We make mesh networks work all the time on Earth. The Internet itself is a static mesh network. It's *ad hoc* wireless mesh networks that can have issues, where you're figuring everything out on the fly, in a decentralized system without any governing authority. And even those mostly work just fine so long as you have an acceptable node density and you're not trying to interoperate between systems from various different manufacturers. For example, my understanding is that the One Laptop Per Child ad-hoc mesh networks worked quite well in towns where they were mass-deployed.
As for latency issues - firstly, so what? Other than multiplayer arcade-style games and a few other real-time uses, latency is mostly irrelevant unless it gets *really* bad. That said, satellites certainly introduce greater broadcast latency, though at a 500km orbit (1000km ground-to-ground, these won't be geostationary), you're introducing only about 3-1/3ms of latency per "hop". And on the plus side, you've potentially got a lot more satellite nodes servicing an area than a ground based system would have, along with the potential ability to shunt traffic to underutilized ground hubs rather than having to direct all regional traffic through the same terrestrial hub, allowing more optimal use of available terrestrial bandwidth and the ability to route around overloaded nodes that would introduce substantial logistical latency.
Perhaps they don't need it? "Satellite-ready" bands are special because they represent offer an extremely "quiet" piece of spectrum suitable for antennas that broadcast and/or receive over very wide areas - potentially the entire cross section of the Earth, at ~13,000 km across.
If it's true, as someone mentioned above, that these would use tightbeam antennas that only cover an area a few km across, then you're talking pretty low broadcast power needed per antenna - your typical cell phone has 10x that range. Shouldn't take many solar panels to power a broadcast station at "terrestrial spectrum" levels over such a small region.
The distance through space is irrelevant (aside from latency and implementation details) - all that matters is the amount of broadcast power, and the size of the "spotlight" it makes on the Earth. Well, and what percentage of the signal is "off target" so that it doesn't hit the "spotlit" region - but modern tightbeam antennas can be very impressively directional.
Well - not quite irrelevant I suppose - you also have the customer antennas sending a signal back. The real limiting factor on acceptable "noisiness" of the spectrum might actually be the directionality and associated power consumption of the customer's phased-array antennas - those have to be mass-produced, and thus incur far larger economic constraints.
Well sure - but they were hoping the scam would last long enough for the early adopters to get in on the action too. It's getting so you can't even trust a pyramid scheme to make you a dishonest buck anymore.
Yeah, the three-item list probably offers the most dramatic examples of where an Oxford comma can clarify things, due to the comma serving unrelated uses.
There's also an unrelated problem it can clarify - "Get your burgers here! Dog, cat, mouse and rat!" Are they selling three kinds of burgers, or four?
The problem is that you generally need an indicator of whether the list is inclusive or selective - i.e. if you say "These boxes contain automobiles, quasars, dogs, cats" do you mean they contain one or more of them (or) or all of them (and)?
The second example is indeed ambiguous, but for reasons not in general related to the Oxford comma. For example: "He hired the strippers, JFK, Mussolini, and Stalin" - there's still ambiguity as to whether "the strippers" is intended to be included in the list, or whether it's naming a set that's then enumerated. Just a hazard of using the comma for multiple, unrelated purposes.
And the frightening thing about self-motivated action is that there's no reason to assume it requires consciousness. You feed a complicated enough system a complicated enough stream of inputs, and the resulting output will look close enough to self-motivated action that you could spend lifetimes debating the terminology.
Heck, we still have no conclusive evidence that humans are anything more than that - "consciousness" or "self awareness" might simply be a useful (or useless?) perceptual illusion of a biological behavior-optimizing matrix. Perhaps the result of a system that needs to predict the result of its outputs on its own future behavior? Obviously that self-model would need to be greatly simplified to avoid infinite recursion - but that would actually be consistent with human "self awareness" - how often do people do something that "wasn't like me"?
I didn't follow the story in depth - mostly they seemed to be the usual partisan torch-and-pitchfork rants. However, I think the core issue, and reason that such behavior is illegal, is that like electronic voting without a paper trail, there's no way to tell how much damage was actually done. You control your own communications channel for government business, it makes it that much easier for you to engage in corrupt dealings and then destroy the evidence. As well as allowing foreign intelligence agencies to more easily spy on you, since it's a fair bet that your basement server is far less secure than the shared servers with a full IT staff charged with keeping them up to date and secure.
