Soon on Slashdot, we will not longer be discussing laptop computers because they are going to be as ubiquitous and cheap (as in 'Toys R Us' cheap) as the humble pocket calculator.
My Dad's first calculator cost $300 and it took a full pack of AA's and it had glow-y red numbers inside tiny light bulbs or vacuum tubes or something. And it came with a power cord. And it was the most exciting thing in the world! If there had been an internet back then, there would have been feverish discussion and hardware hacks and all kinds of 'boy' chatter regarding it and other devices competing for the same market.
But nobody talks about pocket calculators much these days. We've solved them. They're done. They work perfectly, and most of the time the build-quality is somewhere between "Fischer Price" and "Dollar Store G.I. Joe reject".
This is the second computer on a chip I've seen this week. ARM had an even smaller system which out-powered the one in this article by many orders of magnitude, all destined for the same market.
Yeah, it's kind of cool that portable computers are about to be Capital-S SOLVED; that we'll have long battery lives combined with high computing power in a small form-factor, all for $29.95 (or less). Great. Computers are going to be no more exciting than a new binder, pencil case and protractor set. -And probably about as durable, because stuff that lasts doesn't make money. Welcome to the Industrial Age.
Sigh.
So stop and look around. These are the last of the, "Good old days". Breathe it in, folks. It's never going to be the same again.
Of course, I'm sure we'll all find something new to get geeky about. Maybe radio-control cars will come back into vogue. Who knows?
The Register got it right. It's a portable TV for the 21st century. If you think of it that way, you will be less disappointed.
Ah. That's it, isn't it!
Remove any kind of meaningful interaction other than point and finger paint and the iPad is for the couch potato jury box. I hate televisions. The keyboard and two-button mouse are empowering! The ability to hack my computer to do whatever I want it to do within its vast range of capabilities is awesome! I don't want my media dumbed down. I don't want any damned games. I am not a mindless recipient who is too lazy and frightened to live and who just craves numbing entertainment delivered intravenously in the "Daily Download".
Mark my words, Apple are renown for their PR-stunts.
By getting everyone upset, a simple thing like the obvious lack of Flash, which is severely needed for a proper Surfing Experience that the iPad is made for, this is nothing but a PR-STUNT, ingenious - I have to admit - because it'll make you and other RAVE on forever and critique iPad & Apple = Free publicity, and of course - shortly after iPad has been launched, Apple will timely announce that Flash is coming - after all, they have "listened" to their "audience".
Your words have been marked.
My thinking, (and hellbloodanddamnation, I'm actually wasting cylces thinking about an Apple product), is that Flash was dropped because of the last six months of uncertainty surrounding Flash's nigh-impossible to address security vulnerabilities. Linux has done just fine without, and with HTML 5 on the way, I can see that Jobs & Friends were thinking that their new machine would cut a bold path toward a more secure internet experience by avoiding Flash. And what is Flash, anyway? Doesn't the iPhone SDK basically let you do all the same things Flash does but just more securely?
But then, if the sales of the iPad threaten to sag and potential customers complain loudly enough, then Apple might well scramble a Flash add-on into existence. And how hard can that be? How does a computer NOT support Flash anyway? It's just code.
But heck, you might as well mark MY words; They won't do it.
Great. Now I'm ALSO invested in the outcome of this idiotic product. Waste. Of. Time.
If you want to call it a house of cards, feel free. There is no money being "invented" but there is the practice of borrowing against money that isn't unencumbered.
Well, this is, in effect the same thing people are complaining about, just not as extreme or simple. The wiki article does explain this through its example of loan multiplication and the associated charts and graphs.
And I wouldn't call this a house of cards so much as a deliberate and effective system of social control. Though it certainly appears to be unstable from the perspective of the man in the street.
1. As per the wiki article, using 20% as the example, $100 of Central Bank money turns into $500. There is some attempt in the article to distinguish the difference between two types of money, but that's purely academic if not entirely nonsensical, since the moment borrowed funds enter use in the real world it quickly becomes nigh impossible to determine where it came from, especially if it spent any time traded as paper currency. Essentially, the banks DO create money from thin air, but there is an upper limit imposed by the required fraction required to be kept in the vaults.
2. The banks charge interest on that money. -This point appears from my cursory reading of the wiki article to be unaddressed, and it is perhaps the more alarming of the two items because unlike the mechanic observed with Loan Multiplication, it has no upper limit. But the real problem resides in the fact that since the money lent out by banks is all the money which exists in circulation, the question arises; "Where does the extra amount required to pay interest come from?" -Put another way. . . If all the banks at the same time demanded all their loans paid back in full, this would essentially account for all currency in existence. But because all of that money was lent out at interest, everybody would remain in debt because there is simply no money left over to cover the interest. Of course, we don't see this mechanic directly, because the economy is huge and all the loans are never called back in at once. But the net effect is that overall debt increases with time; it becomes more and more challenging for people, companies, cities and countries to scrape together enough of the available money supply to pay back the banks for the principal owed as well as the interest.
The net result is global debt slavery, -regardless of whether this result was deliberately intended or not. Of course, I think it is silly to assume that such a system could possibly be accidental, and indeed famous figures in banking and world politics have made statements over the last couple of centuries which make it quite clear that it was certainly not. This is the reason people are upset. And while I can understand why somebody might call such people, "Nutters", it is hardly a fair accusation, given the very real seriousness of the situation. A lack of insight is usually the culprit, and this is entirely forgivable given that the whole of society has been successfully kept in confusion regarding the true nature of banking for so long.
Just wanted to point out that rubbish such as organ harvesting isn't particularly new - unless you count switching from Christian kids to Palestinian Arabs as some kind of creativity.
