In the movie "Silent Running", they had ships with forests orbiting Saturn, and apparently getting sufficient sunlight there. Are you going to tell me that Hollywood didn't know what they were doing?
No, actually it'd be a giant boon for capitalism: you'd have tons more potential workers and consumers out there. It'd suck for certain industries, like the pharma companies and certain sectors of the medical industry, but then again immortality would probably require constant medical procedures and medications to sustain it, much like a car needs constant maintenance and periodic part replacement to keep running in top shape, so they'd probably adapt.
The only problem would be that the population would grow, but we don't lose that much population to death by old age anyway; our population is growing quickly, mainly in developing countries, because of a high birthrate, and immortality wouldn't affect this (unless they find a way to keep women fertile past the age of 45, which might be a separate problem). Moreover, practical immortality, as I said before, would probably require constant medical treatments of some kind, which might only be affordable to people in industrialized nations; these people generally don't have many kids anyway. And, if it allows people to work much longer and do better financially, it could help people in developing countries ascend out of poverty, and the most successful treatment for overpopulation found so far is getting people out of poverty: rich people don't have 10 kids.
Personally, I think immortality would be a good thing for humanity, overall, though it would definitely cause some short-term problems and require some serious adjustment. Also note this this immortality would be very limited: you might not age any more (as long as you keep taking your anti-aging meds), but you're still going to die if you get hit by a bus or drown in a hurricane. The death rate in industrialized countries, especially the USA, will still be significant, because of all the people who get killed every year in auto accidents, and that's not going to change until we have some sort of automated transit system and humans aren't mostly driving themselves around.
The laptop I recently got was a refurbished Dell E6400 (Latitude). Like with your Dell, Linux works great on it: all the keyboard buttons work, the touchpad and trackpoint work, I really have no complaints. It was just as easy as installing Linux on a Thinkpad.
You're right, the technology needed to make this stuff isn't exactly cutting-edge. All the technology needed is easily pre-WWII, if not earlier; modern.45ACP ammo for instance goes back to the early 1900s.
However, you'd still need some tools that most Americans probably don't have, like some kind of hydraulic press. But you can get one of those at Harbor Freight these days (though I don't know if a 20-ton press is sufficient to make brass ammo from brass stock). A lot of older technology like that isn't helped much by hand tools; they used a lot of forgings and castings back in those days, and that's not actually that easy to do at home (it is for lead, because the melting point is so ridiculously low, but not for other metals). There's some websites showing how people built their own furnances and other things for doing investment casting at home, but again it's not something you can just go buy from Harbor Freight.
As for this guy in Afghanistan, where'd he get his raw materials? What parts did he start with? One thing I can think of that's absolutely necessary for making ammunition is primers, which are small high-explosive charges. Again, it's not super high-tech stuff; they've been making them since the 1800s. However, not many people have easy access to the chemicals needed to make reliable high-explosives, and then to actually make primers out of them safely, without blowing themselves up. Many of the other parts needed to make a firearm like an AK-47 again are pretty specialized, just as presses to stamp the sheet steel into the appropriate parts, or the special tool needed to cut rifled grooves in the barrel. The barrel itself is probably the most difficult part of that weapon to make.
A simple recipe isn't going to help you make firearms; you'll need a lot more equipment than that, plus access to various raw materials like steel, brass, wood, lead, aluminum maybe, and explosives.
You're looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses. Back in "your day" what did you do when Ma Bell screwed you over, like by forcing you to pay a monthly rental fee for your phone, or charging insanely high long-distance charges? Did you go to some other phone company? hahaha. What'd you do when Ford, GM, and Chrysler all conspired to keep important safety features out of cars, and then when someone tried building a car with excellent safety features (Tucker), they conspired to drive him out of business? Did you stop buying from the Big3/4? Nope. You only stopped buying from the crappy American automakers when a cheaper option came along (the Japanese). Of course, it helped that the Japanese cars were better too, but apparently, as Tucker showed, simply being better wasn't enough. What did you do when Standard Oil kept prices too high?
These businesses get away with this nonsense for two good reasons: 1) American consumers are fairly apathetic and won't take a stand if it means going without something they've now come to regard as a necessity, or that having it will be more difficult than by doing nothing. 2) Monopolies can exploit this tendency to great effect.