As such I'd love to see everyone who engaged in such practices imprisoned, but honestly I don't expect to see it happen. I think most everyone accepts that the vast majority of federal elected officials are corrupt, the only question is exactly how badly. As such, while everyone will make lots of noise about their opponent's corruption, they won't actually *do* anything about it, as it would set precedent for their own prosecution when the wheel of power inevitably turns against them. They've pretty much got to be caught red handed doing something really appalling for there to even be a serious inquiry, and even then it's as likely as not that it will simply be dragged out until the population moves on to new outrages, and then quietly dropped with just enough of a slap on the wrist that everyone else can claim that "something was done about it"
Probably "binds to opioid receptors". Of course, binding to them doesn't necessarily translate to "activates them in the normal manner". Lots of pharmaceutical drugs work precisely by binding to different chemical receptors while failing to activate them.
Might be worth reconsidering your position of " just dried vegetable matter. So it's not exactly super dangerous to...the health of the vast majority of people". There's an awful lot of plants that are extremely dangerous to consume. Tobacco will only kill you with prolonged, or very high, exposure. Deadly nightshade is considerably faster and more lethal, and far from the most dangerous. And there's thousands of other examples (pro tip castor bean tea is NOT a suitable replacement for castor oil). You may have noticed that plants can't run away when under attack, so instead they defend themselves with unpleasant tastes, spikes, and a wide range of poisons.
A trick I was recently introduced to for swallowing pills more easily: Tilt your head down to look at the floor as you swallow. Sounded ridiculous, but worked wonderfully.
I suppose if you think about it, that's how we evolved to drink - out of a river or pond. Your tongue automatically does all the work to force water up and into your throat, and anything else gets carried along for the ride. And floating pills would end up being first down the gullet, I would think.
Because, unless I'm misunderstanding something, as you say the Energia was only the first stage, and required a second stage to get to orbit. It's thus rather disingenuous to compare its suborbital payload to the orbital payload of other complete launch systems.
I've been following Bitcoin since it was worth pennies. It's an ingenious technology, and has legitimized the concept of decentralized cryptocurrencies. That's going to have implications rippling into the future that we can't yet imagine.
However, nothing is achieved by ignoring it's pitfalls. The promises that helped it become popular - anonymity especially, have proven to be completely false - as was immediately obvious to anyone who actually understood the technology. It's becoming hideously wasteful of energy, and only promises to get worse - which will tilt the economics strongly against it when a superior alternative is conceived. And it has the "dark money" issue, which is admittedly specific to the particular blockchain rather than its technology, but is nonetheless a serious concern that provides leverage for an alternative to tempt users away.
1) Sure they do - much faster and cheaper transaction times for starters, as well as the potential for much faster wealth growth if they become popular. Bitcoin is benefitting from network effects, like Facebook or Twitter, but once a merchant decides to deal in Bitcoin they can generally deal in any Bitcoin-based currency as well for very low additional costs, and generally many other unrelated cryptocurrencies. So the lock-in isn't there.
2) That's irrelevant. Dvorak offered moderate gains at best, none at worst. And those potential gains came only after months or years of retraining - that was the real cost that prevented its adoption, not the pittance needed to buy a new keyboard. And as I already mentioned, bitcoin offers no comparable lock-in - you can cash out your bitcoins for something else whenever you like - in fact that's the whole point.
> the currency only will get more valuable over time
That presumes that the amount of real wealth traded in Bitcoin increases over time. If Bitcoin were the only currency in use, and economic activity continued to grow, then the value of Bitcoin would continue to grow alongside it, and it would indeed be the deflationary currency its early adopters envisioned.
However, the reality is that there's lots of alternatives to Bitcoin, and that changes things considerably. There's no particular reason why Bitcoin should continue to be accepted in trade, it has several pitfalls and no unique benefits. If someone comes up with a far superior alternative to Bitcoin, then one can reasonably assume that it would eventually be displaced. And as the usage of Bitcoin fell, so to would its value.
The problem is that Bitcoin specifically offers no unique benefit. At the most glaring - I'm free to take the bitcoin stack and start a brand new blockchain for "ImmCoins", which are based on *exactly* the same technology, and differ only in relative uptake and problematic histories (many/most Bitcoins have never been traded, and it's unknown whether they were simply lost early on, or are being hoarded against possible future cash-in or intentional market destabilization, either of which could be very problematic).