People, after all, believe what they want to believe. 700 years ago it was a little harder - a pastor had to work hard to convince his followers that their Jew neighbors are "organ harvesting vile psychopaths". Today it's enough to show a photo of a bunch of cow hearts and everyone goes berserk.
Cow hearts? Oh, stop it. I'm not talking about 700 year-old religious propaganda aimed at the poor, long-suffering Jews who must never be evaluated in the same light as any other war criminal, (because they're special!) I'm talking about Israel's chief pathologist being investigated for organ harvesting. And you know it.
As a side note - who is exactly this "government" you're talking about? I was sure it is democratically elected. And replaced every 2.5 years in average, by the way. So - unless everyone here is a psychopath (a wonderful word, by the way), eventually we will run out of psychopathic governments. Shame. Where will I get my extra eye-balls then.
Well, THAT was the lamest piece of 'logic' I've heard today. Congratulations. Are you telling me that "Democracy" prevents corruption? I think the grand experiment in America has proven that to be a completely false notion. And you know that too.
For some reason everyone ignores at least 8 years of rockets shot from the Gaza strip onto the (civilian) cities of Israel. The most recent rocket was shot today. I recently read that Hamas responded to the Goldstone report by saying they were aiming at military installations, and were just lacking the accuracy to not just miss and kill civilians.
The reason everybody ignores the 'rocket' attacks from the Gaza strip is that it's a pathetic excuse on many levels. The ones I find most compelling are the ones where the Mossad are implicated in bomb attacks on their own country.
Finally, since *I* am also interested in your moral-welfare, I'd recommend also boycotting China, for a simple reason. Consider the population of the People's Republic of China - 1,338,612,968 (2010 estimate - Wikipedia). Consider the population of the so called Palestinian Arabs - let's upper bound it with 5,000,000 (could only find 1,500,202 in the Gaza strip). So, basically, if Chinese suffer more than ~0.37 percent of Palestinian's suffer, you're better off with boycotting PRC.
That's a sick and twisted argument to excuse not just Israeli violence, but violence of any kind. "Well, THEY'RE doing it!" I sincerely hope you're joking. (Though given your apparent desire to excuse and smooth over Israeli genocidal tendencies, I think you ARE both joking and not getting why it's sick. Dissected any cats when you were small?).
Do these studies propose a mechanism for this? I'd like to see their results for this blood-brain-barrier permeability work; it sort of smells like nonsense. If it's *not* nonsense, though, it could have some promising applications in pharmacology.
Hm. That's the first time I've ever seen anybody ask that question. Usually I walk away from these discussions with bruises and a sinking feeling regarding the human race. Anyway. . , yes, there is at least one mechanism which I've run across while exploring this stuff.
It's called, "Cyclotronic Resonance".
Here's a quote, (emphasis is mine). ..
Cross Currents, Robert O. Becker, 1990
In 1982, Dr. A. H. Jafary-Asl and his colleagues at the University of Salford in England reported that yeast cells displayed both nuclear magnetic resonance and electron paramagnetic resonance, and that these resonances were different depending on whether the cells were alive or dead. They also found that when living yeast cells were exposed to conditions of nuclear magnetic resonances they multiplied at twice their normal rate-and the daughter cells were half as large as normal! Perhaps a more complex type of resonance was part of the answer, after all.
The advantage of complex resonances such as nuclear magnetic resonance is that the energy in the field is concentrated upon single physical entities (such as the nuclei of Berlin atoms), rather than being spread among all the cells of the body.
In 1985, Dr. Carl Blackman of the EPA and Dr. Abraham Liboff of Oakland University, working independently, integrated the reports of Jafary-Asl and the attempts to duplicate Bawin and Adey's experiments. They concluded that the strength of the local steady-state magnetic field of the Earth at the site of each of the laboratories was the hidden variable that determined the different frequencies reported.
Both Blackman and Liboff suggested that the mechanism involved was a specific type of resonance, cyclotron resonance (which has nothing to do with the cyclotron, an early type of particle accelerator used in atomic physics). When they applied the mathematical equations for cyclotron resonance to the different frequencies reported by the different laboratories, along with the respective strengths of the local magnetic fields they found the same result. The Ca++ efflux was the result of cyclotron resonance between the frequency of the applied electric field and the strength of the Earth's local magnetic field at each separate laboratory.
Cyclotron resonance can be explained as follows, albeit in a somewhat simplistic fashion: If a charged particle or ion is exposed to a steady magnetic field in space, it will begin to go into a circular, or orbital, motion at right angles to the applied magnetic field. The speed with which it orbits will be determined by the ratio between the charge and the mass of the particle and by the strength of the magnetic field.
We know the frequency of rotation (the number of times per second that the particle completes a full rotation) from the equation relating the charge/mass ratio of the particle and the strength of the magnetic field. If an electric field is added that oscillates at exactly this frequency at right angles to the magnetic field, energy is transferred from the electric field to the charged particle.
If the direction of the electric field is slightly off from the right angle, the particle will move in a spiral pathway.
We can substitute an oscillating magnetic field for the electric field and still obtain cyclotron resonance. However, It must be applied parallel to the constant magnetic field.
Cyclotron resonance may be produced any time there is a steady magnetic field combined with an oscillating electric or magnetic field acting on a charged particle. Many of the activities of living cells involve charged particles-such as the common ions of sodium (Na+), calcium (Ca++), and potassi
Are you kidding me? He spent his entire post justifying (poorly) why he didn't read the article.
And yes, I happen to know what I am talking about because I've put in the effort of reading tons of stuff, much of which I find disagreeable in the extreme. (At the moment, I'm working up the balls to dive into Ayn Rand's, "The Fountainhead".) -Why do I do this to myself? Because while reading and listening to people's arguments, I regularly find that despite the tone or bias of the author in question, despite my own views on various matters, there is nearly always a nugget or two of useful information I didn't know about previously and from which I can benefit either directly or through researching further. That's why I trust my opinions more than those of people who are apparently scared of reading.
