"My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system"... NASA had that vision with the Space Shuttle, but even excluding all R&D and capital purchases, just the incremental costs per launch were orders of magnitude higher than $500k per seat. And that's just to LEO! OK, that's "halfway to anywhere", but maintenance is a bitch, the staff required is huge, on and on... NASA isn't a role model for efficiency, but I seriously doubt that the commercial sector is going to be able to outdevelop them in just 10-15 years.
I thought the same a few years ago, but SpaceX just did everything right then. Hey, they developed a launcher (two actually), launchpads and a spacecraft, built *and* launched them for about the same amount of money as NASA or ESA need to build a single launchpad. ESA's ATV alone (without the launcher and everything else) did cost *more* than what SpaceX did spend altogether until now and ATV is just a one-way orbital transporter with no reentry capability.
Outdeveloping NASA and the other government-fed entities seems very much possible.
How does he plan on getting the fuel TO Mars in the first place?
He doesn't want to get it TO Mars, he wants to get it FROM Mars. There's enough CO2 and water there to produce your own fuel and oxidizer from local resources. Has been proposed (and demonstrated engineering-wise) since decades. This is not easy or cheap, but much easier and cheaper than to transport it there from Earth.
There is no fuel to be found, but you can make fuel from the atmosphere (CO2) and water (and lots of power from solar cells or fission). This has been proposed for decades now. For everything more than a one-off foot print mission it's certainly worth the effort.
Elon Musk may be a bit crazy, but he's not an idiot. In fact SpaceX has done lots of things meanwhile that were deemed plain impossible with the kind of money they had in hand. The crucial point will be if SpaceX will be a profitable company in the next years. If they manage to make sane profits I'm pretty well sure that Musk will put every penny into going to Mars. He's *that* crazy, really.
One important thing to note is that the laws of the physical world are pretty much ingrained in us. Not only in us, even in animals and their reactions to things. Things from the physical realm *have* to obey these laws (or they wouldn't work) and just imitating them can help here. *Understanding* why they work is better, though.
One reason the iPhone took off as it did despite its touchscreen was the fact that the scrolling was modelled closely on the behaviour of "real" things: There is friction and inertia, you can "throw" a page, everything works in a reliable, predictable way because it's the same way every physical thing behaves. There is no abstraction here at all, it even painfully emulates things that have no real meaning in the digital world. They have meaning for us and our animal minds and bodies, though. We are a product of millions of years of evolution in the physical world and while there is freedom in breaking out of this there's also much to work with in this.
Their devices are not innovative, they are just the most polished and accessible devices pretty much available. No wonder they are so love/hate on Slashdot, but the rest of the world loves em. Combined with one of the most effective distribution channels ever made, it's a pretty remarkable combo for consumers.
I think that many people just confuse "invention" and "innovation":
Wikipedia: "Innovation is the creation of better or more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are accepted by markets, governments, and society. Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a new idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the creation of the idea or method itself."
Apple might not have invented very much, but Apple surely has innovated a lot, also with devices.
You may think about SJ what you want, but if you look at his presentations and speeches one thing that is much more interesting than his RDF is the pieces this RDF is made up from: He is extremely clear, logically convincing, he speaks freely without a script and everything appears to be very well thought through. You don't need to accept what he did and what he thought, but there's still much to learn from him, if you like him or not.
For any political, public or indeed business work these are abilities that are extremely important and at the same time rare. I can fully understand that there were people wanting him badly in a political rule. And I'm actually happy that he was obviously single-minded enough to not fall for that. He never cared for anything but computers, applied technology and business. Even if you don't like the company, the software and the business he built, the way he managed to do that certainly is something to learn from.
Only idiots refuse to learn from people they don't like. The opposite from something that is totally wrong is invariably also totally wrong.
I mean saving the $200 is nice, admittedly, but not at the expense of dumping mercury into some Chinese town's river water, or working some 12-year-old for 16 hour days.
Extend this to food, clothes, oil, natural resources and everything else and you may find yourself in a position where you can't spare a penny to buy any smartphone or TV at all.
THIS would be honest. Nobody does that though, because then it would really, really start to hurt.