Instagram showed what happens when a company thinks it's a monopoly, thinks whatever they're offering is indispensible but really isn't, and in reality they're not a monopoly and customers can easily and trivially switch to another alternative that doesn't annoy them. For a counter-example, look at Facebook themselves: tons of people gripe about them all the time, however, except for the few who don't mind being socially cut off from their FB-addicted peers (or just don't have that many friends in the first place), everyone just puts up with it, because all their friends are on there, and there's no way to switch to some competing platform (and none exist anyway, none quite like FB anyway) and still see what people are posting in their FB accounts because it's a vertical monopoly. Windows is another good example; not that many people really like it, and tons of people have bitched about it over the last two decades, but not many have actually changed, because it's too difficult to do without the things that platform offers, namely access to various popular applications. If it were trivially easy to install and run all Windows apps, with 100% compatibility, on another platform (without having to run Windows in a VM, like you do on Macs with Parallels or Linux with VMware or others), then Windows would have a significantly lower marketshare right now.
I'm a Model M keyboard snob too, but I found the E6400 keyboard just as good as the Thinkpad's (and neither of them all *that* great). I also liked the greater use of aluminum on the Dell, and the simple boxy styling. And, it has the same Trackpoint that the Thinkpad has (but with a bigger and blue rubber top, instead of the smaller red one).
No way. There's simply far, far too many of these posts to be shills working for Redmond. Worse, there's tons of them here on/., with low-ish UIDs, and I never see many responses refuting these peoples' posts.
I'm still not seeing why allowing the board to force shareholders to sell is a good thing. If the majority of the shareholders want to run the company in an unprofitable way, so what? Why should anyone be allowed to force them to do otherwise? The minority shareholders can sell their shares and find a more profitable company in that case. If the founding family doesn't have a majority of shares, then this shouldn't even be a problem. Or, for your flip argument, if Michael Dell refuses to sell at $20, and he's the majority shareholder (he has more than 1/2 the shares), then again, I don't see the problem: he owns most of the company, so he should be able to do whatever the hell he wants. Don't like it? Don't buy into a company where one dude owns most of the company. Or, if he doesn't own more than half the shares, then this situation shouldn't arise, as he should be outvoted by others.
Now, in my hypothetical world where no one can be forced to sell, if some private firm goes out and buys up 95% of the shares, then they effectively have control of the company anyway, even if 5% of the shareholders are curmudgeons who refuse to sell. Since they only have 5%, they don't have enough power to do anything.
What am I missing? Other than the fact that the logistics of contacting a bunch of people who have stock shares in their IRA accounts and giving them an offer may be a lot of extra work for the private-equity buyer (but it should be pretty easy these days since most people have their portfolios with a relatively small number of brokerages; also, most shares are probably owned by institutions, not individuals anyway), I'm not seeing the downside.
Yep, basically Apple got really lucky they got a control-freak asshole to take over the reins who was probably the world's greatest salesman. By all rights, they should have gone under. You can't count on that kind of luck when running a company.
This seems to make sense, but all the other Slashdotters are telling me otherwise. Same goes for most other tech forums. Most people are singing the praises of Windows 8 and touchscreens, and talking about how we're going to have touch-enabled desktop systems soon and everyone's going to get used to holding their arms straight out all day long.
Or will it damage the Windows and PC brand more? We keep hearing how PCs are dead and how we are all dying to do real content creation on single tasking oriented GUIs on tiny tablets (sarcasm intended).
You say this sarcastically, but it's true. Everyone really is dying to switch over to single-tasking GUIs on tiny tablets. Everywhere you go, people are saying the same thing, that touch UIs and tablets are the way of the future. Even here on Slashdot and other tech forums, all the technophiles are praising Windows 8 and the other various moves to unified touch-enabled interfaces; anyone who disagrees is considered a luddite. Intel is even pushing mfgrs to include touchscreens as a standard feature on laptops now.
Admittedly, my understanding of the rules of public corporation governance is sketchy, but why are stockholders forced to sell their shares? Maybe if they changed the rules so that no one could ever be forced to sell, things would be different.
Don't be silly, Dell isn't that bad. They make some very nice laptop hardware, for instance. I just got an Inspiron, for instance, that's nicer than the Thinkpad I had at my last job.