Moreover, completely new cryptocurrencies are being invented practically every day - it's only a matter of time before one is invented whose technology is unquestionably superior to Bitcoin in every way - and at some point after that it can reasonably be assumed that Bitcoin will have been abandoned for the superior alternative.
I wonder how they're sure it's a new species? Lots of species are capable of both sexual and asexual reproduction, and if only a single female of an invasive species with such an ability were introduced into a new environment, then obviously the entire resulting invasive population would be female - males can only be produced sexually.
So, it would seem to me that to be able to claim it as a new species they'd have to try to locate the original population, and confirm that they wouldn't/couldn't interbreed with the self-cloning females. Though I suppose if the entire species has yet to be identified, then naming it after the ability to self-clone is far from the worst option available.
Preferentially select the most desirable mutants to spawn the next generation. No two clones are identical, DNA transcription isn't accurate enough for that. We "breed" plenty of plants via cuttings as well - how else do you suppose seedless grapes, watermelons, etc. are bred?.
So it was, though for that one to count though you have to consider the Buran itself to be part of the payload. The Energia-Buran had a payload of only 30,000kg, just slightly more than the Space Shuttle. It looks like the Energia alone claimed a payload capacity of 100,000kg, but that assumed the payload would achieve orbital insertion on its own, which rather seems like cheating if we're comparing it to launch vehicles capable of actually delivering their payloads to orbit.
Heck - potentially far earlier than that. "Monkey see, monkey do" - mimicry is a common trait among primates, and even those with no apparent language pass on knowledge of their limited technologies via demonstration (e.g. how to prepare a branch to effectively fish termites from their mound). Proto-humans probably passed stone-knapping and other technologies along that way for a very long time before we developed communication capabilities abstract enough to really be called "language".
It's probably a lot less efficient though - communication lets you explain what the student is doing wrong far more clearly than pointing and grunting, as well as making it a lot easier to collaborate on ideas with your peers. And there's some arguments to be made that language may have even stimulated the development of our capacity for abstract thought.
>From what I've understood of orbital mechanics you have to reach LEO first to go anywhere else.
Not strictly necessary, but there's not a lot of wasted effort in doing so, and you'd need MUCH more powerful rockets (or other launch systems) to even consider doing anything else. If we ever build a lunar "beanstalk" space elevator though that may change - you could extend a cable from the moon, through the Earth-Moon L1 point, almost to Earth, and have the free end traveling with the same angular momentum (relative to Earth) as the Earth's surface, so that a direct vertical "rocket hop" to grab the end could potentially be far more efficient. Once you're on an elevator you're (potentially) only dealing with friction losses, actual orbital energies can be transferred between ascending and descending payloads.
Tumbling cable space elevators are another option, and can actually do that without any moving parts or efficiency losses - transferring momentum directly between their own mass and that of the payloads as they're caught and released at different points in the rotation. Around Earth though they have their own challenges. Either technique though would be far more achievable than an Earth-based "beanstalk" - which would require materials considerably stronger than anything we've developed so far (flawless multiwalled carbon nanotubes could theoretically do the job, but you'd have basically no safety margin)
Cool, I had to rewatch it in response, and you're absolutely correct. The difference is dramatic, *definitely* almost-duplicate feeds last time. Perhaps, like CL said, the two feeds from a stereo camera. But an awesome landing, and now we can follow both down to their respective pads.
>we want them to be as small as reasonable I quite agree. But am I alone in thinking that the vast majority have gone well beyond that point? It's a rare phone that wouldn't benefit from being twice the thickness with 3x the battery life. Maybe they could even use that added thickness to include some structural components so the things could take more of a beating.
I still have my original-model TI-85 from 1992 - it doesn't get as much use anymore, but it took a heck of a beating through 10 years of school and another 15 in the office, and is still going strong. Seem to remember hearing it was designed to be able to drive over it (with the cover on) and probably not damage it - though that may have been an urban legend inspired by its toughness. In comparison a modern hi-end "phablet" smartphone costs considerably more, has about the same footprint, but breaks if you look at it funny.