The point is that more and more companies offer products that replace open protocols with open servers and clients. Email is/was SMTP with millions of servers and client applications implementing that protocol. No room to make money apart from selling bandwidth. The web as we know it is HTTP with millions of servers and clients and while there is ample room to make money it's not actually a product.
Facebook and Twitter aren't protocols. They are products, owned and controlled by companies that does all of this to make money and to achieve this they offer what people want, not what's sound and reasonable from a technological POV.
If you have a closer look at this you will find that there are reasons for this shifting picture: All the good old protocols were designed from a very technical point of view, or from the point of view of technical users. Email is complicated to set up, there's a reason for many people (if they still use email at all anymore) using some webmail service. It also doesn't do very much except sending messages and small files around. It offers no way to actually find people. The web (based on the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) just transfers files containing clever markup and doesn't care for anything else. All of this fine and dandy from a technical POV but just doesn't address very much of what "normal" people actually want to do.
I really can't be angry about what Facebook does, because: We (as geeks) just totally failed to come up with protocols and tools for an infrastructure that would've been able to address the needs of casual users. Instead we insisted that webmail is silly and a full-featured MUA the way to go. In Usenet we were fighting HTML content and fake names even as Usenet (as a communication platform) went under. And there was never anything that even tried to implement a net-wide address book or useful calendaring. All these missing things left a gaping hole that companies like Facebook just exploded into like a gas into a vacuum.
It's easy to hate Facebook and to praise geekdom, but we just miserably failed. We were (and still are) more fascinated by the tools instead of what people might want to do.
Until better management tools are made to "manage" the apple devices / environment, they will still be a secondary (or greater) choice for enterprise environments.
While I agree that Apple is very much sitting on its hands here, there is no way to ignore iDevices. It's almost like an "Occupy IT" movement. And the users are relishing our squirming and cursing. And while I'm an sysadmin myself, I'd almost say we deserve it to be on the receiving end this time. It's a comically reversed situation to how it usually works: Users are requiring simple things, you know they aren't that simple and you can't do anything really but learn and work and adapt and curse. Wow, that *hurts*. *They* are the ones who traditionally had to swallow what we rained down on them.
Now *they* are smug and wave their iPads ("it just works") and we have to find a way to make them work and to manage them. How unfair is this? Now *we* are clicking through iTunes for *them*! What goes around comes around, really.
The root problem is China is a communist state with a restrictive market that prevents people from "shopping around" and getting the best prices possible for their labor.
You have no idea. China is communist in name, but in fact it is more capitalist than the US. People aren't prevented from "shopping around" for work, they're forced to do that. China has hundreds of millions of workers travelling the country looking for (and finding) work. They are leaving their home villages because state-owned factories have shut down and there is just nothing left to live from there. It's these people who work at Foxconn and elsewhere. Offer them a better job elsewhere and they're off the same day. In fact they end up at Foxconn exactly this way.
Today's China is not communism, it's rabid capitalism without democracy.
Apple claims some rights over what you make using their software. I know of no other software that does this, and the very idea strikes me as objectionable and worthy of ridicule, regardless of practical effect.
I've not used the software, but your description suggests it's a stupidly trivial program that does almost nothing, so maybe it doesn't matter in practical terms. Then again, Apple bothered to add this clause to their EULA, so Apple thinks it matters.
It's a fully integrated one-stop book writing, formatting and publishing app, from text to bookshelf in one app. I don't know if this counts as "trivial" in your book, but nobody else, especially Amazon, offers anything like it. Which is strange enough, actually, but there you are.
I think basically Apple wants to make sure that nobody (like Amazon) tries to ride on Apple's back by just supporting the same format and features on a cheaper ebook reader and offering a slightly better cut for the author.
You don't need to think of that as "generous" (it certainly isn't) but from a business POV it's just sensible. It's a proprietary app for a certain store you can use for free. Not altruistic, but also not evil. No love and flowers, just business.
Apple could as well have used a proprietary binary DRM'ed file format and then left out that clause in the EULA which would have had exactly the same effect: You can use it only in the iBooks store and nowhere else. This way you get at least a zipped bunch of clean XML, XHTML, media, and plist files and no DRM for free books.
