we could see B-52's carry heavier bomb loads and still fly longer ranges.
In short, Mac users now realize that if order to be safe from malware attack, you need software on your local computer to intercept and stop the attack in the first place.
Windows users already have multiple choices for such protection, and even Microsoft offers a free one: Microsoft Security Essentials, which is a surprisingly good Internet security program (it's highly recommended especially for Windows 7 users, since it works closely with Windows 7's own security features).
I have a question: how come no one has considered using a spot on Australia's Nullarbor Plain to build a giant telescope? Like Chile's Atacama Desert, the Nullarbor Plain has just about no rain and has effective freedom from light pollution, so it would be perfect for a large optical telescope installation.
Or better yet, require a 35% minimum margin requirement (MMR) to trade in ANY economically-strategic commodity.
At 35% MMR, that's high enough to force the vast majority of commodity traders off the market, and we could see at 25-35% cut in the price of many commodities almost immediately.
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Sometimes, I wonder what Bradbury thought of the modern e-book reader as exemplified by the Amazon Kindle series of e-book readers.
It's been said that many older people are now reading books again, thanks to the Kindle's ability to increase text size to accommodate older readers with vision problems. I like the Kindle for another reason: no more holding or propping up a heavy hardback book, one that often weighs several times more than the current Kindle models (let alone the iPad 2!).
I think for the people who do want decent battery life, the new Transformer running the latest low-power Core i3 CPU, built-in Ivy Bridge graphics, and 4 GB of RAM is all they need. Unlike Intel's past built-in graphics chips, the HD 4000 GPU built into the Ivy Bridge chipset is no slouch at even 3-D graphics, so for most users there is no significant advantage to offering an additional GPU unit.
I think even with the 70-100 megabit/second download speeds you find in Japan, South Korea and parts of Europe, it's still better to have an optical drive because nowadays, a PlayStation 3 game stored on essentially a Blu-ray data disc could have as much as 23-24 GB of program code, and that's pretty daunting to download even with superfast connections.
Actually, Falcon Heavy is important because at 53 tons into low Earth orbit (LEO) payload capacity, that's enough to launch components of a spaceship using _nuclear_ propulsion. And that means with nuclear rockets, instead of nine-month transit time to Mars, we maybe talking as little as 45 days! :-) With that short transit time, the need for consumables and radiation protection will be lower, substantially lightening the weight of the spacecraft going to Mars. And it could means it'll even be cheaper to eventually establish a permanent presence on that planet, too.
I'd almost agree, but with IE 10.0 due in a few months, if you can write HTML 5.0 apps, it should run under IE 10.0 with its pretty good HTML 5.0 compatibility.
IE 9.0 under Windows 7 is actually quite good. The only thing lacking is spellchecking, which will be fixed in IE 10.0 for Windows 7 and 8.
I also blame the radical womens' rights movement, too.
We've now reached the point legally that _any_ remark or "seeing a person the wrong way" could be construed as sexual harassment and as a result, men are having trouble even going out on dates! As a result, even women of college age are openly wondering why they've having trouble dating men, mostly because men so concerned about the legal ramifications of even going out on a date.
By the way, there is a MAJOR reason why usage of Internet Explorer is falling: it lacks automatic spell check. I've read a lot of web browser users have switched to Firefox or Chrome in Windows XP/Vista/7 because IE 8.0 (Windows XP) and IE 9.0 (Vista/7) lack the ability to check spelling.
However, IE 10.0 for Windows 7 and 8 does include spell-checking for the first time, and that may dissuade a good number of users from using alternatives. And unlike IE 8.0 and 9.0, IE 10.0 is WAY more HTML 5.0 compliant, too.
You are correct. To clean up a turbodiesel engine, you need a combination of diesel particulate filters and urea liquid injection into the exhaust stream to chemically "break up" the NOx gases to a simpler form that is easily removed by standard catalytic converters. Developed originally by Mercedes-Benz under trademark name "BlueTec," it's a pretty expensive system of exhaust emission control, hence the reason why such systems have been limited to higher-end turbodiesel models.
Who wants to watch a blurry pirated version with questionable sound quality when by late this fall you can get it on 1080p high-defintion Blu-ray release with super high quality surround sound?
Here's the problem: the Lumia 900 is an GSM/LTE cellphone, not a CDMA/LTE cellphone. As such, the Lumia 900 can be engineered for GSM networks (which is essentially most of the world's cellphone networks!) that have added LTE functionality, for example Australia's own cellphone network with GSM and LTE.
The problem is that the Nokia Lumia 900--the only Windows Phone-based cellphone that has LTE support--works only on AT&T's GSM/LTE combo network for the US version. If the Lumia 900 included a version that worked on Verizon's CDMA/LTE network, that would be a different story!
Leo Laporte on the "This WEEK in Tech" and "MacBreak Weekly" podcasts have said several times over the last 5-6 years that the reason why Macs running OS X haven't been hit with malware was that until very recently, there wasn't enough Macs out there to justify the effort to write malware that can infect these machines.
But now, with the terrifying success of the "Flashback" malware, it's now open season on Mac users. As such, Apple may have to develop a true Internet security suite with automatic virus/malware definition protection updates akin to Microsoft's own Security Essentials 4.0 for Windows XP/Vista/7 so all Internet activity can be closely monitored and all virus and other malware activity immediately stopped in its tracks.