Here's some companies that really should be shut down and the money returned to shareholders, because either they're being horribly mismanaged or they're complete has-beens (or both): Microsoft, Nokia, Gateway, HP, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook.
It seems to me that if a civilization develops "planet-cracking" technology, and the ability to go to other planets to use such technology for harvesting materials, that same civilization should have the technical ability to simply synthesize whatever materials they need through nuclear fission/fusion processes. The energy to do this is extremely abundant; all they have to do is collect it from a nearby star (they can probably just harvest the hydrogen and helium from that star too, to use to create the elements they need, rather than bothering with planets which have a tiny fraction of the total mass in any star system). If you're at the point where you can travel to different star systems and "crack" planets, you should be at the point where you can just harvest stars directly.
Is it though? The earth's "crust" is actually a really thick layer, and we haven't even managed to drill through it yet. Here on top of the crust, the concentration of materials is rather different than it is several miles down. The soil that you walk on every day likely has a lot of carbon in it, a lot more than it does aluminum (unless you're walking on the beach, in which case it's mostly silicon you're walking on). Also important to us is what's in the atmosphere; CO2 is a significant portion of the atmosphere after all. This is important because that's where plants get a lot (probably most) of their carbon from.
You can't grow new carbon; like any other element, it can't be changed without some nuclear fission or fusion process, or radioactive decay. We "recycle" carbon because it's present in the soil and the atmosphere, and living processes (like cotton crops) re-order these hydrocarbons into new forms (leaves, stems, roots, cotton balls, etc.), with the aid of solar energy.
No, adding touch is NOT good, not on PCs (the kind that sit on desks with monitors an arm's length away). Go read about "Gorilla Arm". Human bodies are not designed to hold arms out at a right angle for extended periods. The Romans used this anatomical fact to torture people on crucifixes. The whole idea is utterly stupid.
Yes, but there's no reason Chinese companies can't start up their own glass factories. They have the capital to start up lots of other factories, including electronics manufacturing factories to make things like iPhones (which are also highly automated and use super expensive robotic equipment), and could be more vertically integrated if the made their own glass instead of buying it from Corning. So there's probably some reason they're not doing so.
The glossy screen does make colors come out better, and it looks better too--when you're in a dimly-lit room without any light sources or glare inconveniently located behind you. For the rest of us who don't spend all our laptop-using time in a dark, windowless room, matte screens are much better.
Yes, the GUI allowed many more people (who were not willing to invest the time needed to learn to be CLI masters) to do much more with their computers.
To take this further, we can say that touch interfaces are allowing even more people to do even more stuff with their (handheld) computers: just look at all the people with smartphones now.
However, the people using touch-enabled computers aren't doing the same kind of (more complex) tasks that people with mouse-driven GUIs are doing with their PCs. They're doing much simpler things, since 1) their mobile devices have much smaller screens and 2) fingertips have far less resolution than mouse pointers, and 3) fingertips can only act as one button, not two (you can't right-click with your finger). Good luck trying to use a complicated CAD program with a touch interface.
But more importantly, do people really want to simplify their PCs and make them glorified tablets with keyboards? People who really like doing everything with touch interfaces (people who don't do anything more complicated than a little web surfing, light email, and watching videos) don't need PCs: they already have their phones and tablets. What do they need a PC or laptop for? If they want to do a little more typing than a tablet's on-screen keyboard is comfortable for, then they'll just buy one of those add-on bluetooth keyboards. The people who still want a PC/laptop in a world filled with tablets are people who want to do things that tablets aren't good at, and much of that is likely stuff that touch UIs aren't going to be good for either. They aren't going to be interested in these new touch-enabled laptops.
Nope. You can't make a capacitive touchscreen without glass. It'd have to be a resistive touchscreen. However, those universally suck: it's plainly obvious, just looking at them, that they're touchscreens, they're soft to the touch and not so perfectly flat and uniform like a non-touchscreen LCD, and worst of all, they block light, so you need to use a more powerful backlight to compensate. A more powerful backlight means less battery life, and that's already a huge issue with laptops.
Slashdot Mirror
we can't go past Jupiter's orbit without it.
In the movie "Silent Running", they had ships with forests orbiting Saturn, and apparently getting sufficient sunlight there. Are you going to tell me that Hollywood didn't know what they were doing?
