"I just don't understand where people get that Star Trek and Star Wars are similar in any way."
They are both Hollywood entertainment franchises that became very popular in the 1970s*, featuring space ships and other advanced technology, settings in space and on other planets, and titles that fit the pattern "Star ????" If you can't see how they're similar, you're trying too hard not to.
*Yes, I know when Star Trek debuted; read that sentence more carefully.
It amazes me that so many advocates of profitization of government services still don't understand that they create corporate monopolies that are just as bad as the government, but without accountability to a public which has about as much choice to patronize them as they do whether to submit to the government agencies they replace.
If the woman looked like she was going to cry, "CRY" would have been a natural sign for the chimp to make, regardless of whether she understood the human's emotional state or empathized with it.
Where did they get this "30% of cars by 2015" prediction, a 1980s issue of Popular Mechanics? Even if there were some technological breakthrough that launched us from the DARPA Grand Challenge to market-ready road-ready vehicles next month, there is no way that public safety advocates would stand for them to be introduced onto the public roadways in anything more than carefully-controlled experiments in the next few years. Once the tech is ready, the legal liability issues alone will take the better part of a decade to address. Public confidence in such technology would take even longer. As long as we have GPS systems that give people bad directions, and personal computers that "crash", the public will not buy computer-piloted cars in any significant numbers and they will not accept them on the same roads they use.
Even if Ron Paul doesn't want create a theocracy at the state level, his strict-constructionist/fundamentalist reading of the Constitution would allow that to happen in those states that are prone to that theocracy. It may be in keeping with the letter of the Constitution, but certainly not its spirit.
The Onion has an article joking that Americans enjoy remembering 9/11 more than we enjoy remembering the 10 years since. It's true, and you can hardly blame us. On 9/11, despite the pain and fear, we saw scenes from around the world of people weeping along with us, or standing firmly in solidarity with us, because they saw this attack on the US as an attack on civilized people everywhere. Sure, there were some assholes cheering here and there, but there was also the Queen of England having "The Star Spangled Banner" played at Buckingham Palace, and countless makeshift US flags and signs saying things like "we are all Americans today" being waved at vigils in the streets around the world.
Then George W. Bush – with the support of the American people – pissed all over that goodwill, to the point that the Nobel committee eagerly handed the Peace Prize to the new guy when "regime change" finally happened.
I wrote this on 9/12/2001. I sent it in to the local newspaper, and they ran it on the front page of the Opinion section the following Sunday, next to a big picture of Osama Bin Laden and an article about what America would do in response. As my words were being read, they were already being ignored. Fear and Hatred won.
"Hopefully getting their control channel hammered with SMS noise will induce them to offer some sort of reasonably priced modest-speed data mechanism that isn't a horrible pile of hack..."
More likely it will just result in the elimination of unlimited SMS plans.
I remember thinking it was a huge deal when the population reached 4 billion. After all, it had been 3-billion-something my entire life, which was already incomprehensible, but at least it was easily remembered. Then it hit 5, then 6... and I don't even keep track any more. I had to look it up a few weeks ago when I wanted to make a comment about how "there are X people on this planet" which is the only reason I knew we hadn't hit 7 yet. So it's doubled in my lifetime (46 years) already.
A bit of population trivia that someone pointed out to me recently: colonial "British India" included what is now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. If it had not been arbitrarily partitioned in 1947, but had instead held together as a single nation-state, it would be the most populous country in the world, with more than 1.5 billion people. That hypothetical country plus China would collectively contain over 40% of the world's population.
Bring out a 2011 equivalent of the HP/Compaq TC1100 (an old tablet which the iPad was compared to on a hardware-spec-equivalency basis when it was released), and I will buy it.
HP seems to have become akin to a black hole (or Galactus), devouring other companies and permanently destroying them in the process. OK, it was Compaq that engulfed DEC, but then HP engulfed Compaq. Now it has done the same to 3Com, Palm, and even its own industry-leading microcomputer division seems destined for the singularity.
Definitely part of the problem here is Léo Apotheker, the guy currently in charge of the trainwreck that is HP. I like the commentary quoted in the NY Times that likens him to hypothetical former Boeing exec taking over Ford, then announcing that Ford was going to make planes instead.