I don't exactly love that, but there's also no reason to hate it.
Google should just turn that into a feature by gifting a S/MIME certificate to every user with an authenticated real name and of course support this with Gmail. This way you could finally have encrypted and/or signed email for free and would have a social network account you can use for everything you want to have published provable by you.
I will never understand what's wrong with having a social network that insists in real names. There are more than enough offers for services and networks that just allow everyone to pretend to be someone else. If you want to be anonymous or pseudonymous, use something else then. But having *one* option to have an account that is *provable* yours and a way to mail and write things that are *provable* written by you: What is so bad about having this option? Come on, what is bad about this? You don't have to use it. But if you want it or need it, it's there. Why should every social network work the same way? Why would we need more than one if all worked the same way?
Nothing against using an assumed name (as you see I'm not using my real name here), but some people are *insisting* in *nobody* ever using their real name in a way that is nearly manic. There are sometimes reasons to be identifiable and to be able to sign things you write and to have a way of being able to prove your identity. Really. Having one network to support and even enforce that is good. It's just one option. Having no way to do it is not more freedom, it is less freedom.
"Title and intellectual property rights in and to any content displayed by or accessed through the Apple Software belongs to the respective content owner."
Note the "content". Software (as iBooks Author) creates files or documents or "works", but not content. Authors create content. This content is yours.
If you think this is word-wanking, try the following gedankenexperiment:
You write a book using MS Word for the text, Photoshop for the illustrations and you even buy some high-quality photos for it. Then you import all of that into iBooks Author to create a book for the iBook Store. You also import all of that into InDesign (or whatever software you bought for creating ePubs) to sell elsewhere.
How should the book you created from *your* content be affected by the iBook Author EULA? It isn't. Apple even spells this out in the EULA. The content of course is yours to sell.
I'm not an Apple fanboi and I don't like Apple very much but I think iBook Author and the iBook store is a good idea. I also don't like the EULA terms very much but they are not what some people would like you to think they are. If you want to sell the file created with iBooks Author you can sell it only via Apple. But if you want to sell your content in that book elsewhere you can still do that.
Meanwhile I just hate that kind of sensational journalism that ignores facts and just wants to drive page-views by fueling hate and fury. Really, I'm sick of it. Be rational and READ THE FUCKING EULA.
I don't consider being able to use my device in high ambient light conditions "one tiny advantage."
Maybe, but you're a rather small market;-)
Really, how often is the average user unable to use his tablet or smartphone due to the light being too bright? Don't forget that displays have become brighter and brighter in the last years. And what amount of poor colors, contrast and viewing angles do you think would he accept to have this fixed? I tell you what: He wouldn't be willing to give up *any* of this. He would gladly buy something that has no disadvantages and the additional advantage to be usable in bright sunlight, yes.
Modern LCD/LED displays are bad in very bright light (like direct sunlight) and very good everywhere else. Pixel Qi displays are Ok in bright light (they still have poor contrast and no color then, they look more like dark grey on silver) and bad everywhere else. Thinking that the mass market would prefer the latter is just not realistic.
I'm not saying that you're wrong or that it wouldn't be great to have the option to order a tablet or laptop with a Pixel Qi display. I just mean to say that there are reasons for the mainstream not embracing these displays.
Poor colors, poor contrast, poor viewing angles in normal (color) mode.
Basically it has one tiny advantage (readable in bright light) that you have to buy with having what for all intents and purposes is a piss-poor LCD everywhere else. And most people use their devices indoor anyway where Pixel Qi displays look like a cheap LCD from five years ago. And the mainstream vendors know this very well.
Pixel Qi is not a miracle display technology. It has its uses in certain cases but it's not just better overall as some people seem to think.
Finally, it is in mankind's best interest to move beyond earth.
This is true. I'm not against manned spaceflight, I'm just against all this pseudo-science excuses people lacking the balls to state this simple fact are making all the time. For science, robots are better and cheaper. To go there, they're not. I'm very happy about SpaceX and Elon Musk finally saying "we want to go and that's it". No need for feeble excuses. Let's go.