No, actually it'd be a giant boon for capitalism: you'd have tons more potential workers and consumers out there. It'd suck for certain industries, like the pharma companies and certain sectors of the medical industry, but then again immortality would probably require constant medical procedures and medications to sustain it, much like a car needs constant maintenance and periodic part replacement to keep running in top shape, so they'd probably adapt.
The only problem would be that the population would grow, but we don't lose that much population to death by old age anyway; our population is growing quickly, mainly in developing countries, because of a high birthrate, and immortality wouldn't affect this (unless they find a way to keep women fertile past the age of 45, which might be a separate problem). Moreover, practical immortality, as I said before, would probably require constant medical treatments of some kind, which might only be affordable to people in industrialized nations; these people generally don't have many kids anyway. And, if it allows people to work much longer and do better financially, it could help people in developing countries ascend out of poverty, and the most successful treatment for overpopulation found so far is getting people out of poverty: rich people don't have 10 kids.
Personally, I think immortality would be a good thing for humanity, overall, though it would definitely cause some short-term problems and require some serious adjustment. Also note this this immortality would be very limited: you might not age any more (as long as you keep taking your anti-aging meds), but you're still going to die if you get hit by a bus or drown in a hurricane. The death rate in industrialized countries, especially the USA, will still be significant, because of all the people who get killed every year in auto accidents, and that's not going to change until we have some sort of automated transit system and humans aren't mostly driving themselves around.
Palpatine wields the power of the Force. The others are just sociopathic assholes with normal human abilities.
The laptop I recently got was a refurbished Dell E6400 (Latitude). Like with your Dell, Linux works great on it: all the keyboard buttons work, the touchpad and trackpoint work, I really have no complaints. It was just as easy as installing Linux on a Thinkpad.
I guess I'll be avoiding Samsung laptops...
You're right, the technology needed to make this stuff isn't exactly cutting-edge. All the technology needed is easily pre-WWII, if not earlier; modern .45ACP ammo for instance goes back to the early 1900s.
However, you'd still need some tools that most Americans probably don't have, like some kind of hydraulic press. But you can get one of those at Harbor Freight these days (though I don't know if a 20-ton press is sufficient to make brass ammo from brass stock). A lot of older technology like that isn't helped much by hand tools; they used a lot of forgings and castings back in those days, and that's not actually that easy to do at home (it is for lead, because the melting point is so ridiculously low, but not for other metals). There's some websites showing how people built their own furnances and other things for doing investment casting at home, but again it's not something you can just go buy from Harbor Freight.
As for this guy in Afghanistan, where'd he get his raw materials? What parts did he start with? One thing I can think of that's absolutely necessary for making ammunition is primers, which are small high-explosive charges. Again, it's not super high-tech stuff; they've been making them since the 1800s. However, not many people have easy access to the chemicals needed to make reliable high-explosives, and then to actually make primers out of them safely, without blowing themselves up. Many of the other parts needed to make a firearm like an AK-47 again are pretty specialized, just as presses to stamp the sheet steel into the appropriate parts, or the special tool needed to cut rifled grooves in the barrel. The barrel itself is probably the most difficult part of that weapon to make.
A simple recipe isn't going to help you make firearms; you'll need a lot more equipment than that, plus access to various raw materials like steel, brass, wood, lead, aluminum maybe, and explosives.
You're looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses. Back in "your day" what did you do when Ma Bell screwed you over, like by forcing you to pay a monthly rental fee for your phone, or charging insanely high long-distance charges? Did you go to some other phone company? hahaha. What'd you do when Ford, GM, and Chrysler all conspired to keep important safety features out of cars, and then when someone tried building a car with excellent safety features (Tucker), they conspired to drive him out of business? Did you stop buying from the Big3/4? Nope. You only stopped buying from the crappy American automakers when a cheaper option came along (the Japanese). Of course, it helped that the Japanese cars were better too, but apparently, as Tucker showed, simply being better wasn't enough. What did you do when Standard Oil kept prices too high?
These businesses get away with this nonsense for two good reasons: 1) American consumers are fairly apathetic and won't take a stand if it means going without something they've now come to regard as a necessity, or that having it will be more difficult than by doing nothing. 2) Monopolies can exploit this tendency to great effect.