Think about it; even a dedicated lunatic who spends his life studying something I find silly is naturally going to put a LOT of energy into researching and digging up buried patterns which I simply don't care enough to do myself. Then that lunatic will present his prize nuggets for my approval. This is a gift! I can look at that stuff and weigh it according to my own powers of deduction without my having to do any of the heavy lifting. And sure, a high percentage of those nuggets may well be flawed, but even flawed thinking will reveal information which can be useful, and in some cases, the lunatic will turn out to NOT be a lunatic at all. There are numerous famous examples of people being ostracized by the herd even when they had lots of great things to offer. You know some of the famous names. Heck, most of us here were probably laughed at in school because we had the misfortune of not fitting in with the herd groupthink. Geeks should be the LAST people to judge others in a sheep-like manner. "But I don't have the time to read; I have to judge books by the cover." BULLSHIT. Turn off the damned TV and stop playing video games. MAKE time. Jeezuz.
Reading things you disagree with should be a priority. How else are you going to strengthen your own views? Not by pretending you are right, by fortifying ignorance, but by continually challenging and updating what you think you know. If this poster and I were plopped in a library for 100 years, and we followed our personal methods, (me of reading and weighing everything and his of only reading what he agreed with), is there any doubt which of us would come out more capable of dealing with the world? (And who would come out one of those old men who closes his eyes and shakes his head and says, "No, no, no" to everything anybody says, who never listens and who talks too much about nothing, and who has generally devolved into a state of old-man cartoon uselessness?)
Refusing to read based on your not liking the type of person doing the writing is barely a step away from book burning.
Oh, and by the way, the poster's problems regarding the Frey Effect are just plain silly. Read the general wikipedia notes and then follow up what you find there on your own if you don't believe me.
Microwaves are electromagnetic waves with wavelengths ranging from as long as one meter to as short as one millimeter, or equivalently, with frequencies between 300 MHz (0.3 GHz) and 300 GHz.[1] This broad definition includes both UHF and EHF (millimeter waves), and various sources use different boundaries.[2] In all cases, microwave includes the entire SHF band (3 to 30 GHz, or 10 to 1 cm) at minimum, with RF engineering often putting the lower boundary at 1 GHz (30 cm), and the upper around 100 GHz (3mm).
Even if they did, life on earth has been dealing with microwave radiation for billions of years. It occurs naturally just like actually harmful ionizing radiation,
The Sun broadcasts all kinds of EM noise, including microwave radiation. But it is chaotic. The difficulties with man-made EM is that specific modulated frequencies which do not appear in nature are what have an effect on biological systems. Specifically, microwaves modulated way down to frequencies within the 10 to 500 htz range, at non-ionizing energy levels, will cause cells to activate odd features of their biology and generally misbehave in a variety of weird ways.
Your brain's awash in radiation all the time, with a higher energy per photon than what you get from a cell phone, and with much more of it.
If you leave a transistor radio playing on top of a baseboard radiator which has been cranked up for the winter, the same will be true. But the radio, due to its design characteristics, is only going to respond to the wavelengths transmitted by the radio tower miles away. But if you put the radio next to an electronic device which outputs noise which falls within its range of reception, then you'll get static.
The problem is that the brain responds in some very weird ways to a range of modulated signals delivered via microwave carrier, and those signals happen to come from cell phones and other electronic gear. Among many such responses, one of the big ones is that the Blood Brain Barrier stops working properly and starts allowing all manner of foreign particles across its membrane, so if you have medicines or other toxins in your blood, they are able to enter and affect brain cells. That's just one of many ways EM can alter your nervous system.
It seems to me we're not particularly good at black-market organ harvesting, considering the bunch of Israelis lying around waiting for transplants.
Evil sells to the highest bidder and psychopathic governments are perfectly happy to abuse their own citizens as well as everybody else. But you know that. Denial is pathetic and you can only fool yourself. Others can and will see despite all tactics to the contrary. And deep down, you know that too.
Anyway, if you are true to your anti-Israeli cause, I'd recommend making sure you don't use any Israeli products. That includes, of course, intellectual-products, such as Intel Core2 chips, various medicines, economy models, and so forth.
It's not a moral/logical problem hindered by idiotic semantics. It's about applying economic pressure to a criminal state. Anybody interested in boycotting Israeli goods, it's easy to do. . .
Check the barcode/UPC symbol. If it's made in Israel, the first three digits are "7 29". Here's a visual.
Bye now, apologist. You should know better. Shame on you.
I was addressing the AC parent, which was not only leaning towards hate speech, but also got a worrisome +4.
You're right. But the world has a lot of excellent reasons to be pissed off with Israel these days. I don't call it hate speech so much as, "Great. Those genocidal, media-owning psychopaths are pumping themselves up again," speech.
Anti-Semitic? No. Anti-Israeli? Hell, yes! -And it may be nothing, tagging a scientific discovery with the "Israeli Scientist" label, but it's that camel's back thing. After enough vile awfulness, (a WALL around an entire society using false flag bombings as an excuse for a land-grab? Black market organ harvesting? Using guilt to manipulate the world reaction to clearly psychopathic acts? For goodness sake!), every little spot is going to cause a reaction.
It's comics at their best. Randall Munroe gives the audience only the most brief fragments of information and allows our minds to fill in the blanks. But overall, he's quite clear about the kinds of girls he's attracted to, so a geek guy who shares his taste can easily map onto his pictures the perfect archetypal form.