Slashdot Mirror
We make mesh networks work all the time on Earth. The Internet itself is a static mesh network. It's *ad hoc* wireless mesh networks that can have issues, where you're figuring everything out on the fly, in a decentralized system without any governing authority. And even those mostly work just fine so long as you have an acceptable node density and you're not trying to interoperate between systems from various different manufacturers. For example, my understanding is that the One Laptop Per Child ad-hoc mesh networks worked quite well in towns where they were mass-deployed.
As for latency issues - firstly, so what? Other than multiplayer arcade-style games and a few other real-time uses, latency is mostly irrelevant unless it gets *really* bad. That said, satellites certainly introduce greater broadcast latency, though at a 500km orbit (1000km ground-to-ground, these won't be geostationary), you're introducing only about 3-1/3ms of latency per "hop". And on the plus side, you've potentially got a lot more satellite nodes servicing an area than a ground based system would have, along with the potential ability to shunt traffic to underutilized ground hubs rather than having to direct all regional traffic through the same terrestrial hub, allowing more optimal use of available terrestrial bandwidth and the ability to route around overloaded nodes that would introduce substantial logistical latency.
Perhaps they don't need it? "Satellite-ready" bands are special because they represent offer an extremely "quiet" piece of spectrum suitable for antennas that broadcast and/or receive over very wide areas - potentially the entire cross section of the Earth, at ~13,000 km across.
If it's true, as someone mentioned above, that these would use tightbeam antennas that only cover an area a few km across, then you're talking pretty low broadcast power needed per antenna - your typical cell phone has 10x that range. Shouldn't take many solar panels to power a broadcast station at "terrestrial spectrum" levels over such a small region.
The distance through space is irrelevant (aside from latency and implementation details) - all that matters is the amount of broadcast power, and the size of the "spotlight" it makes on the Earth. Well, and what percentage of the signal is "off target" so that it doesn't hit the "spotlit" region - but modern tightbeam antennas can be very impressively directional.
Well - not quite irrelevant I suppose - you also have the customer antennas sending a signal back. The real limiting factor on acceptable "noisiness" of the spectrum might actually be the directionality and associated power consumption of the customer's phased-array antennas - those have to be mass-produced, and thus incur far larger economic constraints.
> Adults knew it was a scam from the start.
Well sure - but they were hoping the scam would last long enough for the early adopters to get in on the action too. It's getting so you can't even trust a pyramid scheme to make you a dishonest buck anymore.
Physically - assuming you have an appropriate screwdriver and a pair of wire cutters to cut out the microphone.
Whether it will still work as a speaker or not... No clue
Yeah, the three-item list probably offers the most dramatic examples of where an Oxford comma can clarify things, due to the comma serving unrelated uses.
There's also an unrelated problem it can clarify - "Get your burgers here! Dog, cat, mouse and rat!" Are they selling three kinds of burgers, or four?
The problem is that you generally need an indicator of whether the list is inclusive or selective - i.e. if you say "These boxes contain automobiles, quasars, dogs, cats" do you mean they contain one or more of them (or) or all of them (and)?
The second example is indeed ambiguous, but for reasons not in general related to the Oxford comma. For example: "He hired the strippers, JFK, Mussolini, and Stalin" - there's still ambiguity as to whether "the strippers" is intended to be included in the list, or whether it's naming a set that's then enumerated. Just a hazard of using the comma for multiple, unrelated purposes.
And the frightening thing about self-motivated action is that there's no reason to assume it requires consciousness. You feed a complicated enough system a complicated enough stream of inputs, and the resulting output will look close enough to self-motivated action that you could spend lifetimes debating the terminology.
Heck, we still have no conclusive evidence that humans are anything more than that - "consciousness" or "self awareness" might simply be a useful (or useless?) perceptual illusion of a biological behavior-optimizing matrix. Perhaps the result of a system that needs to predict the result of its outputs on its own future behavior? Obviously that self-model would need to be greatly simplified to avoid infinite recursion - but that would actually be consistent with human "self awareness" - how often do people do something that "wasn't like me"?
I didn't follow the story in depth - mostly they seemed to be the usual partisan torch-and-pitchfork rants. However, I think the core issue, and reason that such behavior is illegal, is that like electronic voting without a paper trail, there's no way to tell how much damage was actually done. You control your own communications channel for government business, it makes it that much easier for you to engage in corrupt dealings and then destroy the evidence. As well as allowing foreign intelligence agencies to more easily spy on you, since it's a fair bet that your basement server is far less secure than the shared servers with a full IT staff charged with keeping them up to date and secure.