A near vacuum is actually a pretty good insulation. Regolith would help against radiation, though. Ice would be even better, there are quite a few places on Mars with thick ice deposits. You also get water there (no, really?)...
Still, all of this is pointless. There's just nothing that robotic probes wouldn't do much cheaper, especially since they don't need to breath, eat, drink, wash and be returned.
If people want to see the surface they can use one of the video feeds or climb up the ladder/take the elevator to the surface.
If this is enough why don't just send a probe with a video camera and view the feed from your comfortable home down here on Earth? Much cheaper, too.
As others already said: There's just no fscking reason to go there. The only reason is "we want to" and nobody likes to say this, so everybody makes up scientific reasons and others that never hold up to any kind of analysis.
Yeah, I think we should go to Mars (and elsewhere, like the Jupiter moons) just because we can and want. It's hard and it's expensive and dangerous and possible, so let's do it. Let's do all the science we can on the way, but don't think even for a moment that this is the actual reason.
There was a time when efficient encryption was considered a weapon and could not be exported from the US. This was given up later.
Looking back this was just logical. The point is that controlling what code is being exported is very hard and anyway coming up with good encryption is not that hard anyway. But once you have devices everywhere that can use end-to-end encryption of communications very easily and cheaply, everyone can use that and encrypted communication is basically out of control.
The only halfway practical way to deal with this is: Just allow all of this but make sure that you get access to the devices at a point BEFORE any encryption takes place (and after decryption).
I don't like the very idea, but on the other hand I really can't imagine any state or government to accept safe encryption in communications being the norm with no way to listen in. Democracy or not, but ubiquitous encrypted communication for everyone (including criminals, terrorists, whoever) is something that is impossible to accept for any government that sees controlling and policing as part of the job description.
I would also say that bringing foreign countries satellites back for inspection was why Nixon went with the shuttle which could never go high enough to fulfill that mission but now the Air Force has a relatively cheap space plane that could do that and bring it back. On a coolness scale from 1 to 10 it's an 11.
A wet dream that won't achieve more than soiled pants.
Even if the satellite/craft won't have a self-destruction charge (soviet satellites were known to have these) grappling and storing anything that isn't prepared for that and will have fuel and RCS engines is just madness. And then the payload capacity of this puny spaceplane isn't enough for more than a microsat even without thinking of what the grappling, storing and securing devices would take up.
Funny enough I'm the IT guy for a small chain of arthouse theatres and there is no dropping of revenue going on there. Rather the other way round, this year was again better than the last.
And yes, tickets are rather cheap, concession (drinks, popcorn, etc.) too, there are about 30 different movies on monthly and hardly any of these are Hollywood movies. Still, people love that. They could buy the DVD instead, but they prefer to come into a friendly place, have a talk before and after the movie, drink a nice (and not too expensive) beer from a healthy selection, munch some very cheap and tasty popcorn and generally have a jolly good time. Many come at least once a week. Once you start to realize that there are literally thousands of great movies you've never heard of in the news there's a whole new world to explore. And once you realize that this is not just an "industry" you may even find some nice theatre you really like to go to.
I would totally agree that you can't rely only on blockbusters. Or on selling expensive beverages.
Finding someone for that kind of pay who is able to do all of this and do it well won't be easy:
Academics have a name for such people. They're called "grad students".
Basically, yes. But then you'll be responsible to keep all that tech not only maintained but also up and running while replacing and updating it, and this with someone who has (probably) only very limited years to live and work. Breaking this old tech and then working half a year on a real new, real good, full-featured modern replacement for it is not really an option.
Well, I'm not saying he won't find someone. Could be a cool and rewarding job anyway.