More like since 1971, when the Mariner 9 orbiter found ancient dried up river beds. As such, Mars probably had life well beyond the simple single-cell lifeform stage in ancient times, but as the atmosphere got thinner, the surface life went away, but it's possible the simple-celled life still exists beneath the surface now.
Here's the simple reason why corporations engage in the behavior outlined in the New York Times article: _our income tax system based on Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code, encourages such activity_.
Thanks to all those complicated loopholes in the Internal Revenue Code and all the additional rulings that add up to around 70,000 pages of tax code, this is why you have millions of jobs, thousands of factories, hundreds of corporate headquarters, and possibly as high as US$15 TRILLION (!!!) in American-owned liquid assets out of the USA for tax avoidance reasons. Maybe it's time to gut the entire tax code and start all over again in one of two ways:
1) A 17% flat-rate no-loophole income tax, where the only loophole is a very generous initial earned income (wages and pensions) exemption to protect lower-income taxpayers (e.g., as high as US$46,000 for a two-adult/two legal dependent family), and get rid of the alternate minimum tax, estate tax, maybe the FICA tax, gift tax, marriage penalty, self-employment tax and taxation on bank account interest, capital gains and stock dividend payments. This is what Steve Forbes proposed back in 1996.
2) Completely phase out the income tax in favor of a 23% national consumption tax on all new goods and services sales, where business-to-business sales, used good sales, and college tuition are exempt from the tax. To help lower-income people, any legal household will get a monthly payment to cover the cost of the tax up to the Federally-defined poverty level (US$580 per month payment for the family I mentioned earlier). This is the FairTax proposal, H.R. 25/S. 13.
Under both of these proposals, American companies have all the incentive to keep as much of their liquid assets and operations in the USA as possible, since it is tax-advantageous to do so. An it also means vastly lower yearly tax compliance costs, meaning hundreds of billions of dollars spent per year in tax compliance are now freed up for more productive activities. In short, such a change will result in the next American economic boom.
You know, why Subway has not considered opening a franchised branch inside the Apple corporate campus is beyond me....
What happened from this story is essentially a tiny version of what happened in 1908 when a fairly large meteor or faint comet fragment entered the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of probably over 32,000 mph and exploded 5-7 kilometers above the ground with the force of the warhead from the Russian R-36M ICBM--around 20 MT. That's why trees were blown down many miles from the center point of the explosion.
If I remember correctly, Volkswagen Chairman Martin Winterkorn predicted that by 2020, an electric car about the size of today's Volkswagen Golf with a battery pack almost the same volume size as the Golf's fuel tank could go 800 km (497 miles) on a single charge, thanks to dramatic improvements in lithium-ion and ultracapacitor battery designs. If Winterkorn's prediction becomes reality, this will be the beginning of the end of the age of petroleum-fueled automobiles, light trucks and SUV's. By 2025, people will be looking back at the "quaint old days" of fueling up a personal vehicle with gasoline or diesel fuel. :-)
The only reason why the USAF stuck with the TF33's up till now was the fact they could get plentiful engine spare parts from retired 707-320 models (the JT3D engine used on the 707-320B/C models is essentially the commercial variant of the military TF33 engine). But with the increasing cost of fuel, the B-52H needs more fuel-efficient engines, and an uprated PW2000 series engine makes the most sense.
Indeed, that's why the USAF went with the General Electric CF6-80 engine on the C-5M rebuild program--quieter, more takeoff thrust and lower fuel burn.
Two big engines won't work for two reasons:
1. The ground clearance mitigates against that idea, given the size of the front fan on 777 engines.
2. Being a real combat aircraft, you don't want such a big plane reliant on just two engines.
But the fact that Oracle is suing Google over the Java implementation in Android and Apple might be seriously considering a direct lawsuit against Google for Android copying much of the user interface of iOS, I'm not sure if this is a good idea for Nokia to embrace Android 4.0 and later.
As such, Android may be very popular now, but its murky legal status might stunt its growth prospects in the future. Meanwhile, Windows Phone 7.5 and the upcoming 8.0 uses the very unique Metro user interface, which appears to not violate any of the Apple patents and copyrights on the iOS touchscreen interface.
I do think that we could see B-52's get additional upgrades, notably:
1. An updated version of the Pratt & Whitney PW2000 series engine, probably uprated to 42,000 lb. thrust. Four of these engines will replace the eight P&W TF33's now used on the B-52H.
2. More electronics upgrades--made easier by the fact the plane is big enough to accommodate them.
3. With more powerful engines, we could see B-52's carry heavier bomb loads and still fly longer ranges.
In short, Mac users now realize that if order to be safe from malware attack, you need software on your local computer to intercept and stop the attack in the first place.
Windows users already have multiple choices for such protection, and even Microsoft offers a free one: Microsoft Security Essentials, which is a surprisingly good Internet security program (it's highly recommended especially for Windows 7 users, since it works closely with Windows 7's own security features).
I have a question: how come no one has considered using a spot on Australia's Nullarbor Plain to build a giant telescope? Like Chile's Atacama Desert, the Nullarbor Plain has just about no rain and has effective freedom from light pollution, so it would be perfect for a large optical telescope installation.
Or better yet, require a 35% minimum margin requirement (MMR) to trade in ANY economically-strategic commodity.
At 35% MMR, that's high enough to force the vast majority of commodity traders off the market, and we could see at 25-35% cut in the price of many commodities almost immediately.