1.) You have 2 Rubick's Cubes. 2.) You "entagle" them by making the faces of each Cube exactly identical to the other. 3.) You separate them physically into different geological locations. 4.) You "measure" Cube A by turning one of its sides. 5.) You call a handler at Cube B using a "common channel" (phone). 6.) Cube B is "measured" by having its identical face turned exactly replicating Step 4, per the instructions received by step 5. 7.) Repeat steps 4 through 6 until your heart is content. 8.) Bring the Cubes together, and marvel that their faces are still identical to each other.
Except that isn't how it works.
Here's a neat page which goes to some lengths to explain why people are excited and mystified by this particular feature of reality.
It is a high school science level presentation, but frankly, that's my level and with something as peculiar as Quantum Entanglement, it helps to go through the steps as a refresher. If you want to skip ahead, then the goods can be found on this page.
Well, okay, but let's keep this in perspective. This is an incredible discovery about the nature of the universe, not a mundane piece of junk being proposed for sale at the local Walmart. If somebody can't find an application or a way to extrapolate further insights from this, then they're not trying.
Oh. So... as per this article and what this POLITICIAN is saying, I guess what record companies are doing is NOT blackmail, and is in fact quite all right and we should wish them the best of luck with their endeavors and hope they come to arbitrarily rape our lives and finances next in their never-ending fearmongering quest! Thanks for helping me see the light, Fantastic Lad! We need more insightful comments like yours in Slashdot!
What on Earth are you going on about? How does anything I said have anything to do with record companies? The allegation was that politicians are in bed with the copyright thugs, and that what had most likely happened in this case is that the Lord in question has decided he wasn't being paid well enough for his compliance. I'm sorry if you find corruption upsetting, I do as well, but I'm not the one being corrupt.
Or are you so enamored with "Hope" that any not-stupid & evil thing a politician says you'll cling to like a drowning man? Did Obama's line of bullshit have you all excited and weepy? Sorry, but politicians LIE exactly because people are willing to believe them and not hold them accountable.
Hot damn! With that, you just shot from "standard I-hate-politicians guy regurgitating unsubstantiated lines from talk radio and bad comedians" to "crazy paranoid conspiracy theorist who doesn't want YOU to know what he's thinking, oh no, because YOU might be one of THEM, I have all the knowledge and if you'd open your eyes you'd see ALL the truths, and I'M not going to connect the dots because they're SO SIMPLE THAT ANYONE CAN SEE THEM WHY CAN'T THEY SEE THEM they must've gotten to you first blah blah blah"!
Oh yeah, THAT's really going to happen. I'll be gtfo-ing, thank-you very much. Just be lucky you get any hints and whispers at all. Make the effort to do your own research and make your own contacts. The world gives up her secrets to those who put in the work. Otherwise, nobody owes you a thing, (especially when you know how to ask so nicely.)
That being said, Good Luck out there! We all need it.
Okay. . , I hate to do this, but I'm going to anyway. . .
Eric Flint is a total bullshit artist.
I read the first of his essays, (#6) and while it was full of smart points illustrating how providing free ebooks actually increases sales of the paper ones (ie, making ebooks and free information a GOOD thing for authors), 'amazingly' he completely failed to mention two of the most significant reasons why sales of his books increased.
1) He's an established author with a couple dozen books out who is an early adopter; while other authors are sitting on their kiesters, waiting to see what the market will do, he's out there. It's easy to get noticed and experience sales spikes when you're one of only a handful of names on the rack.
2. He built the rack! He's using awareness of the whole free-information controversy to propel his name into the spotlight. Heck, the essay itself talked primarily about his own books, mentioning two of his titles a total of 19 times throughout.
Now I have NO problem with self-promotion. It takes gumption and strength to survive as a creative force in this world, and he's going about it in a manner which doesn't involve sucking up to a corporate entity. So good for him! HOWEVER he's being more than a little manipulative and misleading in his approach, because while he may not be anything more than a competent author, (and I'm sorry, but he's not; no ruthless self-promoter is ever more than competent, and sometimes barely that), he IS a smart enough man to know that if a given market is flooded with titles, then normal market forces apply, so you'd better get there first and make a lot of noise because that's your window of opportunity before the flood buries everybody.
Just because Nine Inch Nails can clean up by adopting a semi-open source model doesn't mean that your talented musician friends are going to sell more than fifty CDs this year doing the same thing.
Which isn't to say that free models can't work. It's just that Eric Flint's argument isn't entirely clean.
You know what's the mistake with your argument? Ralph Lucas is not an electioneering politician and does not need to be. He is a hereditary peer for life.
If a politician speaks, it's because s/he's telling a lie. There are no True Idealists in power because they all die in small airplane crashes and/or are not admitted into the power circles because they refuse to diddle child sex slaves at parties. I'm not joking even a little bit. Nobody in power circles will trust or work with you unless you share dirty secrets on each other. I've had friends whose parents were high level political figures and the inside scoop is enough to make you want to vomit and/or kill somebody. -Or most likely, get killed. These people are evil. Period.
Ignorance mixed with a feeling of superiority makes everything seem funny.
Ironically, conceited and ignorant people acting on their conceit and ignorance are often a joke in and of themselves. -A sad joke, but a joke nonetheless.
When I was into karate I remember it being pointed out time and again that a relaxed defender almost always reacts faster than the attacker. Probably because the attacker is more aggressive and more tense.
Also because the attacker has committed to an expression of energy, which tells you where s/he's going to end up. This gives you an entire road map for shaping a result. Having the skill and resources necessary to follow that map is another thing entirely, but it applies to every type of human activity. Kung Fu isn't about fighting. It's about surfing.
This is a fantastic idea! It takes a great deal of strength to do this; one has to learn how to have fun and ignore the pangs of the ego.
