I realize that you are personally invested in seeing this phone succeed, and that you can site some minority of smartphone users who are fine with massive phones, but it doesn't change the fact that my argument is sound. If you want to talk into something the size of a small tablet, I'm not going to stop you, but don't be surprised when Apple outsells it with phone-sized phones.
Hmm - if that is true, I wonder why Google wants to create the impression it has a security team that is quite happy to pretend to be law enforcement.
Because, unlike Apple, they could not get actual law enforcement interested in getting involved. So they needed to do something to add some drama, intrigue, and a sense of danger to the situation.
I don't think it was intended to be funny. I think that it was intended to make people think that there is the same kind of buzz around this phone that there was around the iPhone that was left in the bar. The whole intimidating security routine was all part of the "just like Apple" routine they were doing.
I'm sure that there are some folks with big pockets that will like the phone, but I just don't see it having the kind of mass appeal that the iPhone does. On the other hand, a huge phone definitely can't be missed on a display filled with normal size phones, so it will get attention at Best Buy.
I've seen women with hands big enough to hold this phone comfortably. Of course, they used to be men.;)
If you can imagine a 4.7" display functioning as a laptop replacement for routine stuff, you've got way better eyes than I have. I go nuts having to work on a laptop with a 13" display.
What's really funny about this is that it's a transparent publicity stunt -- but almost no one in the mainstream press even noticed.
Even if you're Google, you can't create much buzz about the release of yet another Android phone into an already overcrowded marketplace. It's about as exciting as a new inkjet printer.
Outside of the nerdosphere, there really isn't a lot of call for a phone that is almost the size of a small tablet. It dwarfs the iPhone 5 shown next to it, and bigger isn't always better in something that is supposed to be portable. Well-heeled consumers can afford both a smartphone and a tablet. They don't need a phone so large that it requires its owner to only buy clothes with massive pockets.
Microsoft's entire security model was based on the idiotic notion that one could take a single user OS with no security (Win 3.x/95/98/Me) and years later create successors (NT/2K/etc.) that didn't break applications that were already written. It wasn't users -- it was coddling the software vendors that drove the convoluted, unmanageable pseudo-security that got pasted on to the OS.
No rational OS architect would have permitted end-user applications to write to OS system directories, nor would they have allowed Dynamically Linked Libraries to be created and added to OS directories with no entity controlling the namespace (meaning you could create a blorm.dll that installed with your product and I could create a blorm.dll that overwrote it when my product was installed).
Other ideas, like allowing some kid in the Philippines to e-mail you a script that automatically ran when viewed, were just examples of the level of stupidity that had permeated the Microsoft campus.
How about you stop pulling the "terrorism" card and "child porn" card, and tell us why, in no uncertain terms, you need to keep prying into our lives. What evidence do you have that proves, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that such additional monitoring will help stamp out child pornography? What justification do you really have for your stance? I'm talking hard numbers... how many cases have been successfully prosecuted (i.e., resulting in prison terms) for child pornography as a direct result of ISP data retention?
I have an even better idea: Stop pretending that our Constitutional rights are something to be traded away for more efficient law enforcement. If catching more pedophiles and terrorists requires the circumvention of the Constitution, then just accept that you just won't be able to catch more pedophiles and terrorists. Stop trying to tell us that you need to tap our phones, monitor our Internet usage, get records of our library activities, and shove protoscopes up our asses before we board airplanes.
As I get older, I become ever more convinced over-legislation will be the downfall of our society. We've got 535 people in Congress who think that their job is passing more laws. And any time there is a national tragedy, Congress gets into high gear to push even more laws through. A perfect example was Columbine. Congress went into a tizzy to pass new laws -- as if going on a murderous shooting spree in a public school had been legal at the time that the Columbine massacre took place.
But we don't have anyone tasked with repealing bad and duplicitous laws that are already on the books. Even unconstitutional laws often remain on the books for years because the system is set up to make it hard to overturn a law: The courts won't even listen to you unless you, personally, are harmed by those laws (if the law does not harm you, you do not have legal "standing").
What's made it worse is the use of misleading legislation names for political gain. If someone proposes a law called the "Online Sexual Predator Prevention Act of 2006" it will pass, regardless of what the law really is. It may be doing anything from giving government subsidies to RJ Reynolds to eliminating school lunch programs for the underprivileged. But any Congressman who votes against it will be painted as being in favor of sexual predators using the Internet as a means to find, rape, and kill children.
The way that I watched my last launch at Cape Canaveral was to jump up from my station and run out the control room door after I saw the rocket ignition on the video monitor. I got outside just as the Delta II cleared the tower.
The way that I found out about the launch date was by attending the meetings that were held while we performed integration and test on the satellite that was to be launched. For the five months I was at Cape Canaveral, I stayed in condos at Canaveral Towers and the Cape Winds Resort. As far as tickets, the only ones we needed were occasional plane tickets to go between there and home. Hope that helped.