If the second edition of Kernighan & Ritchie was published in 1988, I must have read the first, because it was one of the texts for my mid-80s CS degree. I still have it around here somewhere. For better or worse, I didn't change my life much, as I never went into programming as a career. Seems like a missed opportunity. One of far too many.
In my work as a {groan} Help Desk staffer, I still encounter users who don't have basic keyboard skills. Either they are relatively young, and their experience with virtual keyboards apparently leads them to think that CapsLock is the way to enter uppercase letters, even on physical keyboards.... or they are {sigh} my age, and don't grasp how to use keys like Ctrl and Alt. ("Hold down the 'Alt' key, and then press 'Tab' ("where's that?").)
Actually what I love most about this film is how the B&W rendering and the use of intertitles and accompanying music, gives it the flavor of a silent movie, making it feel even older than it is.
Translation: "I don't have decent broadband in the backwater where I live, so I have to select the special 'ship me a CD' option and pay extra when I buy software.... [whine, whine, whine]"
I don't have any stats handy, but the percentage of software that is distributed on optical media has been plummeting in recent years. The software that isn't available for direct download is dwindling fast. Yes, I buy software, and I buy most of it online, and download it on the spot. My broadband is kinda sucky too, but I deal with it. Like the floppy disk 10 years ago, the optical disk has become optional. It's handy to have an external drive sitting around Just In Case, but it's an accessory, not a necessity. In fact, I recently built a new system from that hardware up, and the only thing I used an optical drive for, was to load Windows. Once I had an OS with a functional TCP/IP stack, the optical drive was superfluous.
No, the iPad has a keyboard. The fact that it's flat* and vanishes when not needed doesn't change the fact that it's an input device with which you tap out letters and numbers with your fingers.
*So was the keyboard on my Atari 400 computer back in the Middle Ages.:)
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So cut it out, Paul.
"I just don't understand where people get that Star Trek and Star Wars are similar in any way."
They are both Hollywood entertainment franchises that became very popular in the 1970s*, featuring space ships and other advanced technology, settings in space and on other planets, and titles that fit the pattern "Star ????" If you can't see how they're similar, you're trying too hard not to.
*Yes, I know when Star Trek debuted; read that sentence more carefully.
It amazes me that so many advocates of profitization of government services still don't understand that they create corporate monopolies that are just as bad as the government, but without accountability to a public which has about as much choice to patronize them as they do whether to submit to the government agencies they replace.
If the woman looked like she was going to cry, "CRY" would have been a natural sign for the chimp to make, regardless of whether she understood the human's emotional state or empathized with it.
According to William S. Burroughs (and a Laurie Anderson song inspired by him), language is a virus.
Where did they get this "30% of cars by 2015" prediction, a 1980s issue of Popular Mechanics? Even if there were some technological breakthrough that launched us from the DARPA Grand Challenge to market-ready road-ready vehicles next month, there is no way that public safety advocates would stand for them to be introduced onto the public roadways in anything more than carefully-controlled experiments in the next few years. Once the tech is ready, the legal liability issues alone will take the better part of a decade to address. Public confidence in such technology would take even longer. As long as we have GPS systems that give people bad directions, and personal computers that "crash", the public will not buy computer-piloted cars in any significant numbers and they will not accept them on the same roads they use.
VMS -> WNT -> W2K -> W2003 -> W2008 -> VMS.
You do realize that that is the part of the country (rural PA) that Obama was talking about with his "cling to their guns and religion" comment?
Even if Ron Paul doesn't want create a theocracy at the state level, his strict-constructionist/fundamentalist reading of the Constitution would allow that to happen in those states that are prone to that theocracy. It may be in keeping with the letter of the Constitution, but certainly not its spirit.
The Onion has an article joking that Americans enjoy remembering 9/11 more than we enjoy remembering the 10 years since. It's true, and you can hardly blame us. On 9/11, despite the pain and fear, we saw scenes from around the world of people weeping along with us, or standing firmly in solidarity with us, because they saw this attack on the US as an attack on civilized people everywhere. Sure, there were some assholes cheering here and there, but there was also the Queen of England having "The Star Spangled Banner" played at Buckingham Palace, and countless makeshift US flags and signs saying things like "we are all Americans today" being waved at vigils in the streets around the world.
Then George W. Bush – with the support of the American people – pissed all over that goodwill, to the point that the Nobel committee eagerly handed the Peace Prize to the new guy when "regime change" finally happened.