James Burke's Connections was based on similar philosophy. Non-linear thinking is a very powerful method of moving through time. Many geeks live in the clutches of an obsessive desire to control everything so that they don't get hurt by being wrong. If they could just relax and roll with the ups and downs and not be so hard on themselves, not care if they are laughed at, then they would find their power and perhaps start living lives of consequence.
One university professor described an enormously powerful way of doing research; When you're up against a wall, seeking fruitlessly to find a specific title to continue your line of thinking, instead just pull out some random book nearby. Doesn't even have to be from the same shelf or Dewey code. It will have the answer. -But only if you're tuned to your inner Jedi.
Those who deny their inner Jedi are forever lost. But the upside, I guess, is that nobody will laugh at them.
Slashdot Mirror
Soon on Slashdot, we will not longer be discussing laptop computers because they are going to be as ubiquitous and cheap (as in 'Toys R Us' cheap) as the humble pocket calculator.
My Dad's first calculator cost $300 and it took a full pack of AA's and it had glow-y red numbers inside tiny light bulbs or vacuum tubes or something. And it came with a power cord. And it was the most exciting thing in the world! If there had been an internet back then, there would have been feverish discussion and hardware hacks and all kinds of 'boy' chatter regarding it and other devices competing for the same market.
But nobody talks about pocket calculators much these days. We've solved them. They're done. They work perfectly, and most of the time the build-quality is somewhere between "Fischer Price" and "Dollar Store G.I. Joe reject".
This is the second computer on a chip I've seen this week. ARM had an even smaller system which out-powered the one in this article by many orders of magnitude, all destined for the same market.
Yeah, it's kind of cool that portable computers are about to be Capital-S SOLVED; that we'll have long battery lives combined with high computing power in a small form-factor, all for $29.95 (or less). Great. Computers are going to be no more exciting than a new binder, pencil case and protractor set. -And probably about as durable, because stuff that lasts doesn't make money. Welcome to the Industrial Age.
Sigh.
So stop and look around. These are the last of the, "Good old days". Breathe it in, folks. It's never going to be the same again.
Of course, I'm sure we'll all find something new to get geeky about. Maybe radio-control cars will come back into vogue. Who knows?
-FL
Huh? For about 95% of non-business Linux users, the one of the first things they do is install the flash plugin.
Well, color me totally ignorant! I guess it's been a few years now since I thought a great deal about Linux.
Perhaps it was that Macromedia didn't offer a Flash authoring package. . ?
I need to look this stuff up. Thanks for the correction.
-FL
Being a Pod Person is about intent, not about the toys they use to live their choices.
I hope people who use Apple computers don't think I'm calling them names. I'm not.
Apple just happens to have recognized and targeted the Pod Person market specifically. Doesn't mean one can't subvert their intentions!
-FL
The Register got it right. It's a portable TV for the 21st century. If you think of it that way, you will be less disappointed.
Ah. That's it, isn't it!
Remove any kind of meaningful interaction other than point and finger paint and the iPad is for the couch potato jury box. I hate televisions. The keyboard and two-button mouse are empowering! The ability to hack my computer to do whatever I want it to do within its vast range of capabilities is awesome! I don't want my media dumbed down. I don't want any damned games. I am not a mindless recipient who is too lazy and frightened to live and who just craves numbing entertainment delivered intravenously in the "Daily Download".
Pod people freak me out.
-FL
Mark my words, Apple are renown for their PR-stunts.
By getting everyone upset, a simple thing like the obvious lack of Flash, which is severely needed for a proper Surfing Experience that the iPad is made for, this is nothing but a PR-STUNT, ingenious - I have to admit - because it'll make you and other RAVE on forever and critique iPad & Apple = Free publicity, and of course - shortly after iPad has been launched, Apple will timely announce that Flash is coming - after all, they have "listened" to their "audience".
Your words have been marked.
My thinking, (and hellbloodanddamnation, I'm actually wasting cylces thinking about an Apple product), is that Flash was dropped because of the last six months of uncertainty surrounding Flash's nigh-impossible to address security vulnerabilities. Linux has done just fine without, and with HTML 5 on the way, I can see that Jobs & Friends were thinking that their new machine would cut a bold path toward a more secure internet experience by avoiding Flash. And what is Flash, anyway? Doesn't the iPhone SDK basically let you do all the same things Flash does but just more securely?
But then, if the sales of the iPad threaten to sag and potential customers complain loudly enough, then Apple might well scramble a Flash add-on into existence. And how hard can that be? How does a computer NOT support Flash anyway? It's just code.
But heck, you might as well mark MY words; They won't do it.
Great. Now I'm ALSO invested in the outcome of this idiotic product. Waste. Of. Time.
-FL
You know what?
This was one of those instances where I hit "Submit" instead of "Delete" and I've been regretting it for most of the day.
While there is some validity to my diatribe in general, it was bloody unfair to dump it on you personally. I hope you will accept my apologies.
I'm Sorry. An emotional knee-jerk got the better of me.
-FL
If you want to call it a house of cards, feel free. There is no money being "invented" but there is the practice of borrowing against money that isn't unencumbered.
Well, this is, in effect the same thing people are complaining about, just not as extreme or simple. The wiki article does explain this through its example of loan multiplication and the associated charts and graphs.
And I wouldn't call this a house of cards so much as a deliberate and effective system of social control. Though it certainly appears to be unstable from the perspective of the man in the street.
1. As per the wiki article, using 20% as the example, $100 of Central Bank money turns into $500. There is some attempt in the article to distinguish the difference between two types of money, but that's purely academic if not entirely nonsensical, since the moment borrowed funds enter use in the real world it quickly becomes nigh impossible to determine where it came from, especially if it spent any time traded as paper currency. Essentially, the banks DO create money from thin air, but there is an upper limit imposed by the required fraction required to be kept in the vaults.