Finding someone for that kind of pay who is able to do all of this and do it well won't be easy:
Managing national and international travel for Prof. Hawking and his care team. Expect to spend around 3 months per year abroad! Development and maintenance of Professor Hawking's communication and speech systems Procurement and maintenance of his wheelchairs and accessible van Preparation of lecture graphics and public speaking Dealing with the media and press Answering inquiries from the public and maintaining the website The post requires a wide range of skills, most importantly: Ability to work under pressure Maintenance of "black box" systems with no instruction manual or technical support Computer literacy Electronics knowledge Ability to speak to a large audience Ability to show others how to use complex systems
Slashdot Mirror
"My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system" ... NASA had that vision with the Space Shuttle, but even excluding all R&D and capital purchases, just the incremental costs per launch were orders of magnitude higher than $500k per seat. And that's just to LEO! OK, that's "halfway to anywhere", but maintenance is a bitch, the staff required is huge, on and on... NASA isn't a role model for efficiency, but I seriously doubt that the commercial sector is going to be able to outdevelop them in just 10-15 years.
I thought the same a few years ago, but SpaceX just did everything right then. Hey, they developed a launcher (two actually), launchpads and a spacecraft, built *and* launched them for about the same amount of money as NASA or ESA need to build a single launchpad. ESA's ATV alone (without the launcher and everything else) did cost *more* than what SpaceX did spend altogether until now and ATV is just a one-way orbital transporter with no reentry capability.
Outdeveloping NASA and the other government-fed entities seems very much possible.
How does he plan on getting the fuel TO Mars in the first place?
He doesn't want to get it TO Mars, he wants to get it FROM Mars. There's enough CO2 and water there to produce your own fuel and oxidizer from local resources. Has been proposed (and demonstrated engineering-wise) since decades. This is not easy or cheap, but much easier and cheaper than to transport it there from Earth.
There is no fuel to be found, but you can make fuel from the atmosphere (CO2) and water (and lots of power from solar cells or fission). This has been proposed for decades now. For everything more than a one-off foot print mission it's certainly worth the effort.
Elon Musk may be a bit crazy, but he's not an idiot. In fact SpaceX has done lots of things meanwhile that were deemed plain impossible with the kind of money they had in hand. The crucial point will be if SpaceX will be a profitable company in the next years. If they manage to make sane profits I'm pretty well sure that Musk will put every penny into going to Mars. He's *that* crazy, really.
One important thing to note is that the laws of the physical world are pretty much ingrained in us. Not only in us, even in animals and their reactions to things. Things from the physical realm *have* to obey these laws (or they wouldn't work) and just imitating them can help here. *Understanding* why they work is better, though.
One reason the iPhone took off as it did despite its touchscreen was the fact that the scrolling was modelled closely on the behaviour of "real" things: There is friction and inertia, you can "throw" a page, everything works in a reliable, predictable way because it's the same way every physical thing behaves. There is no abstraction here at all, it even painfully emulates things that have no real meaning in the digital world. They have meaning for us and our animal minds and bodies, though. We are a product of millions of years of evolution in the physical world and while there is freedom in breaking out of this there's also much to work with in this.
Their devices are not innovative, they are just the most polished and accessible devices pretty much available. No wonder they are so love/hate on Slashdot, but the rest of the world loves em. Combined with one of the most effective distribution channels ever made, it's a pretty remarkable combo for consumers.
I think that many people just confuse "invention" and "innovation":
Wikipedia: "Innovation is the creation of better or more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are accepted by markets, governments, and society. Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a new idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the creation of the idea or method itself."
Apple might not have invented very much, but Apple surely has innovated a lot, also with devices.
You may think about SJ what you want, but if you look at his presentations and speeches one thing that is much more interesting than his RDF is the pieces this RDF is made up from: He is extremely clear, logically convincing, he speaks freely without a script and everything appears to be very well thought through. You don't need to accept what he did and what he thought, but there's still much to learn from him, if you like him or not.
For any political, public or indeed business work these are abilities that are extremely important and at the same time rare. I can fully understand that there were people wanting him badly in a political rule. And I'm actually happy that he was obviously single-minded enough to not fall for that. He never cared for anything but computers, applied technology and business. Even if you don't like the company, the software and the business he built, the way he managed to do that certainly is something to learn from.
Only idiots refuse to learn from people they don't like. The opposite from something that is totally wrong is invariably also totally wrong.
Extend this to food, clothes, oil, natural resources and everything else and you may find yourself in a position where you can't spare a penny to buy any smartphone or TV at all.
THIS would be honest. Nobody does that though, because then it would really, really start to hurt.