Our government will never turn into a police state as long as the second amendment stays on the books. Believe it or not, it still is, even though democrats try their best to tear that one to shreads.
You nut-cases always amaze me with your belief that the federal government is being held in check by rifles, pistols, and shotguns in the homes of good-ole-boys. What good is your Glock, M1 Garand, or Mossberg going to do against a tank? It's like saying that we're safe from muggers so long as we carry our trusty slingshots.
Instead of making ad hominem attacks on everyone who disagrees with you, why don't you add something of value to the discussion?
The iPod has dominated the personal music player (PMP) market since its introduction in 2001. In this quarter alone, iPod sales are expected to approach 9 million units.
With sales numbers like those, it's easy to see why other companies have been trying (unsuccessfully) for the last five years to take market share away from Apple. It's equally easy to see why Apple has the R&D budget to stay one step ahead of its rivals.
What you don't seem to grasp is that the iPod devices drive music sales on iTunes. Apple can afford to break even or to lose money on each iPod sale because the average iPod buyer loads the iPod up one $.99 song at a time through iTunes.
To compete with Apple, a company would have to develop an business model in which PMP sales were subsidized by later music sales. That means creating a viable iTunes competitor. So, how do you convince the record labels to sign on with your music store and how do you get prices from them that are as good as what they give Apple? You don't have an installed base of millions of PMPs, so they aren't looking at a tempting market that they need to reach. Many other companies have already tried to compete with iPod and failed, so what makes your venture more likely to succeed?
But let's suppose that you have pictures of all of the major record execs having sex with donkeys and that's how you get the same music availability and pricing that Apple does for iTunes. Now how do you convince your company's management that you can out-iPod Apple? How do you get them to give you the massive sums of R&D money needed to build something that is as pleasing to the consumer as the iPod? How do you make them believe that your efforts will be any more successful than those of Creative Labs, Archos, Samsung, SanDisk, or the myriad other players, most of which came and went with little fanfare?
Now how do you convince your vendors to provide you sweet deals on everything for lithium-ion batteries to headphone jacks? How do you get the prices for components that Apple does? Toshiba knows that they will sell 30+ million hard drives through Apple, so they are willing to give Apple the best pricing possible. How do you propose to get that kind of pricing? By saying "we're going to sell a lot, too"?
I've owned personal music players from Creative Labs, Rio, and Archos because I was loathe to give Apple my money. But the fact is that the other players were large, clunky, and poorly constructed when compared with the iPod offerings. Go into any Best Buy and look at the personal music players. The iPod simply looks like a product from five years in the future when compared with the competitors.
While I expect that some well-heeled competitor will come along to challenge Apple, I don't expect it to happen soon. The only way that I see it happening anytime soon is if a court rules that Apple's iTunes/iPod bundling is illegal and orders Apple to open up its DRM and allow competing products to use iTunes for music purchases.
Hopefully, that was a lot more thought-provoking than the "Waah!" stuff that you posted.
Except for those of us who have no real choice in ISP's. My only option for internet access that exceeds 256KB is cable.
For most (non-geek) users, 256kb DSL with Google is way better than 5mb cable without Google. The ISP wouldn't risk driving customers to DSL.
Your ISP could cut costs now by blocking Google, but they don't do it, do they? They could block access to lots of high-bandwidth sites and applications, but they don't. Ever wonder why?
That would be a great analogy if there were only 1 or 2 restaurants.
It's a great analogy as-is.
Besides, there are many ISPs. Even if you have only one broadband ISP in your area, it's likely that they are part of a nationwide company (e.g., Comcast, AT&T, Cox, Road Runner, etc.). Any Google extortion fee would affect all of their users -- even in markets where there are many competitors.
Searching isn't free either. It's factored into the bill from your ISP. That's what you pay them for -- moving data.
Besides, Google is a low-bandwidth, primarily text, web page. One search on Google is way less bandwidth than loading cnn.com or downloading even a small application.
Google isn't using bandwidth on my ISP's network. The users are the ones who request the data. If they blocked Google, then the users would move as much, or more, data via other search engines.
This idea is a non-starter: If an ISP stopped carrying Google because Google wouldn't pay an extortion fee, the ISP's customers would leave in a giant stampede. So don't get worked up about this. Remember that it's legal for a restaurant to charge for ketchup, but you don't see a lot of pay dispensers for ketchup.
'Notably, the FCC backed away from an effort to impose higher fines by holding all network affiliates responsible for a broadcast, instead of just the stations that had been flagged by a viewer in a complaint.'
And therein lies the problem. In its only decision involving broadcast indecency, FCC v. Pacifica, the U.S. Supreme Court noted in 1978 that the "normal definition of 'indecent' merely refers to nonconformance with accepted standards of morality."