Instagram showed what happens when a company thinks it's a monopoly, thinks whatever they're offering is indispensible but really isn't, and in reality they're not a monopoly and customers can easily and trivially switch to another alternative that doesn't annoy them. For a counter-example, look at Facebook themselves: tons of people gripe about them all the time, however, except for the few who don't mind being socially cut off from their FB-addicted peers (or just don't have that many friends in the first place), everyone just puts up with it, because all their friends are on there, and there's no way to switch to some competing platform (and none exist anyway, none quite like FB anyway) and still see what people are posting in their FB accounts because it's a vertical monopoly. Windows is another good example; not that many people really like it, and tons of people have bitched about it over the last two decades, but not many have actually changed, because it's too difficult to do without the things that platform offers, namely access to various popular applications. If it were trivially easy to install and run all Windows apps, with 100% compatibility, on another platform (without having to run Windows in a VM, like you do on Macs with Parallels or Linux with VMware or others), then Windows would have a significantly lower marketshare right now.
I'm a Model M keyboard snob too, but I found the E6400 keyboard just as good as the Thinkpad's (and neither of them all *that* great). I also liked the greater use of aluminum on the Dell, and the simple boxy styling. And, it has the same Trackpoint that the Thinkpad has (but with a bigger and blue rubber top, instead of the smaller red one).
Hmm, thanks for explaining it. It does make sense now.
No way. There's simply far, far too many of these posts to be shills working for Redmond. Worse, there's tons of them here on /., with low-ish UIDs, and I never see many responses refuting these peoples' posts.
Sorry, I had a brain fart. I meant Latitude, not Inspiron. Latitude E6400 > Thinkpad T510. Both 1-2 years old, not the very latest model.
I'm still not seeing why allowing the board to force shareholders to sell is a good thing. If the majority of the shareholders want to run the company in an unprofitable way, so what? Why should anyone be allowed to force them to do otherwise? The minority shareholders can sell their shares and find a more profitable company in that case. If the founding family doesn't have a majority of shares, then this shouldn't even be a problem. Or, for your flip argument, if Michael Dell refuses to sell at $20, and he's the majority shareholder (he has more than 1/2 the shares), then again, I don't see the problem: he owns most of the company, so he should be able to do whatever the hell he wants. Don't like it? Don't buy into a company where one dude owns most of the company. Or, if he doesn't own more than half the shares, then this situation shouldn't arise, as he should be outvoted by others.
Now, in my hypothetical world where no one can be forced to sell, if some private firm goes out and buys up 95% of the shares, then they effectively have control of the company anyway, even if 5% of the shareholders are curmudgeons who refuse to sell. Since they only have 5%, they don't have enough power to do anything.
What am I missing? Other than the fact that the logistics of contacting a bunch of people who have stock shares in their IRA accounts and giving them an offer may be a lot of extra work for the private-equity buyer (but it should be pretty easy these days since most people have their portfolios with a relatively small number of brokerages; also, most shares are probably owned by institutions, not individuals anyway), I'm not seeing the downside.
Yep, basically Apple got really lucky they got a control-freak asshole to take over the reins who was probably the world's greatest salesman. By all rights, they should have gone under. You can't count on that kind of luck when running a company.
This seems to make sense, but all the other Slashdotters are telling me otherwise. Same goes for most other tech forums. Most people are singing the praises of Windows 8 and touchscreens, and talking about how we're going to have touch-enabled desktop systems soon and everyone's going to get used to holding their arms straight out all day long.
Or will it damage the Windows and PC brand more? We keep hearing how PCs are dead and how we are all dying to do real content creation on single tasking oriented GUIs on tiny tablets (sarcasm intended).
You say this sarcastically, but it's true. Everyone really is dying to switch over to single-tasking GUIs on tiny tablets. Everywhere you go, people are saying the same thing, that touch UIs and tablets are the way of the future. Even here on Slashdot and other tech forums, all the technophiles are praising Windows 8 and the other various moves to unified touch-enabled interfaces; anyone who disagrees is considered a luddite. Intel is even pushing mfgrs to include touchscreens as a standard feature on laptops now.
Admittedly, my understanding of the rules of public corporation governance is sketchy, but why are stockholders forced to sell their shares? Maybe if they changed the rules so that no one could ever be forced to sell, things would be different.
Don't be silly, Dell isn't that bad. They make some very nice laptop hardware, for instance. I just got an Inspiron, for instance, that's nicer than the Thinkpad I had at my last job.