Look out for the LTE phones on that battery life chart. Hint: Start looking from the bottom.
The point is that more and more companies offer products that replace open protocols with open servers and clients. Email is/was SMTP with millions of servers and client applications implementing that protocol. No room to make money apart from selling bandwidth. The web as we know it is HTTP with millions of servers and clients and while there is ample room to make money it's not actually a product.
Facebook and Twitter aren't protocols. They are products, owned and controlled by companies that does all of this to make money and to achieve this they offer what people want, not what's sound and reasonable from a technological POV.
If you have a closer look at this you will find that there are reasons for this shifting picture: All the good old protocols were designed from a very technical point of view, or from the point of view of technical users. Email is complicated to set up, there's a reason for many people (if they still use email at all anymore) using some webmail service. It also doesn't do very much except sending messages and small files around. It offers no way to actually find people. The web (based on the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) just transfers files containing clever markup and doesn't care for anything else. All of this fine and dandy from a technical POV but just doesn't address very much of what "normal" people actually want to do.
I really can't be angry about what Facebook does, because: We (as geeks) just totally failed to come up with protocols and tools for an infrastructure that would've been able to address the needs of casual users. Instead we insisted that webmail is silly and a full-featured MUA the way to go. In Usenet we were fighting HTML content and fake names even as Usenet (as a communication platform) went under. And there was never anything that even tried to implement a net-wide address book or useful calendaring. All these missing things left a gaping hole that companies like Facebook just exploded into like a gas into a vacuum.
It's easy to hate Facebook and to praise geekdom, but we just miserably failed. We were (and still are) more fascinated by the tools instead of what people might want to do.
Until better management tools are made to "manage" the apple devices / environment, they will still be a secondary (or greater) choice for enterprise environments.
While I agree that Apple is very much sitting on its hands here, there is no way to ignore iDevices. It's almost like an "Occupy IT" movement. And the users are relishing our squirming and cursing. And while I'm an sysadmin myself, I'd almost say we deserve it to be on the receiving end this time. It's a comically reversed situation to how it usually works: Users are requiring simple things, you know they aren't that simple and you can't do anything really but learn and work and adapt and curse. Wow, that *hurts*. *They* are the ones who traditionally had to swallow what we rained down on them.
Now *they* are smug and wave their iPads ("it just works") and we have to find a way to make them work and to manage them. How unfair is this? Now *we* are clicking through iTunes for *them*! What goes around comes around, really.
The root problem is China is a communist state with a restrictive market that prevents people from "shopping around" and getting the best prices possible for their labor.
You have no idea. China is communist in name, but in fact it is more capitalist than the US. People aren't prevented from "shopping around" for work, they're forced to do that. China has hundreds of millions of workers travelling the country looking for (and finding) work. They are leaving their home villages because state-owned factories have shut down and there is just nothing left to live from there. It's these people who work at Foxconn and elsewhere. Offer them a better job elsewhere and they're off the same day. In fact they end up at Foxconn exactly this way.
Today's China is not communism, it's rabid capitalism without democracy.
Apple claims some rights over what you make using their software. I know of no other software that does this, and the very idea strikes me as objectionable and worthy of ridicule, regardless of practical effect.
I've not used the software, but your description suggests it's a stupidly trivial program that does almost nothing, so maybe it doesn't matter in practical terms. Then again, Apple bothered to add this clause to their EULA, so Apple thinks it matters.
It's a fully integrated one-stop book writing, formatting and publishing app, from text to bookshelf in one app. I don't know if this counts as "trivial" in your book, but nobody else, especially Amazon, offers anything like it. Which is strange enough, actually, but there you are.
I think basically Apple wants to make sure that nobody (like Amazon) tries to ride on Apple's back by just supporting the same format and features on a cheaper ebook reader and offering a slightly better cut for the author.
You don't need to think of that as "generous" (it certainly isn't) but from a business POV it's just sensible. It's a proprietary app for a certain store you can use for free. Not altruistic, but also not evil. No love and flowers, just business.