2. The banks charge interest on that money. -This point appears from my cursory reading of the wiki article to be unaddressed, and it is perhaps the more alarming of the two items because unlike the mechanic observed with Loan Multiplication, it has no upper limit. But the real problem resides in the fact that since the money lent out by banks is all the money which exists in circulation, the question arises; "Where does the extra amount required to pay interest come from?" -Put another way. . . If all the banks at the same time demanded all their loans paid back in full, this would essentially account for all currency in existence. But because all of that money was lent out at interest, everybody would remain in debt because there is simply no money left over to cover the interest. Of course, we don't see this mechanic directly, because the economy is huge and all the loans are never called back in at once. But the net effect is that overall debt increases with time; it becomes more and more challenging for people, companies, cities and countries to scrape together enough of the available money supply to pay back the banks for the principal owed as well as the interest.
The net result is global debt slavery, -regardless of whether this result was deliberately intended or not. Of course, I think it is silly to assume that such a system could possibly be accidental, and indeed famous figures in banking and world politics have made statements over the last couple of centuries which make it quite clear that it was certainly not. This is the reason people are upset. And while I can understand why somebody might call such people, "Nutters", it is hardly a fair accusation, given the very real seriousness of the situation. A lack of insight is usually the culprit, and this is entirely forgivable given that the whole of society has been successfully kept in confusion regarding the true nature of banking for so long.
-FL
Just wanted to point out that rubbish such as organ harvesting isn't particularly new - unless you count switching from Christian kids to Palestinian Arabs as some kind of creativity.
People, after all, believe what they want to believe. 700 years ago it was a little harder - a pastor had to work hard to convince his followers that their Jew neighbors are "organ harvesting vile psychopaths". Today it's enough to show a photo of a bunch of cow hearts and everyone goes berserk.
Cow hearts? Oh, stop it. I'm not talking about 700 year-old religious propaganda aimed at the poor, long-suffering Jews who must never be evaluated in the same light as any other war criminal, (because they're special!) I'm talking about Israel's chief pathologist being investigated for organ harvesting. And you know it.
As a side note - who is exactly this "government" you're talking about? I was sure it is democratically elected. And replaced every 2.5 years in average, by the way. So - unless everyone here is a psychopath (a wonderful word, by the way), eventually we will run out of psychopathic governments. Shame. Where will I get my extra eye-balls then.
Well, THAT was the lamest piece of 'logic' I've heard today. Congratulations. Are you telling me that "Democracy" prevents corruption? I think the grand experiment in America has proven that to be a completely false notion. And you know that too.
For some reason everyone ignores at least 8 years of rockets shot from the Gaza strip onto the (civilian) cities of Israel. The most recent rocket was shot today. I recently read that Hamas responded to the Goldstone report by saying they were aiming at military installations, and were just lacking the accuracy to not just miss and kill civilians.
The reason everybody ignores the 'rocket' attacks from the Gaza strip is that it's a pathetic excuse on many levels. The ones I find most compelling are the ones where the Mossad are implicated in bomb attacks on their own country.
Finally, since *I* am also interested in your moral-welfare, I'd recommend also boycotting China, for a simple reason.
Consider the population of the People's Republic of China - 1,338,612,968 (2010 estimate - Wikipedia). Consider the population
of the so called Palestinian Arabs - let's upper bound it with 5,000,000 (could only find 1,500,202 in the Gaza strip). So, basically, if Chinese suffer more than ~0.37 percent of Palestinian's suffer, you're better off with boycotting PRC.
That's a sick and twisted argument to excuse not just Israeli violence, but violence of any kind. "Well, THEY'RE doing it!" I sincerely hope you're joking. (Though given your apparent desire to excuse and smooth over Israeli genocidal tendencies, I think you ARE both joking and not getting why it's sick. Dissected any cats when you were small?).
-FL
Do these studies propose a mechanism for this? I'd like to see their results for this blood-brain-barrier permeability work; it sort of smells like nonsense. If it's *not* nonsense, though, it could have some promising applications in pharmacology.
Hm. That's the first time I've ever seen anybody ask that question. Usually I walk away from these discussions with bruises and a sinking feeling regarding the human race. Anyway. . , yes, there is at least one mechanism which I've run across while exploring this stuff.
It's called, "Cyclotronic Resonance".
Here's a quote, (emphasis is mine). . .
This guy's post was modded "Insightful"?
Are you kidding me? He spent his entire post justifying (poorly) why he didn't read the article.
And yes, I happen to know what I am talking about because I've put in the effort of reading tons of stuff, much of which I find disagreeable in the extreme. (At the moment, I'm working up the balls to dive into Ayn Rand's, "The Fountainhead".) -Why do I do this to myself? Because while reading and listening to people's arguments, I regularly find that despite the tone or bias of the author in question, despite my own views on various matters, there is nearly always a nugget or two of useful information I didn't know about previously and from which I can benefit either directly or through researching further. That's why I trust my opinions more than those of people who are apparently scared of reading.
Think about it; even a dedicated lunatic who spends his life studying something I find silly is naturally going to put a LOT of energy into researching and digging up buried patterns which I simply don't care enough to do myself. Then that lunatic will present his prize nuggets for my approval. This is a gift! I can look at that stuff and weigh it according to my own powers of deduction without my having to do any of the heavy lifting. And sure, a high percentage of those nuggets may well be flawed, but even flawed thinking will reveal information which can be useful, and in some cases, the lunatic will turn out to NOT be a lunatic at all. There are numerous famous examples of people being ostracized by the herd even when they had lots of great things to offer. You know some of the famous names. Heck, most of us here were probably laughed at in school because we had the misfortune of not fitting in with the herd groupthink. Geeks should be the LAST people to judge others in a sheep-like manner. "But I don't have the time to read; I have to judge books by the cover." BULLSHIT. Turn off the damned TV and stop playing video games. MAKE time. Jeezuz.