As such I'd love to see everyone who engaged in such practices imprisoned, but honestly I don't expect to see it happen. I think most everyone accepts that the vast majority of federal elected officials are corrupt, the only question is exactly how badly. As such, while everyone will make lots of noise about their opponent's corruption, they won't actually *do* anything about it, as it would set precedent for their own prosecution when the wheel of power inevitably turns against them. They've pretty much got to be caught red handed doing something really appalling for there to even be a serious inquiry, and even then it's as likely as not that it will simply be dragged out until the population moves on to new outrages, and then quietly dropped with just enough of a slap on the wrist that everyone else can claim that "something was done about it"
Probably "binds to opioid receptors". Of course, binding to them doesn't necessarily translate to "activates them in the normal manner". Lots of pharmaceutical drugs work precisely by binding to different chemical receptors while failing to activate them.
Might be worth reconsidering your position of " just dried vegetable matter. So it's not exactly super dangerous to...the health of the vast majority of people". There's an awful lot of plants that are extremely dangerous to consume. Tobacco will only kill you with prolonged, or very high, exposure. Deadly nightshade is considerably faster and more lethal, and far from the most dangerous. And there's thousands of other examples (pro tip castor bean tea is NOT a suitable replacement for castor oil). You may have noticed that plants can't run away when under attack, so instead they defend themselves with unpleasant tastes, spikes, and a wide range of poisons.
A trick I was recently introduced to for swallowing pills more easily: Tilt your head down to look at the floor as you swallow. Sounded ridiculous, but worked wonderfully.
I suppose if you think about it, that's how we evolved to drink - out of a river or pond. Your tongue automatically does all the work to force water up and into your throat, and anything else gets carried along for the ride. And floating pills would end up being first down the gullet, I would think.
Because, unless I'm misunderstanding something, as you say the Energia was only the first stage, and required a second stage to get to orbit. It's thus rather disingenuous to compare its suborbital payload to the orbital payload of other complete launch systems.
I've been following Bitcoin since it was worth pennies. It's an ingenious technology, and has legitimized the concept of decentralized cryptocurrencies. That's going to have implications rippling into the future that we can't yet imagine.
However, nothing is achieved by ignoring it's pitfalls. The promises that helped it become popular - anonymity especially, have proven to be completely false - as was immediately obvious to anyone who actually understood the technology. It's becoming hideously wasteful of energy, and only promises to get worse - which will tilt the economics strongly against it when a superior alternative is conceived. And it has the "dark money" issue, which is admittedly specific to the particular blockchain rather than its technology, but is nonetheless a serious concern that provides leverage for an alternative to tempt users away.
1) Sure they do - much faster and cheaper transaction times for starters, as well as the potential for much faster wealth growth if they become popular. Bitcoin is benefitting from network effects, like Facebook or Twitter, but once a merchant decides to deal in Bitcoin they can generally deal in any Bitcoin-based currency as well for very low additional costs, and generally many other unrelated cryptocurrencies. So the lock-in isn't there.
2) That's irrelevant. Dvorak offered moderate gains at best, none at worst. And those potential gains came only after months or years of retraining - that was the real cost that prevented its adoption, not the pittance needed to buy a new keyboard. And as I already mentioned, bitcoin offers no comparable lock-in - you can cash out your bitcoins for something else whenever you like - in fact that's the whole point.
> the currency only will get more valuable over time
That presumes that the amount of real wealth traded in Bitcoin increases over time. If Bitcoin were the only currency in use, and economic activity continued to grow, then the value of Bitcoin would continue to grow alongside it, and it would indeed be the deflationary currency its early adopters envisioned.
However, the reality is that there's lots of alternatives to Bitcoin, and that changes things considerably. There's no particular reason why Bitcoin should continue to be accepted in trade, it has several pitfalls and no unique benefits. If someone comes up with a far superior alternative to Bitcoin, then one can reasonably assume that it would eventually be displaced. And as the usage of Bitcoin fell, so to would its value.
The problem is that Bitcoin specifically offers no unique benefit. At the most glaring - I'm free to take the bitcoin stack and start a brand new blockchain for "ImmCoins", which are based on *exactly* the same technology, and differ only in relative uptake and problematic histories (many/most Bitcoins have never been traded, and it's unknown whether they were simply lost early on, or are being hoarded against possible future cash-in or intentional market destabilization, either of which could be very problematic).