When ruling on obscenity in 1973 in Miller vs. California, the Supreme Court established the "three-pronged test" for obscenity:
(a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest
(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law
(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value
Note that the first test mentions "community standards." That's a recognition by the Court that something that is "obscene" in one community might not be in another. It's not much of a stretch to argue that standards for indecency vary by community also.
The FCC, by going after individual affiliates, might be called upon to present evidence that the community standards in each and every market with a targeted affiliate are such that the program would be considered indecent. If that happens, the FCC's ability to impose such fines might be seriously curtailed by the Court's decision.
I note you failed to respond to the comment concerning the recent mission to Jupiter's moons.
While it's great that we sent an unmanned probe, it's sad that manned exploration has ground to a halt. Many countries, countries that were not part of the original space race, have sent unmanned probes and satellites into space.
And exactly what practical value is that information to us?
None. That's one thing that is so great about it. Pure science is not motivated by greed, political gain, or any other perverting force. It's man striving to better himself by increasing his knowledge, even if that doesn't lead to material gain.
We have plenty of private sector companies that want to commercially exploit space. Let's fund public sector efforts to improve man's understanding of the universe.
Do the math. As a percentage of the population, education-wise we're extremely competitive.
Apparently not. As I said in my original post, 36 percent of undergraduate students in the United States receive their degrees in science or engineering, compared to 59 percent of undergraduates in China and 66 percent in Japan.
36% does not sound competitive with 59% and 66% -- at least to me.
Very good. Now, look at a breakdown of education by county in those states, and in most of them you're going to find the counties with the highest rate of college education voted Republican.
Wrong. I went through this painful process in 2000 and the uneducated bible belters in the most rural counties were the most likely to vote Republican. If the most educated voters tend to vote Republican, one would expect that the Republicans would easily carry states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Instead, they carry states like Alabama, West Virginia, and Arkansas.
Um, wrong again. Blue collar workers are more likely to be smokers than white-collar workers. How many Republican labor unions do you know of?
No, you are wrong, wrong, wrong. You mistake the educated union leaders, who recognize that the Democrats are their allies and that the GOP is their enemy, from the rank and file who believe that prayer in school is good, teaching creationism is better, and that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.
Yeah, we're so far behind in science we remain the only nation that's ever put a man on the moon
We did that almost 40 years ago -- when we were a leader in science. In the last 30 years, we've not landed another person on the moon or any other celestial body. 36 percent of undergraduate students in the United States receive their degrees in science or engineering, compared to 59 percent of undergraduates in China and 66 percent in Japan. In 2004, the United States graduated 70,000 engineers, while China graduated 500,000 and India graduated 200,000.
As opposed to what - turning it into an absurdly expensive photo gallery for navel-gazers?
As opposed to doing real science. Hubble has been used to discover moons around Pluto. Hubble has provided data for thousands of scientific papers. Hubble proved the existence of black holes. Hubble determined that gamma rays originate outside of our solar system. In the early 90's Hubble cleared up the mystery of quasars: It confirmed that quasars are actually active galactic nuclei in distant galaxies and are powered by black holes. The list goes on and on, but it's not just pretty pictures.
Since when is the space program the exclusive preserve of scientists? IIRC, when the space program was started, the whole point of it was exploration.
You do realize that the people doing the exploring were scientists, don't you? You know that it was scientific exploration, don't you?
I don't recall that Spain sent a biologist or a geologist to America before sending an explorer and merchant to discover it, nor did England send them before establishing the Virginia and Jamestown Companies to colonize and develop it.
So we should send non-scientists off in spaceships to roam the universe and see what is discovered -- much as Spain and England did with sailing ships in centuries past? My prediction: We'd discover that most of them died in their spaceships without ever reaching another planet. The universe is a very big, empty, and inhospitable place. While Christopher Columbus could sail until he reached land and then just step off his ship and breathe in the fresh air, that's not likely to happen to a modern Christopher Columbus even if he reaches some other world.
Actually, no. Smokers save public health costs because they die earlier than non-smokers. Look it up.
False. The costs for smoking-related illnesses includes everything from heart-bypass operations to chemotherapy to long-term care for smokers who suffered strokes. Smokers get hospitalized more often for pneumonia, emphysema, infections, diabetes, and many other diseases and conditions than non-smokers.
You're assuming everyone who smokes is a liberal parasite on the public dole. Not necessarily true!
No. Smokers are, on average, less-educated than non-smokers. Adults with fewer than 12 years of education are about twice as likely to smoke as adults with more than 12 years of education (29.9 percent versus 14.6 percent).
Conservatives are, on average, less educated than liberals. That's why Bush swept the ten states with the lowest rate of college education in 2000 and 2004 while Gore and Kerry took seven of the ten states with the highest rate of college education.
Since the poorest states are the ones with the highest smoking rate and the highest percentage of conservative voters, it's more likely that conservatives are smokers who end up on being 'parasites on the public dole.'
First of all, technology has improved a lot since the 1960s. There are cell phones with more computer processing power than all of NASA during the Apollo program.