Reading things you disagree with should be a priority. How else are you going to strengthen your own views? Not by pretending you are right, by fortifying ignorance, but by continually challenging and updating what you think you know. If this poster and I were plopped in a library for 100 years, and we followed our personal methods, (me of reading and weighing everything and his of only reading what he agreed with), is there any doubt which of us would come out more capable of dealing with the world? (And who would come out one of those old men who closes his eyes and shakes his head and says, "No, no, no" to everything anybody says, who never listens and who talks too much about nothing, and who has generally devolved into a state of old-man cartoon uselessness?)
Refusing to read based on your not liking the type of person doing the writing is barely a step away from book burning.
Oh, and by the way, the poster's problems regarding the Frey Effect are just plain silly. Read the general wikipedia notes and then follow up what you find there on your own if you don't believe me.
-FL
Cellphones and routers do not emit microwave radiation. They broadcast in UHF.
UHF is part of the broad definition included when one says, "Microwave Spectrum".
Even if they did, life on earth has been dealing with microwave radiation for billions of years. It occurs naturally just like actually harmful ionizing radiation,
The Sun broadcasts all kinds of EM noise, including microwave radiation. But it is chaotic. The difficulties with man-made EM is that specific modulated frequencies which do not appear in nature are what have an effect on biological systems. Specifically, microwaves modulated way down to frequencies within the 10 to 500 htz range, at non-ionizing energy levels, will cause cells to activate odd features of their biology and generally misbehave in a variety of weird ways.
-FL
Your brain's awash in radiation all the time, with a higher energy per photon than what you get from a cell phone, and with much more of it.
If you leave a transistor radio playing on top of a baseboard radiator which has been cranked up for the winter, the same will be true. But the radio, due to its design characteristics, is only going to respond to the wavelengths transmitted by the radio tower miles away. But if you put the radio next to an electronic device which outputs noise which falls within its range of reception, then you'll get static.
The problem is that the brain responds in some very weird ways to a range of modulated signals delivered via microwave carrier, and those signals happen to come from cell phones and other electronic gear. Among many such responses, one of the big ones is that the Blood Brain Barrier stops working properly and starts allowing all manner of foreign particles across its membrane, so if you have medicines or other toxins in your blood, they are able to enter and affect brain cells. That's just one of many ways EM can alter your nervous system.
-FL
It seems to me we're not particularly good at black-market organ harvesting, considering the bunch of Israelis lying around waiting for transplants.
Evil sells to the highest bidder and psychopathic governments are perfectly happy to abuse their own citizens as well as everybody else. But you know that. Denial is pathetic and you can only fool yourself. Others can and will see despite all tactics to the contrary. And deep down, you know that too.
Anyway, if you are true to your anti-Israeli cause, I'd recommend making sure you don't use any Israeli products. That includes, of course, intellectual-products, such as Intel Core2 chips, various medicines, economy models, and so forth.
It's not a moral/logical problem hindered by idiotic semantics. It's about applying economic pressure to a criminal state. Anybody interested in boycotting Israeli goods, it's easy to do. . .
Check the barcode/UPC symbol. If it's made in Israel, the first three digits are "7 29". Here's a visual.
Bye now, apologist. You should know better. Shame on you.
-FL
I was addressing the AC parent, which was not only leaning towards hate speech, but also got a worrisome +4.
You're right. But the world has a lot of excellent reasons to be pissed off with Israel these days. I don't call it hate speech so much as, "Great. Those genocidal, media-owning psychopaths are pumping themselves up again," speech.
Anti-Semitic? No. Anti-Israeli? Hell, yes! -And it may be nothing, tagging a scientific discovery with the "Israeli Scientist" label, but it's that camel's back thing. After enough vile awfulness, (a WALL around an entire society using false flag bombings as an excuse for a land-grab? Black market organ harvesting? Using guilt to manipulate the world reaction to clearly psychopathic acts? For goodness sake!), every little spot is going to cause a reaction.
Sorry if that upsets you. Israel == Evil.
-FL
Ha ha! Me too!
It's comics at their best. Randall Munroe gives the audience only the most brief fragments of information and allows our minds to fill in the blanks. But overall, he's quite clear about the kinds of girls he's attracted to, so a geek guy who shares his taste can easily map onto his pictures the perfect archetypal form.
Quite the accomplishment for a stick figure!
-FL
1.) You have 2 Rubick's Cubes.
2.) You "entagle" them by making the faces of each Cube exactly identical to the other.
3.) You separate them physically into different geological locations.
4.) You "measure" Cube A by turning one of its sides.
5.) You call a handler at Cube B using a "common channel" (phone).
6.) Cube B is "measured" by having its identical face turned exactly replicating Step 4, per the instructions received by step 5.
7.) Repeat steps 4 through 6 until your heart is content.
8.) Bring the Cubes together, and marvel that their faces are still identical to each other.
Except that isn't how it works.
Here's a neat page which goes to some lengths to explain why people are excited and mystified by this particular feature of reality.
It is a high school science level presentation, but frankly, that's my level and with something as peculiar as Quantum Entanglement, it helps to go through the steps as a refresher. If you want to skip ahead, then the goods can be found on this page.
-FL
Nope, not a practical way to transfer energy
Well, okay, but let's keep this in perspective. This is an incredible discovery about the nature of the universe, not a mundane piece of junk being proposed for sale at the local Walmart. If somebody can't find an application or a way to extrapolate further insights from this, then they're not trying.