Moreover, completely new cryptocurrencies are being invented practically every day - it's only a matter of time before one is invented whose technology is unquestionably superior to Bitcoin in every way - and at some point after that it can reasonably be assumed that Bitcoin will have been abandoned for the superior alternative.
I wonder how they're sure it's a new species? Lots of species are capable of both sexual and asexual reproduction, and if only a single female of an invasive species with such an ability were introduced into a new environment, then obviously the entire resulting invasive population would be female - males can only be produced sexually.
So, it would seem to me that to be able to claim it as a new species they'd have to try to locate the original population, and confirm that they wouldn't/couldn't interbreed with the self-cloning females. Though I suppose if the entire species has yet to be identified, then naming it after the ability to self-clone is far from the worst option available.
How many non-farmed cows do you see in the world?
Preferentially select the most desirable mutants to spawn the next generation. No two clones are identical, DNA transcription isn't accurate enough for that. We "breed" plenty of plants via cuttings as well - how else do you suppose seedless grapes, watermelons, etc. are bred?.
So it was, though for that one to count though you have to consider the Buran itself to be part of the payload. The Energia-Buran had a payload of only 30,000kg, just slightly more than the Space Shuttle. It looks like the Energia alone claimed a payload capacity of 100,000kg, but that assumed the payload would achieve orbital insertion on its own, which rather seems like cheating if we're comparing it to launch vehicles capable of actually delivering their payloads to orbit.
You obviously weren't around for the first successful fire-making test. Now THAT was hot!
Heck - potentially far earlier than that. "Monkey see, monkey do" - mimicry is a common trait among primates, and even those with no apparent language pass on knowledge of their limited technologies via demonstration (e.g. how to prepare a branch to effectively fish termites from their mound). Proto-humans probably passed stone-knapping and other technologies along that way for a very long time before we developed communication capabilities abstract enough to really be called "language".
It's probably a lot less efficient though - communication lets you explain what the student is doing wrong far more clearly than pointing and grunting, as well as making it a lot easier to collaborate on ideas with your peers. And there's some arguments to be made that language may have even stimulated the development of our capacity for abstract thought.
>From what I've understood of orbital mechanics you have to reach LEO first to go anywhere else.
Not strictly necessary, but there's not a lot of wasted effort in doing so, and you'd need MUCH more powerful rockets (or other launch systems) to even consider doing anything else. If we ever build a lunar "beanstalk" space elevator though that may change - you could extend a cable from the moon, through the Earth-Moon L1 point, almost to Earth, and have the free end traveling with the same angular momentum (relative to Earth) as the Earth's surface, so that a direct vertical "rocket hop" to grab the end could potentially be far more efficient. Once you're on an elevator you're (potentially) only dealing with friction losses, actual orbital energies can be transferred between ascending and descending payloads.
Tumbling cable space elevators are another option, and can actually do that without any moving parts or efficiency losses - transferring momentum directly between their own mass and that of the payloads as they're caught and released at different points in the rotation. Around Earth though they have their own challenges. Either technique though would be far more achievable than an Earth-based "beanstalk" - which would require materials considerably stronger than anything we've developed so far (flawless multiwalled carbon nanotubes could theoretically do the job, but you'd have basically no safety margin)
Cool, I had to rewatch it in response, and you're absolutely correct. The difference is dramatic, *definitely* almost-duplicate feeds last time. Perhaps, like CL said, the two feeds from a stereo camera. But an awesome landing, and now we can follow both down to their respective pads.
Hmm, that's not bad. I still miss the old days when I charged my flip-phone maybe once a week.
>we want them to be as small as reasonable
I quite agree. But am I alone in thinking that the vast majority have gone well beyond that point? It's a rare phone that wouldn't benefit from being twice the thickness with 3x the battery life. Maybe they could even use that added thickness to include some structural components so the things could take more of a beating.
I still have my original-model TI-85 from 1992 - it doesn't get as much use anymore, but it took a heck of a beating through 10 years of school and another 15 in the office, and is still going strong. Seem to remember hearing it was designed to be able to drive over it (with the cover on) and probably not damage it - though that may have been an urban legend inspired by its toughness. In comparison a modern hi-end "phablet" smartphone costs considerably more, has about the same footprint, but breaks if you look at it funny.