A close encounter with Mars still puts it 69 million kilometers from Earth. The moon is about 385,000 kilometers away. Lighter weight computers just won't have much effect when you look at what must still be carried: Astronauts, food, water, compressed gases (for air), fuel, switches, wiring, etc. While processing power has done wonderful things to increase capabilities in satellites and unmanned probes, it has done little to reduce spacecraft weight. Sure, there is a lot to be gained with high-tech composites like carbon fiber, but you're just whittling away at what must remain a very heavy object.
Also, don't forget that your cell phone's CPU is not tolerant of cosmic rays. That's why CPUs used in space must be rad-hard (radiation hardened). Such CPUs contain extra transistors that take more energy to switch on and off. Cosmic rays can't trigger them so easily. Rad-hard chips continue to do accurate calculations when ordinary chips would glitch. The space industry relies almost exclusively on these rad-hard chips to make computers space-worthy. But these custom-made chips have some downsides: They're extremely expensive, power hungry, and slow -- probably 10 times slower than an equivalent CPU in a modern consumer desktop PC.
Advanced automation means instead of sending robots to a place, you send a robot factory. Instead of sending structural beams to the moon, you send a magnetic sifter to separate the 0.2% iron-nickel particles. These come from asteroids that have rained down on the moon over time and blasted themselves to bits and gotten mixed in with the surface material. A focusing mirror or lens can heat the steel to melting, and for a casting mold, just smooth out the lunar surface and draw a groove.
That sounds like a lot of the pie-in-the-sky type of stuff that I've read in science fiction. While it's great to dream, we've not even put a man on the moon in over 30 years, much less stablished a base there. Just how big a focusing mirror or lens does it take to turn, say, 100 pounds of iron-nickel particles molten? How do we get that mirror/lens there? Where do we house the astronauts establishing the iron smelting factory? How do we feed them? While the moon may yield some minerals, it's a long way from crude, sand-cast iron beam to a structure capable of sustaining life or to a rocket capable of getting men to Mars and back.
Apollo was a touch-and-go compared to what you're proposing. I just can't see NASA mounting something as ambitious as what you propose on a budget that, adjusted for inflation, is half of what it was at the peak of the Apollo program.
There are also ways to vastly reduce the cost to get to space. The Shuttle-derived launchers that NASA is pursuing now aren't it. They are merely optimization of a fundamentally poor technology - chemical rockets.
NASA, and the private sector, have examined all kinds of propulsion. NASA launched one rocket with a nuclear fission unit in 1965. The Soviet Union is believed to have made 33 such launches. Despite billions of dollars of research in the 1950s and 1960s, nuclear propulsion was abandoned due to technical and political difficulties. While ion-power looks promising to cut travel time to distant planets, it isn't the panacea that one might like.
P.S. I do know something about this kind of thing. I am writing this from my condo in Cape Canaveral where I am stationed as part of a launch campaign for a satellite.
You also eliminate cigarette and alcohol taxes. Oops! Forgot about that, didn't ya sport?
And those taxes are a drop in the bucket compared to the health care costs inflicted on society by smokers. Forgot about that, didn't ya sport? The median tax rate on cigarettes in the U.S. is 80 cents per pack. If you smoke a pack a day, for 30 years, you've paid $8760 in taxes. That won't come close to covering the costs for chemotherapy, heart bypass, after-stroke care, or any of the other likely results of your habit.
Well damn! I could've sworn heart disease was the number one killer in America.
And smoking causes heart disease! According to the American Heart Association:
Cigarette smoking is the most important preventable cause of premature death in the United States. It accounts for more than 440,000 of the more than 2.4 million annual deaths. Cigarette smokers have a higher risk of developing a number of chronic disorders. These include fatty buildups in arteries, several types of cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (lung problems). Atherosclerosis (buildup of fatty substances in the arteries) is a chief contributor to the high number of deaths from smoking. Many studies detail the evidence that cigarette smoking is a major cause of coronary heart disease, which leads to heart attack.
How does smoking affect coronary heart disease risk?
Cigarette and tobacco smoke, high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, physical inactivity, obesity and diabetes are the six major independent risk factors for coronary heart disease that you can modify or control. Cigarette smoking is so widespread and significant as a risk factor that the Surgeon General has called it "the leading preventable cause of disease and deaths in the United States."
Cigarette smoking increases the risk of coronary heart disease by itself. When it acts with other factors, it greatly increases risk. Smoking increases blood pressure, decreases exercise tolerance and increases the tendency for blood to clot. Smoking also increases the risk of recurrent coronary heart disease after bypass surgery.
Cigarette smoking is the most important risk factor for young men and women. It produces a greater relative risk in persons under age 50 than in those over 50.
Women who smoke and use oral contraceptives greatly increase their risk of coronary heart disease and stroke compared with nonsmoking women who use oral contraceptives.