I wrote this on 9/12/2001. I sent it in to the local newspaper, and they ran it on the front page of the Opinion section the following Sunday, next to a big picture of Osama Bin Laden and an article about what America would do in response. As my words were being read, they were already being ignored. Fear and Hatred won.
"Hopefully getting their control channel hammered with SMS noise will induce them to offer some sort of reasonably priced modest-speed data mechanism that isn't a horrible pile of hack..."
More likely it will just result in the elimination of unlimited SMS plans.
He's not from space; that's just where he got his super powers.
If you can be observed, you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and can be photographed. The direction and distance don't matter.
(Unless you're a police officer doing your job poorly, of course.)
You can see pretty much anything "from space". Find yourself a strong enough lens or a low enough orbit, and "I can see my house from here".
I remember thinking it was a huge deal when the population reached 4 billion. After all, it had been 3-billion-something my entire life, which was already incomprehensible, but at least it was easily remembered. Then it hit 5, then 6... and I don't even keep track any more. I had to look it up a few weeks ago when I wanted to make a comment about how "there are X people on this planet" which is the only reason I knew we hadn't hit 7 yet. So it's doubled in my lifetime (46 years) already.
A bit of population trivia that someone pointed out to me recently: colonial "British India" included what is now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. If it had not been arbitrarily partitioned in 1947, but had instead held together as a single nation-state, it would be the most populous country in the world, with more than 1.5 billion people. That hypothetical country plus China would collectively contain over 40% of the world's population.
Bring out a 2011 equivalent of the HP/Compaq TC1100 (an old tablet which the iPad was compared to on a hardware-spec-equivalency basis when it was released), and I will buy it.
HP seems to have become akin to a black hole (or Galactus), devouring other companies and permanently destroying them in the process. OK, it was Compaq that engulfed DEC, but then HP engulfed Compaq. Now it has done the same to 3Com, Palm, and even its own industry-leading microcomputer division seems destined for the singularity.
Definitely part of the problem here is Léo Apotheker, the guy currently in charge of the trainwreck that is HP. I like the commentary quoted in the NY Times that likens him to hypothetical former Boeing exec taking over Ford, then announcing that Ford was going to make planes instead.
If the second edition of Kernighan & Ritchie was published in 1988, I must have read the first, because it was one of the texts for my mid-80s CS degree. I still have it around here somewhere. For better or worse, I didn't change my life much, as I never went into programming as a career. Seems like a missed opportunity. One of far too many.
In my work as a {groan} Help Desk staffer, I still encounter users who don't have basic keyboard skills. Either they are relatively young, and their experience with virtual keyboards apparently leads them to think that CapsLock is the way to enter uppercase letters, even on physical keyboards.... or they are {sigh} my age, and don't grasp how to use keys like Ctrl and Alt. ("Hold down the 'Alt' key, and then press 'Tab' ("where's that?").)
Actually what I love most about this film is how the B&W rendering and the use of intertitles and accompanying music, gives it the flavor of a silent movie, making it feel even older than it is.
It may not be as technologically advanced, but it has a better plot than [insert recent digitally-rendered feature film here]!
Translation: "I don't have decent broadband in the backwater where I live, so I have to select the special 'ship me a CD' option and pay extra when I buy software.... [whine, whine, whine]"
I don't have any stats handy, but the percentage of software that is distributed on optical media has been plummeting in recent years. The software that isn't available for direct download is dwindling fast. Yes, I buy software, and I buy most of it online, and download it on the spot. My broadband is kinda sucky too, but I deal with it. Like the floppy disk 10 years ago, the optical disk has become optional. It's handy to have an external drive sitting around Just In Case, but it's an accessory, not a necessity. In fact, I recently built a new system from that hardware up, and the only thing I used an optical drive for, was to load Windows. Once I had an OS with a functional TCP/IP stack, the optical drive was superfluous.
"omitting an optical drive in a full-size desktop computer build seems something like cheating"
Optical disks? How quaint! :)
And how exactly does that contradict what I said? :)
The problem was that the UI wasn't designed for tablet use; Apple solved that, by creating one that was.
No, the iPad has a keyboard. The fact that it's flat* and vanishes when not needed doesn't change the fact that it's an input device with which you tap out letters and numbers with your fingers.
*So was the keyboard on my Atari 400 computer back in the Middle Ages. :)