Apple could as well have used a proprietary binary DRM'ed file format and then left out that clause in the EULA which would have had exactly the same effect: You can use it only in the iBooks store and nowhere else. This way you get at least a zipped bunch of clean XML, XHTML, media, and plist files and no DRM for free books.
I don't exactly love that, but there's also no reason to hate it.
Google should just turn that into a feature by gifting a S/MIME certificate to every user with an authenticated real name and of course support this with Gmail. This way you could finally have encrypted and/or signed email for free and would have a social network account you can use for everything you want to have published provable by you.
I will never understand what's wrong with having a social network that insists in real names. There are more than enough offers for services and networks that just allow everyone to pretend to be someone else. If you want to be anonymous or pseudonymous, use something else then. But having *one* option to have an account that is *provable* yours and a way to mail and write things that are *provable* written by you: What is so bad about having this option? Come on, what is bad about this? You don't have to use it. But if you want it or need it, it's there. Why should every social network work the same way? Why would we need more than one if all worked the same way?
Nothing against using an assumed name (as you see I'm not using my real name here), but some people are *insisting* in *nobody* ever using their real name in a way that is nearly manic. There are sometimes reasons to be identifiable and to be able to sign things you write and to have a way of being able to prove your identity. Really. Having one network to support and even enforce that is good. It's just one option. Having no way to do it is not more freedom, it is less freedom.
You're still missing the point.
If Apple doesn't publish you. GAME OVER. The only way to get your book out there after that is to give it away...for free!
Nonsense. You only can't publish the very file created by iBooks Author elsewhere. The content you wrote is still yours.
This is even spelled out in the EULA later on. Of course this is desperately ignored in that article and everywhere else.
Really. It's even in the fscking EULA:
"Title and intellectual property rights in and to any content displayed by or accessed through the Apple Software belongs to the respective content owner."
Note the "content". Software (as iBooks Author) creates files or documents or "works", but not content. Authors create content. This content is yours.
If you think this is word-wanking, try the following gedankenexperiment:
You write a book using MS Word for the text, Photoshop for the illustrations and you even buy some high-quality photos for it. Then you import all of that into iBooks Author to create a book for the iBook Store. You also import all of that into InDesign (or whatever software you bought for creating ePubs) to sell elsewhere.
How should the book you created from *your* content be affected by the iBook Author EULA? It isn't. Apple even spells this out in the EULA. The content of course is yours to sell.
I'm not an Apple fanboi and I don't like Apple very much but I think iBook Author and the iBook store is a good idea. I also don't like the EULA terms very much but they are not what some people would like you to think they are. If you want to sell the file created with iBooks Author you can sell it only via Apple. But if you want to sell your content in that book elsewhere you can still do that.
Meanwhile I just hate that kind of sensational journalism that ignores facts and just wants to drive page-views by fueling hate and fury. Really, I'm sick of it. Be rational and READ THE FUCKING EULA.
Maybe, but you're a rather small market ;-)
Really, how often is the average user unable to use his tablet or smartphone due to the light being too bright? Don't forget that displays have become brighter and brighter in the last years. And what amount of poor colors, contrast and viewing angles do you think would he accept to have this fixed? I tell you what: He wouldn't be willing to give up *any* of this. He would gladly buy something that has no disadvantages and the additional advantage to be usable in bright sunlight, yes.
Modern LCD/LED displays are bad in very bright light (like direct sunlight) and very good everywhere else. Pixel Qi displays are Ok in bright light (they still have poor contrast and no color then, they look more like dark grey on silver) and bad everywhere else. Thinking that the mass market would prefer the latter is just not realistic.
I'm not saying that you're wrong or that it wouldn't be great to have the option to order a tablet or laptop with a Pixel Qi display. I just mean to say that there are reasons for the mainstream not embracing these displays.
Poor colors, poor contrast, poor viewing angles in normal (color) mode.
Basically it has one tiny advantage (readable in bright light) that you have to buy with having what for all intents and purposes is a piss-poor LCD everywhere else. And most people use their devices indoor anyway where Pixel Qi displays look like a cheap LCD from five years ago. And the mainstream vendors know this very well.
Pixel Qi is not a miracle display technology. It has its uses in certain cases but it's not just better overall as some people seem to think.