Smoking decreases HDL (good) cholesterol. Cigarette smoking combined with a family history of heart disease also seems to greatly increase the risk.
What about cigarette smoking and stroke and peripheral arterial disease?
Studies show that cigarette smoking is an important risk factor for stroke. Inhaling cigarette smoke produces several effects that damage the cerebrovascular system. Women who take oral contraceptives and smoke increase their risk of stroke many times. Smoking also creates a higher risk for peripheral arterial disease and aortic aneurysm.
I smoke
Well who would have guessed that someone as clever as you would smoke?
Slashdot Mirror
Probably not, people aren't usually willing to replace their wardrobe to accomodate their smart phone.
I realize that you are personally invested in seeing this phone succeed, and that you can site some minority of smartphone users who are fine with massive phones, but it doesn't change the fact that my argument is sound. If you want to talk into something the size of a small tablet, I'm not going to stop you, but don't be surprised when Apple outsells it with phone-sized phones.
Hmm - if that is true, I wonder why Google wants to create the impression it has a security team that is quite happy to pretend to be law enforcement.
Because, unlike Apple, they could not get actual law enforcement interested in getting involved. So they needed to do something to add some drama, intrigue, and a sense of danger to the situation.
I don't think it was intended to be funny. I think that it was intended to make people think that there is the same kind of buzz around this phone that there was around the iPhone that was left in the bar. The whole intimidating security routine was all part of the "just like Apple" routine they were doing.
;)
I'm sure that there are some folks with big pockets that will like the phone, but I just don't see it having the kind of mass appeal that the iPhone does. On the other hand, a huge phone definitely can't be missed on a display filled with normal size phones, so it will get attention at Best Buy.
I've seen women with hands big enough to hold this phone comfortably. Of course, they used to be men.
If you can imagine a 4.7" display functioning as a laptop replacement for routine stuff, you've got way better eyes than I have. I go nuts having to work on a laptop with a 13" display.
What's really funny about this is that it's a transparent publicity stunt -- but almost no one in the mainstream press even noticed.
Even if you're Google, you can't create much buzz about the release of yet another Android phone into an already overcrowded marketplace. It's about as exciting as a new inkjet printer.
Outside of the nerdosphere, there really isn't a lot of call for a phone that is almost the size of a small tablet . It dwarfs the iPhone 5 shown next to it, and bigger isn't always better in something that is supposed to be portable. Well-heeled consumers can afford both a smartphone and a tablet. They don't need a phone so large that it requires its owner to only buy clothes with massive pockets.
Maybe searching for love on Google wasn't working out so well...
Microsoft's entire security model was based on the idiotic notion that one could take a single user OS with no security (Win 3.x/95/98/Me) and years later create successors (NT/2K/etc.) that didn't break applications that were already written. It wasn't users -- it was coddling the software vendors that drove the convoluted, unmanageable pseudo-security that got pasted on to the OS.
No rational OS architect would have permitted end-user applications to write to OS system directories, nor would they have allowed Dynamically Linked Libraries to be created and added to OS directories with no entity controlling the namespace (meaning you could create a blorm.dll that installed with your product and I could create a blorm.dll that overwrote it when my product was installed).
Other ideas, like allowing some kid in the Philippines to e-mail you a script that automatically ran when viewed, were just examples of the level of stupidity that had permeated the Microsoft campus.
Yeah, why can't he be classy like Noelle Bush (Jeb's Daughter), or Jenna and Barbara Bush. Is it so hard for Gore's son to behave in a classy manner like, say Jenna Bush?
Those Democrats are just so trashy, arent't they?
How about you stop pulling the "terrorism" card and "child porn" card, and tell us why, in no uncertain terms, you need to keep prying into our lives. What evidence do you have that proves, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that such additional monitoring will help stamp out child pornography? What justification do you really have for your stance? I'm talking hard numbers ... how many cases have been successfully prosecuted (i.e., resulting in prison terms) for child pornography as a direct result of ISP data retention?
I have an even better idea: Stop pretending that our Constitutional rights are something to be traded away for more efficient law enforcement. If catching more pedophiles and terrorists requires the circumvention of the Constitution, then just accept that you just won't be able to catch more pedophiles and terrorists. Stop trying to tell us that you need to tap our phones, monitor our Internet usage, get records of our library activities, and shove protoscopes up our asses before we board airplanes.
As I get older, I become ever more convinced over-legislation will be the downfall of our society. We've got 535 people in Congress who think that their job is passing more laws. And any time there is a national tragedy, Congress gets into high gear to push even more laws through. A perfect example was Columbine. Congress went into a tizzy to pass new laws -- as if going on a murderous shooting spree in a public school had been legal at the time that the Columbine massacre took place.
But we don't have anyone tasked with repealing bad and duplicitous laws that are already on the books. Even unconstitutional laws often remain on the books for years because the system is set up to make it hard to overturn a law: The courts won't even listen to you unless you, personally, are harmed by those laws (if the law does not harm you, you do not have legal "standing").
What's made it worse is the use of misleading legislation names for political gain. If someone proposes a law called the "Online Sexual Predator Prevention Act of 2006" it will pass, regardless of what the law really is. It may be doing anything from giving government subsidies to RJ Reynolds to eliminating school lunch programs for the underprivileged. But any Congressman who votes against it will be painted as being in favor of sexual predators using the Internet as a means to find, rape, and kill children.
It's a joke.
I'm sure they never thought anyone would actually believe that a 5oz. aluminum case would withstand being hit by a mortar or a rocket-powered grenade.
The way that I watched my last launch at Cape Canaveral was to jump up from my station and run out the control room door after I saw the rocket ignition on the video monitor. I got outside just as the Delta II cleared the tower.
The way that I found out about the launch date was by attending the meetings that were held while we performed integration and test on the satellite that was to be launched. For the five months I was at Cape Canaveral, I stayed in condos at Canaveral Towers and the Cape Winds Resort. As far as tickets, the only ones we needed were occasional plane tickets to go between there and home. Hope that helped.
Our government will never turn into a police state as long as the second amendment stays on the books. Believe it or not, it still is, even though democrats try their best to tear that one to shreads.
You nut-cases always amaze me with your belief that the federal government is being held in check by rifles, pistols, and shotguns in the homes of good-ole-boys. What good is your Glock, M1 Garand, or Mossberg going to do against a tank? It's like saying that we're safe from muggers so long as we carry our trusty slingshots.
> Remember, it's really all about George Bush.
No, it's all about the Constitution. It's all about protecting the rights that countless brave Americans fought for and died to protect.
It's about not being cowards who give up our rights and our way of life because we're so scared of the terrorists.
Just how many people would have quoted Patrick Henry had he said "you can take my liberty if it makes me a little safer"?
Instead of making ad hominem attacks on everyone who disagrees with you, why don't you add something of value to the discussion?
The iPod has dominated the personal music player (PMP) market since its introduction in 2001. In this quarter alone, iPod sales are expected to approach 9 million units.
With sales numbers like those, it's easy to see why other companies have been trying (unsuccessfully) for the last five years to take market share away from Apple. It's equally easy to see why Apple has the R&D budget to stay one step ahead of its rivals.
What you don't seem to grasp is that the iPod devices drive music sales on iTunes. Apple can afford to break even or to lose money on each iPod sale because the average iPod buyer loads the iPod up one $.99 song at a time through iTunes.
To compete with Apple, a company would have to develop an business model in which PMP sales were subsidized by later music sales. That means creating a viable iTunes competitor. So, how do you convince the record labels to sign on with your music store and how do you get prices from them that are as good as what they give Apple? You don't have an installed base of millions of PMPs, so they aren't looking at a tempting market that they need to reach. Many other companies have already tried to compete with iPod and failed, so what makes your venture more likely to succeed?
But let's suppose that you have pictures of all of the major record execs having sex with donkeys and that's how you get the same music availability and pricing that Apple does for iTunes. Now how do you convince your company's management that you can out-iPod Apple? How do you get them to give you the massive sums of R&D money needed to build something that is as pleasing to the consumer as the iPod? How do you make them believe that your efforts will be any more successful than those of Creative Labs, Archos, Samsung, SanDisk, or the myriad other players, most of which came and went with little fanfare?
Now how do you convince your vendors to provide you sweet deals on everything for lithium-ion batteries to headphone jacks? How do you get the prices for components that Apple does? Toshiba knows that they will sell 30+ million hard drives through Apple, so they are willing to give Apple the best pricing possible. How do you propose to get that kind of pricing? By saying "we're going to sell a lot, too"?
I've owned personal music players from Creative Labs, Rio, and Archos because I was loathe to give Apple my money. But the fact is that the other players were large, clunky, and poorly constructed when compared with the iPod offerings. Go into any Best Buy and look at the personal music players. The iPod simply looks like a product from five years in the future when compared with the competitors.
While I expect that some well-heeled competitor will come along to challenge Apple, I don't expect it to happen soon. The only way that I see it happening anytime soon is if a court rules that Apple's iTunes/iPod bundling is illegal and orders Apple to open up its DRM and allow competing products to use iTunes for music purchases.
Hopefully, that was a lot more thought-provoking than the "Waah!" stuff that you posted.
Except for those of us who have no real choice in ISP's. My only option for internet access that exceeds 256KB is cable.
For most (non-geek) users, 256kb DSL with Google is way better than 5mb cable without Google. The ISP wouldn't risk driving customers to DSL.
Your ISP could cut costs now by blocking Google, but they don't do it, do they? They could block access to lots of high-bandwidth sites and applications, but they don't. Ever wonder why?
That would be a great analogy if there were only 1 or 2 restaurants.
It's a great analogy as-is.
Besides, there are many ISPs. Even if you have only one broadband ISP in your area, it's likely that they are part of a nationwide company (e.g., Comcast, AT&T, Cox, Road Runner, etc.). Any Google extortion fee would affect all of their users -- even in markets where there are many competitors.
Searching isn't free either. It's factored into the bill from your ISP. That's what you pay them for -- moving data.
Besides, Google is a low-bandwidth, primarily text, web page. One search on Google is way less bandwidth than loading cnn.com or downloading even a small application.
Google isn't using bandwidth on my ISP's network. The users are the ones who request the data. If they blocked Google, then the users would move as much, or more, data via other search engines.
This idea is a non-starter: If an ISP stopped carrying Google because Google wouldn't pay an extortion fee, the ISP's customers would leave in a giant stampede. So don't get worked up about this. Remember that it's legal for a restaurant to charge for ketchup, but you don't see a lot of pay dispensers for ketchup.
'Notably, the FCC backed away from an effort to impose higher fines by holding all network affiliates responsible for a broadcast, instead of just the stations that had been flagged by a viewer in a complaint.'
And therein lies the problem. In its only decision involving broadcast indecency, FCC v. Pacifica, the U.S. Supreme Court noted in 1978 that the "normal definition of 'indecent' merely refers to nonconformance with accepted standards of morality."
When ruling on obscenity in 1973 in Miller vs. California, the Supreme Court established the "three-pronged test" for obscenity:
(a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest
(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law
(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value
Note that the first test mentions "community standards." That's a recognition by the Court that something that is "obscene" in one community might not be in another. It's not much of a stretch to argue that standards for indecency vary by community also.
The FCC, by going after individual affiliates, might be called upon to present evidence that the community standards in each and every market with a targeted affiliate are such that the program would be considered indecent. If that happens, the FCC's ability to impose such fines might be seriously curtailed by the Court's decision.
I note you failed to respond to the comment concerning the recent mission to Jupiter's moons.
While it's great that we sent an unmanned probe, it's sad that manned exploration has ground to a halt. Many countries, countries that were not part of the original space race, have sent unmanned probes and satellites into space.
And exactly what practical value is that information to us?
None. That's one thing that is so great about it. Pure science is not motivated by greed, political gain, or any other perverting force. It's man striving to better himself by increasing his knowledge, even if that doesn't lead to material gain.
We have plenty of private sector companies that want to commercially exploit space. Let's fund public sector efforts to improve man's understanding of the universe.
Do the math. As a percentage of the population, education-wise we're extremely competitive.
Apparently not. As I said in my original post, 36 percent of undergraduate students in the United States receive their degrees in science or engineering, compared to 59 percent of undergraduates in China and 66 percent in Japan.
36% does not sound competitive with 59% and 66% -- at least to me.
Very good. Now, look at a breakdown of education by county in those states, and in most of them you're going to find the counties with the highest rate of college education voted Republican.
Wrong. I went through this painful process in 2000 and the uneducated bible belters in the most rural counties were the most likely to vote Republican. If the most educated voters tend to vote Republican, one would expect that the Republicans would easily carry states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Instead, they carry states like Alabama, West Virginia, and Arkansas.
Um, wrong again. Blue collar workers are more likely to be smokers than white-collar workers. How many Republican labor unions do you know of?
No, you are wrong, wrong, wrong. You mistake the educated union leaders, who recognize that the Democrats are their allies and that the GOP is their enemy, from the rank and file who believe that prayer in school is good, teaching creationism is better, and that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.
Yeah, we're so far behind in science we remain the only nation that's ever put a man on the moon
We did that almost 40 years ago -- when we were a leader in science. In the last 30 years, we've not landed another person on the moon or any other celestial body. 36 percent of undergraduate students in the United States receive their degrees in science or engineering, compared to 59 percent of undergraduates in China and 66 percent in Japan. In 2004, the United States graduated 70,000 engineers, while China graduated 500,000 and India graduated 200,000.
As opposed to what - turning it into an absurdly expensive photo gallery for navel-gazers?
As opposed to doing real science. Hubble has been used to discover moons around Pluto. Hubble has provided data for thousands of scientific papers. Hubble proved the existence of black holes. Hubble determined that gamma rays originate outside of our solar system. In the early 90's Hubble cleared up the mystery of quasars: It confirmed that quasars are actually active galactic nuclei in distant galaxies and are powered by black holes. The list goes on and on, but it's not just pretty pictures.
Since when is the space program the exclusive preserve of scientists? IIRC, when the space program was started, the whole point of it was exploration.
You do realize that the people doing the exploring were scientists, don't you? You know that it was scientific exploration, don't you?
I don't recall that Spain sent a biologist or a geologist to America before sending an explorer and merchant to discover it, nor did England send them before establishing the Virginia and Jamestown Companies to colonize and develop it.
So we should send non-scientists off in spaceships to roam the universe and see what is discovered -- much as Spain and England did with sailing ships in centuries past? My prediction: We'd discover that most of them died in their spaceships without ever reaching another planet. The universe is a very big, empty, and inhospitable place. While Christopher Columbus could sail until he reached land and then just step off his ship and breathe in the fresh air, that's not likely to happen to a modern Christopher Columbus even if he reaches some other world.
False. The costs for smoking-related illnesses includes everything from heart-bypass operations to chemotherapy to long-term care for smokers who suffered strokes. Smokers get hospitalized more often for pneumonia, emphysema, infections, diabetes, and many other diseases and conditions than non-smokers.
You're assuming everyone who smokes is a liberal parasite on the public dole. Not necessarily true!
No. Smokers are, on average, less-educated than non-smokers. Adults with fewer than 12 years of education are about twice as likely to smoke as adults with more than 12 years of education (29.9 percent versus 14.6 percent).
Conservatives are, on average, less educated than liberals. That's why Bush swept the ten states with the lowest rate of college education in 2000 and 2004 while Gore and Kerry took seven of the ten states with the highest rate of college education.
The states with the highest smoking rates:Since the poorest states are the ones with the highest smoking rate and the highest percentage of conservative voters, it's more likely that conservatives are smokers who end up on being 'parasites on the public dole.'
First of all, technology has improved a lot since the 1960s.
There are cell phones with more computer processing power
than all of NASA during the Apollo program.
A close encounter with Mars still puts it 69 million kilometers from Earth. The moon is about 385,000 kilometers away. Lighter weight computers just won't have much effect when you look at what must still be carried: Astronauts, food, water, compressed gases (for air), fuel, switches, wiring, etc. While processing power has done wonderful things to increase capabilities in satellites and unmanned probes, it has done little to reduce spacecraft weight. Sure, there is a lot to be gained with high-tech composites like carbon fiber, but you're just whittling away at what must remain a very heavy object.
Also, don't forget that your cell phone's CPU is not tolerant of cosmic rays. That's why CPUs used in space must be rad-hard (radiation hardened). Such CPUs contain extra transistors that take more energy to switch on and off. Cosmic rays can't trigger them so easily. Rad-hard chips continue to do accurate calculations when ordinary chips would glitch. The space industry relies almost exclusively on these rad-hard chips to make computers space-worthy. But these custom-made chips have some downsides: They're extremely expensive, power hungry, and slow -- probably 10 times slower than an equivalent CPU in a modern consumer desktop PC.
Advanced automation means instead of sending robots to a
place, you send a robot factory. Instead of sending
structural beams to the moon, you send a magnetic sifter
to separate the 0.2% iron-nickel particles. These come
from asteroids that have rained down on the moon over time
and blasted themselves to bits and gotten mixed in with
the surface material. A focusing mirror or lens can heat
the steel to melting, and for a casting mold, just smooth
out the lunar surface and draw a groove.
That sounds like a lot of the pie-in-the-sky type of stuff that I've read in science fiction. While it's great to dream, we've not even put a man on the moon in over 30 years, much less stablished a base there. Just how big a focusing mirror or lens does it take to turn, say, 100 pounds of iron-nickel particles molten? How do we get that mirror/lens there? Where do we house the astronauts establishing the iron smelting factory? How do we feed them? While the moon may yield some minerals, it's a long way from crude, sand-cast iron beam to a structure capable of sustaining life or to a rocket capable of getting men to Mars and back.
Apollo was a touch-and-go compared to what you're proposing. I just can't see NASA mounting something as ambitious as what you propose on a budget that, adjusted for inflation, is half of what it was at the peak of the Apollo program.
There are also ways to vastly reduce the cost to get to
space. The Shuttle-derived launchers that NASA is pursuing
now aren't it. They are merely optimization of a fundamentally
poor technology - chemical rockets.
NASA, and the private sector, have examined all kinds of propulsion. NASA launched one rocket with a nuclear fission unit in 1965. The Soviet Union is believed to have made 33 such launches. Despite billions of dollars of research in the 1950s and 1960s, nuclear propulsion was abandoned due to technical and political difficulties. While ion-power looks promising to cut travel time to distant planets, it isn't the panacea that one might like.
P.S. I do know something about this kind of thing. I am writing this from my condo in Cape Canaveral where I am stationed as part of a launch campaign for a satellite.
And those taxes are a drop in the bucket compared to the health care costs inflicted on society by smokers. Forgot about that, didn't ya sport? The median tax rate on cigarettes in the U.S. is 80 cents per pack. If you smoke a pack a day, for 30 years, you've paid $8760 in taxes. That won't come close to covering the costs for chemotherapy, heart bypass, after-stroke care, or any of the other likely results of your habit.
Well damn! I could've sworn heart disease was the number one killer in America.
And smoking causes heart disease! According to the American Heart Association:
I smoke
Well who would have guessed that someone as clever as you would smoke?