-FL
Oh. So... as per this article and what this POLITICIAN is saying, I guess what record companies are doing is NOT blackmail, and is in fact quite all right and we should wish them the best of luck with their endeavors and hope they come to arbitrarily rape our lives and finances next in their never-ending fearmongering quest! Thanks for helping me see the light, Fantastic Lad! We need more insightful comments like yours in Slashdot!
What on Earth are you going on about? How does anything I said have anything to do with record companies? The allegation was that politicians are in bed with the copyright thugs, and that what had most likely happened in this case is that the Lord in question has decided he wasn't being paid well enough for his compliance. I'm sorry if you find corruption upsetting, I do as well, but I'm not the one being corrupt.
Or are you so enamored with "Hope" that any not-stupid & evil thing a politician says you'll cling to like a drowning man? Did Obama's line of bullshit have you all excited and weepy? Sorry, but politicians LIE exactly because people are willing to believe them and not hold them accountable.
Don't shoot the messenger.
-FL
Hot damn! With that, you just shot from "standard I-hate-politicians guy regurgitating unsubstantiated lines from talk radio and bad comedians" to "crazy paranoid conspiracy theorist who doesn't want YOU to know what he's thinking, oh no, because YOU might be one of THEM, I have all the knowledge and if you'd open your eyes you'd see ALL the truths, and I'M not going to connect the dots because they're SO SIMPLE THAT ANYONE CAN SEE THEM WHY CAN'T THEY SEE THEM they must've gotten to you first blah blah blah"!
Yes, that's me. You called it exactly. Bye now.
-FL
details or gtfo
Oh yeah, THAT's really going to happen. I'll be gtfo-ing, thank-you very much. Just be lucky you get any hints and whispers at all. Make the effort to do your own research and make your own contacts. The world gives up her secrets to those who put in the work. Otherwise, nobody owes you a thing, (especially when you know how to ask so nicely.)
That being said, Good Luck out there! We all need it.
-FL
Okay. . , I hate to do this, but I'm going to anyway. . .
Eric Flint is a total bullshit artist.
I read the first of his essays, (#6) and while it was full of smart points illustrating how providing free ebooks actually increases sales of the paper ones (ie, making ebooks and free information a GOOD thing for authors), 'amazingly' he completely failed to mention two of the most significant reasons why sales of his books increased.
1) He's an established author with a couple dozen books out who is an early adopter; while other authors are sitting on their kiesters, waiting to see what the market will do, he's out there. It's easy to get noticed and experience sales spikes when you're one of only a handful of names on the rack.
2. He built the rack! He's using awareness of the whole free-information controversy to propel his name into the spotlight. Heck, the essay itself talked primarily about his own books, mentioning two of his titles a total of 19 times throughout.
Now I have NO problem with self-promotion. It takes gumption and strength to survive as a creative force in this world, and he's going about it in a manner which doesn't involve sucking up to a corporate entity. So good for him! HOWEVER he's being more than a little manipulative and misleading in his approach, because while he may not be anything more than a competent author, (and I'm sorry, but he's not; no ruthless self-promoter is ever more than competent, and sometimes barely that), he IS a smart enough man to know that if a given market is flooded with titles, then normal market forces apply, so you'd better get there first and make a lot of noise because that's your window of opportunity before the flood buries everybody.
Just because Nine Inch Nails can clean up by adopting a semi-open source model doesn't mean that your talented musician friends are going to sell more than fifty CDs this year doing the same thing.
Which isn't to say that free models can't work. It's just that Eric Flint's argument isn't entirely clean.
-FL
You know what's the mistake with your argument? Ralph Lucas is not an electioneering politician and does not need to be. He is a hereditary peer for life.
Peers like dirty cash as well as any psychopath in power.
If a politician speaks, it's because s/he's telling a lie. There are no True Idealists in power because they all die in small airplane crashes and/or are not admitted into the power circles because they refuse to diddle child sex slaves at parties. I'm not joking even a little bit. Nobody in power circles will trust or work with you unless you share dirty secrets on each other. I've had friends whose parents were high level political figures and the inside scoop is enough to make you want to vomit and/or kill somebody. -Or most likely, get killed. These people are evil. Period.
-FL
Ignorance mixed with a feeling of superiority makes everything seem funny.
Ironically, conceited and ignorant people acting on their conceit and ignorance are often a joke in and of themselves. -A sad joke, but a joke nonetheless.
-FL
When I was into karate I remember it being pointed out time and again that a relaxed defender almost always reacts faster than the attacker. Probably because the attacker is more aggressive and more tense.
Also because the attacker has committed to an expression of energy, which tells you where s/he's going to end up. This gives you an entire road map for shaping a result. Having the skill and resources necessary to follow that map is another thing entirely, but it applies to every type of human activity. Kung Fu isn't about fighting. It's about surfing.
-FL
This is a fantastic idea! It takes a great deal of strength to do this; one has to learn how to have fun and ignore the pangs of the ego.
James Burke's Connections was based on similar philosophy. Non-linear thinking is a very powerful method of moving through time. Many geeks live in the clutches of an obsessive desire to control everything so that they don't get hurt by being wrong. If they could just relax and roll with the ups and downs and not be so hard on themselves, not care if they are laughed at, then they would find their power and perhaps start living lives of consequence.
One university professor described an enormously powerful way of doing research; When you're up against a wall, seeking fruitlessly to find a specific title to continue your line of thinking, instead just pull out some random book nearby. Doesn't even have to be from the same shelf or Dewey code. It will have the answer. -But only if you're tuned to your inner Jedi.
Those who deny their inner Jedi are forever lost. But the upside, I guess, is that nobody will laugh at them.
-FL