Here's some companies that really should be shut down and the money returned to shareholders, because either they're being horribly mismanaged or they're complete has-beens (or both): Microsoft, Nokia, Gateway, HP, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook.
Alienware is not about paying 500 dollars just for a fancy LED on your case. Don't be ridiculous.
Alienware is about paying 500 dollars for a totally ridiculous-looking case, which includes a bunch of fancy extra LEDs.
It seems to me that if a civilization develops "planet-cracking" technology, and the ability to go to other planets to use such technology for harvesting materials, that same civilization should have the technical ability to simply synthesize whatever materials they need through nuclear fission/fusion processes. The energy to do this is extremely abundant; all they have to do is collect it from a nearby star (they can probably just harvest the hydrogen and helium from that star too, to use to create the elements they need, rather than bothering with planets which have a tiny fraction of the total mass in any star system). If you're at the point where you can travel to different star systems and "crack" planets, you should be at the point where you can just harvest stars directly.
Is it though? The earth's "crust" is actually a really thick layer, and we haven't even managed to drill through it yet. Here on top of the crust, the concentration of materials is rather different than it is several miles down. The soil that you walk on every day likely has a lot of carbon in it, a lot more than it does aluminum (unless you're walking on the beach, in which case it's mostly silicon you're walking on). Also important to us is what's in the atmosphere; CO2 is a significant portion of the atmosphere after all. This is important because that's where plants get a lot (probably most) of their carbon from.
You can't grow new carbon; like any other element, it can't be changed without some nuclear fission or fusion process, or radioactive decay. We "recycle" carbon because it's present in the soil and the atmosphere, and living processes (like cotton crops) re-order these hydrocarbons into new forms (leaves, stems, roots, cotton balls, etc.), with the aid of solar energy.
No, adding touch is NOT good, not on PCs (the kind that sit on desks with monitors an arm's length away). Go read about "Gorilla Arm". Human bodies are not designed to hold arms out at a right angle for extended periods. The Romans used this anatomical fact to torture people on crucifixes. The whole idea is utterly stupid.
Yes, but there's no reason Chinese companies can't start up their own glass factories. They have the capital to start up lots of other factories, including electronics manufacturing factories to make things like iPhones (which are also highly automated and use super expensive robotic equipment), and could be more vertically integrated if the made their own glass instead of buying it from Corning. So there's probably some reason they're not doing so.
The glossy screen does make colors come out better, and it looks better too--when you're in a dimly-lit room without any light sources or glare inconveniently located behind you. For the rest of us who don't spend all our laptop-using time in a dark, windowless room, matte screens are much better.
Yes, the GUI allowed many more people (who were not willing to invest the time needed to learn to be CLI masters) to do much more with their computers.
To take this further, we can say that touch interfaces are allowing even more people to do even more stuff with their (handheld) computers: just look at all the people with smartphones now.
However, the people using touch-enabled computers aren't doing the same kind of (more complex) tasks that people with mouse-driven GUIs are doing with their PCs. They're doing much simpler things, since 1) their mobile devices have much smaller screens and 2) fingertips have far less resolution than mouse pointers, and 3) fingertips can only act as one button, not two (you can't right-click with your finger). Good luck trying to use a complicated CAD program with a touch interface.
But more importantly, do people really want to simplify their PCs and make them glorified tablets with keyboards? People who really like doing everything with touch interfaces (people who don't do anything more complicated than a little web surfing, light email, and watching videos) don't need PCs: they already have their phones and tablets. What do they need a PC or laptop for? If they want to do a little more typing than a tablet's on-screen keyboard is comfortable for, then they'll just buy one of those add-on bluetooth keyboards. The people who still want a PC/laptop in a world filled with tablets are people who want to do things that tablets aren't good at, and much of that is likely stuff that touch UIs aren't going to be good for either. They aren't going to be interested in these new touch-enabled laptops.
Nope. You can't make a capacitive touchscreen without glass. It'd have to be a resistive touchscreen. However, those universally suck: it's plainly obvious, just looking at them, that they're touchscreens, they're soft to the touch and not so perfectly flat and uniform like a non-touchscreen LCD, and worst of all, they block light, so you need to use a more powerful backlight to compensate. A more powerful backlight means less battery life, and that's already a huge issue with laptops.