Finally, it is in mankind's best interest to move beyond earth.
This is true. I'm not against manned spaceflight, I'm just against all this pseudo-science excuses people lacking the balls to state this simple fact are making all the time. For science, robots are better and cheaper. To go there, they're not. I'm very happy about SpaceX and Elon Musk finally saying "we want to go and that's it". No need for feeble excuses. Let's go.
A near vacuum is actually a pretty good insulation. Regolith would help against radiation, though. Ice would be even better, there are quite a few places on Mars with thick ice deposits. You also get water there (no, really?)...
Still, all of this is pointless. There's just nothing that robotic probes wouldn't do much cheaper, especially since they don't need to breath, eat, drink, wash and be returned.
If people want to see the surface they can use one of the video feeds or climb up the ladder/take the elevator to the surface.
If this is enough why don't just send a probe with a video camera and view the feed from your comfortable home down here on Earth? Much cheaper, too.
As others already said: There's just no fscking reason to go there. The only reason is "we want to" and nobody likes to say this, so everybody makes up scientific reasons and others that never hold up to any kind of analysis.
Yeah, I think we should go to Mars (and elsewhere, like the Jupiter moons) just because we can and want. It's hard and it's expensive and dangerous and possible, so let's do it. Let's do all the science we can on the way, but don't think even for a moment that this is the actual reason.
There was a time when efficient encryption was considered a weapon and could not be exported from the US. This was given up later.
Looking back this was just logical. The point is that controlling what code is being exported is very hard and anyway coming up with good encryption is not that hard anyway. But once you have devices everywhere that can use end-to-end encryption of communications very easily and cheaply, everyone can use that and encrypted communication is basically out of control.
The only halfway practical way to deal with this is: Just allow all of this but make sure that you get access to the devices at a point BEFORE any encryption takes place (and after decryption).
I don't like the very idea, but on the other hand I really can't imagine any state or government to accept safe encryption in communications being the norm with no way to listen in. Democracy or not, but ubiquitous encrypted communication for everyone (including criminals, terrorists, whoever) is something that is impossible to accept for any government that sees controlling and policing as part of the job description.
I would also say that bringing foreign countries satellites back for inspection was why Nixon went with the shuttle which could never go high enough to fulfill that mission but now the Air Force has a relatively cheap space plane that could do that and bring it back. On a coolness scale from 1 to 10 it's an 11.
A wet dream that won't achieve more than soiled pants.
Even if the satellite/craft won't have a self-destruction charge (soviet satellites were known to have these) grappling and storing anything that isn't prepared for that and will have fuel and RCS engines is just madness. And then the payload capacity of this puny spaceplane isn't enough for more than a microsat even without thinking of what the grappling, storing and securing devices would take up.
Funny enough I'm the IT guy for a small chain of arthouse theatres and there is no dropping of revenue going on there. Rather the other way round, this year was again better than the last.
And yes, tickets are rather cheap, concession (drinks, popcorn, etc.) too, there are about 30 different movies on monthly and hardly any of these are Hollywood movies. Still, people love that. They could buy the DVD instead, but they prefer to come into a friendly place, have a talk before and after the movie, drink a nice (and not too expensive) beer from a healthy selection, munch some very cheap and tasty popcorn and generally have a jolly good time. Many come at least once a week. Once you start to realize that there are literally thousands of great movies you've never heard of in the news there's a whole new world to explore. And once you realize that this is not just an "industry" you may even find some nice theatre you really like to go to.
I would totally agree that you can't rely only on blockbusters. Or on selling expensive beverages.
Finding someone for that kind of pay who is able to do all of this and do it well won't be easy:
Academics have a name for such people. They're called "grad students".
Basically, yes. But then you'll be responsible to keep all that tech not only maintained but also up and running while replacing and updating it, and this with someone who has (probably) only very limited years to live and work. Breaking this old tech and then working half a year on a real new, real good, full-featured modern replacement for it is not really an option.
Well, I'm not saying he won't find someone. Could be a cool and rewarding job anyway.
Finding someone for that kind of pay who is able to do all of this and do it well won't be easy: