www.apple.CA: $1899 for the base model $3.3k for the SSD model.
These are in Canadian dollars which are worth roughly 2% more than a US dollar (at least last I checked) so converting this into USD gives $1937 which easily rounds to $2k. I'm sure this is the price that Apple must be charging you in the US because Apple is such a fine, upstanding company that I know they wouldn't dream of participating in the usual price gouging of Canadian consumers.
Then, don't buy a subnotebook. The whole point of a subnotebook is that you sacrifice a bit on features and price in order to get something that's really damn small.
Then how come my PDA, which is even smaller, manages to have a replaceable battery? I realize that there is a trade-off between space and features but I cannot imagine that a replaceable battery would add much space. Of course all Mr. Jobs is concerned about is will the lack of this feature put enough people off that they will not buy it. However I cannot imagine there would be many people would would say "there is not way I'm going to buy a 0.8" thick laptop, if only it had been 0.76" thick" whereas there are a lot of us you will not buy one without a replaceable battery.
Certainly for me this is a deal breaker - there is no way I'm going to buy a lap top with a 5 hour, non-replaceable battery for $2-3k. I need at least 8 hours to get through the average sort of day where I would want the portability (notetaking/email in conferences and working on a plane). Yes maybe they will come up with an external battery but then it will hardly be very convenient. No more popping in the replacement battery and using it all afternoon, instead you have to lug around a separate battery to use it. This is in addition to battery lifetime problems.
And Americans mostly did invent the Internet, computer (well, us and the Brits), motor car (well, us and the Brits), the light bulb and the telephone. Find some other examples if you want to prove how stupid and uncreative Americans are.
Unfortunately you rather prove the original posters point. I'll give you the internet and joint credit on the computer but...
The car was invented by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot(French) in 1769. This was before America existed as a separate country so it is a little hard to see how an American could have invented it. His was steam powered but even the internal combustion engine was a Swiss invention by François Isaac de Rivaz who put it in a car in 1807.
The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell who was a British (a Scot in fact) living in Canada in 1874 when he invented the phone. He registered the patent in the US and later also acquired US citizenship but that does NOT make it a US invention in my book.
Edison did not invent the light bulb. He bought the patent for a carbon filament bulb from Woodward (a Canadian) and then copied the developments of Swann (a Brit) who was using tungsten filaments. He was successfully sued by Swann in the UK for violating his patent (for which Swann was given a majority share of Edison's UK company which is why early UK bulbs are all 'Swann-Edison') but in the US case there is considerable evidence to suggest that Edison significantly misrepresented the facts to the judge and that, coupled with the known bias of the US patent courts towards US claimants that exists even today, was enough for him to win the US case. There was an excellent book on this. I don't have it to hand to give you the reference but IIRC it was by a US author. The result is that claiming Edison invented the light bulb is akin to claiming that Gates invented the operating system.
What is interesting is that the US contribution to the inventions you think of as American appears to be the mass production and marketing. It is clear that both Edison and Ford were fantastic businessmen. They knew what people wanted and what they would pay and found a way to deliver wildly popular products. This, in itself, is a very worthy and useful contribution to society...but it does not mean that they actually came up with the original invention. A more modern equivalent would be Gates. Whatever you say about Windows he is a fantastic businessman. He knew what businesses wanted and delivered it.
Personally I think they should update the criteria too but I was thinking more along the lines of giving the award for "activities that show absolutely no evidence of intelligent design"!
The comment that struck me is one board member stating that they were "Opposed to teaching Evolution as a fact."
....but I bet, never the less that he BELIEVES in it as a fact. Lawrence Lessig (of Physics of Star Trek fame) gave an excellent talk at a Canadian physics conference I was at last year where he explained that scientists should not take too much to heart all these medieval occurances since deap down people really did believe in evolution.
His example was the bird flu scare. Absolutely nobody went around say: "don't worry it cannot possible evolve into something deadly to us, it was designed for birds and will stay that way". So when push comes to shove these people really do believe in science and evolution. So in the end they are really nothing more than hypocrits which, since most of them are politicians, we already knew anyway.
Telling everyone that X is bad and Y is good and you should avoid X and do Y instead just makes people resentful, because they like doing X and then feel guilty when they do it.
Actually it is a lot worse than that. Part of the problem is that the media jump all over new results and publicize them before they have been scientifically confirmed (although the huge number of conflicting reports which the medical profession apparently produces does give one pause to consider the level of scientific rigour). As a result the message tends to be: X is good and Y is bad. Oops sorry, actually X is bad too, oh now Y is good, err...sorry actually neither are particularly great, have you tried Z?...and so on. So is it any wonder than most people just ignore it and do what they want?
Imagine what chaos aspiring electronics buffs will be able to create with Wii controllers!
Fortunately more useful things like an interactive whiteboard for $40. The only problem I've had is trying to get my hand on a Wii Remote to try it out but the idea is brilliant...at least if you are a professor: I can teach them physics at the same time as using physics to teach!
I fail to see how it's the copyright law that is letting artists get screwed over by the recording labels
It is not, it is allowing US to get screwed over by the recording labels/Hollywood. Think about it: copyright is very much like a patent in that it grants a monopoly for a limited period of time in order to encourage creativity. The difference is that the "customer" for patent holders are often other firms and it is certainly other firms which have their rights limited most by patents. Now compare the term of a patent (20 years) to the term of copyright (70+ years), where we are the customers and it is us who have our rights limited the most.
I understand that legally copyrights and patents are separate things but conceptually they are very similar. So why is it that we have such huge term lengths for copyrights? If artists can live off their old work for the best part of a century why can't inventors? The main difference to me seems to be the lobbying power of the group whose rights are restricted.
You are correct if you go far enough back but at least we can run a fair election when we try. As I see it the US is trying to run a fair election but literally cannot.
In the end the anonymous vote allows us to vote secure in our liberty. This has always been everyone's first priority. It is only a second priority that the vote be accurate and the result a representation of the public will.
Perhaps for everyone in the US. Elsewhere the top priority has been accuracy and secrecy combined: it is not hard to manage. We've been doing it in Europe since before North America was discovered, although admittedly not everyone got to vote until more recently. We are still working on the "...and the result a representation of the public will" bit though. The main problem seems to be that once elected the buggers decide to go off and line their own pockets. So if you do come up with a solution to that be sure to let the rest of us know!
Broadly speaking CC works well, but with photography, it's a particularly thorny issue because there's a lot more complexity in how copyright and other legal issues work with a photo.
IN THE US. It is worth remembering that there are an awful lot more people not subject to the strange photo copyright rules of the US than are. I understood that CC, like the GPL, was supposed to be a worldwide license, not just a US based one.
Nano technology makes nearly everything possible, and at the same time makes nearly everything ubiquitous and therefore worthless. The only true things of value are those labour intensive things made by hand.
I have not read the book but I fail to see the logic in that. If it makes nearly everything possible then surely it can create everything which is made by hand as well in such a manner that it is hard/impossible to distinguish between the two. In such a world I would have thought that new ideas are the one thing which has value.
I think he just gave me a terrorist look!
But a central task is to recognize microfacial expressions -- a flash of feelings that in a fraction of a second reflects emotions such as fear, anger, surprise or contempt, said Carl Maccario, who helped start the program for TSA.
The average passenger nowadays lives in fear of flight delays/cancellations (or ironically a fear of terrorism!), is angry at the treatment they often receive and holds a lot of the airlines in contempt. So I'm not quite sure how the "terrorist look" will differ from the "average passenger look".
it's illegal to go 70 mph; nobody would ever find out about it if Ford did that since we all would obey the law.
70 mph is the standard motorway speed limit in the UK, 120 or 130 km/h in most of the rest of Europe (which are both over 70 mph) and unlimited on parts of the German autobahn (or used to be). Even in the US the limit is 75 mph on your motorways in some states. Since I'm assuming that you'd know the speed limit in your own country I'm now curious to know where you live since I would guess that this covers a good fraction of Ford's market.
We have the same system in the UK and it works fine for higher population densities (200 times that of Canada) just fine. From what I understand of the US system it was perfect for coping with the communication system of the 18th century but come on guys it's the 21st century now! In fact I think the US system was actually best summed up by one of your past presidents (Carter IIRC) who stated that if a dictatorship adopted the US system it would not be recognised as fully democratic by the UN.
There is apparently only a limited amount of energy available as the universe appears to be both finite and without external sources of energy.
At the risk of sounding like a theorist (I'm actually an experimentalist!): this is an experimental problem not a theoretical one. Supposing the Universe had been created with twice as much energy and identical physical laws? As such this is a practical limit but not a theoretical limit on the temperature. For example in theory worm holes may be possible in practice they are not because you need a negative mass to hold the ends open.
If we assume this continues then we can get a bound based on the theoretical lamda_min (the planck length).
Why is the planck length the minimum wavelength? This is only the peak of the distribution and any blackbody will be emitting wavelengths well above this at significantly lower temperatures. At these energies you probably have a black hole rather than a black body so it will be Hawking radiation rather than black body radiation.
These laws were derived by experimentation and suggest that there is no upper bound. There is no reason to suppose that these laws are not valid up to at least the Planck scale. Beyond that we can't say for certain. So while you are technically correct and we have to keep an open mind about what the laws might be at some as yet unreached energy there is, so far, absolutely no suggestion that there is a maximum energy. The biggest indication of this is that the energy scale actually defines the physics regime we need to consider. As someone once said: "the trick with science is to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out"!
warning i'm not a physicist: but as things speed up don't they gain mass?
That is a very popular misconception that Einstein himself warned against falling into. Particles do not gain mass as they more faster anymore than the electron's charge changes when it is moving faster. What is actually happening is that space-time are distorted relative to a non-moving object. The problem comes because, while the mass is not changing, you can use your old, familiar classical physics equations by pretending that it is.
and propelling them to the speed of light requires infinite amount of energy so...there must be a point where an atom/ion cannot go any faster thus raise the temperature of some space
If you think about it you have answered your own question here! You say it takes an infinite amount of energy to get a mass moving at the speed of light which is correct. Conservation of energy says that this energy has to go some where...and it does: it goes into the kinetic energy of the gas/plasma particles. Hence you already understand that there is no limit to the kinetic energy of the gas particles - they have a finite velocity but not a finite energy, this is not classical physics with the familiar 0.5mv^2 KE formula. Hence there is no theoretical limit to temperature in standard SR.
Temperature is directly related to the velocity of the atoms in a gas or plasma.
No - it is directly related to the kinetic energy of the atoms in a gas and the electrons and ions/nuclei in a plasma (there are no atoms in a plasma). In classical physics this is 0.5mv^2 but this is just the low energy approximation of the true KE which is "ymc^2-mc^2" where y=gamma=1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). As you can see this has no upper bound.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are you getting this 2k-3k number?
www.apple.CA: $1899 for the base model $3.3k for the SSD model.
These are in Canadian dollars which are worth roughly 2% more than a US dollar (at least last I checked) so converting this into USD gives $1937 which easily rounds to $2k. I'm sure this is the price that Apple must be charging you in the US because Apple is such a fine, upstanding company that I know they wouldn't dream of participating in the usual price gouging of Canadian consumers.
Then, don't buy a subnotebook. The whole point of a subnotebook is that you sacrifice a bit on features and price in order to get something that's really damn small.
Then how come my PDA, which is even smaller, manages to have a replaceable battery? I realize that there is a trade-off between space and features but I cannot imagine that a replaceable battery would add much space. Of course all Mr. Jobs is concerned about is will the lack of this feature put enough people off that they will not buy it. However I cannot imagine there would be many people would would say "there is not way I'm going to buy a 0.8" thick laptop, if only it had been 0.76" thick" whereas there are a lot of us you will not buy one without a replaceable battery.
Certainly for me this is a deal breaker - there is no way I'm going to buy a lap top with a 5 hour, non-replaceable battery for $2-3k. I need at least 8 hours to get through the average sort of day where I would want the portability (notetaking/email in conferences and working on a plane). Yes maybe they will come up with an external battery but then it will hardly be very convenient. No more popping in the replacement battery and using it all afternoon, instead you have to lug around a separate battery to use it. This is in addition to battery lifetime problems.
Unfortunately you rather prove the original posters point. I'll give you the internet and joint credit on the computer but...
- The car was invented by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot(French) in 1769. This was before America existed as a separate country so it is a little hard to see how an American could have invented it. His was steam powered but even the internal combustion engine was a Swiss invention by François Isaac de Rivaz who put it in a car in 1807.
- The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell who was a British (a Scot in fact) living in Canada in 1874 when he invented the phone. He registered the patent in the US and later also acquired US citizenship but that does NOT make it a US invention in my book.
- Edison did not invent the light bulb. He bought the patent for a carbon filament bulb from Woodward (a Canadian) and then copied the developments of Swann (a Brit) who was using tungsten filaments. He was successfully sued by Swann in the UK for violating his patent (for which Swann was given a majority share of Edison's UK company which is why early UK bulbs are all 'Swann-Edison') but in the US case there is considerable evidence to suggest that Edison significantly misrepresented the facts to the judge and that, coupled with the known bias of the US patent courts towards US claimants that exists even today, was enough for him to win the US case. There was an excellent book on this. I don't have it to hand to give you the reference but IIRC it was by a US author. The result is that claiming Edison invented the light bulb is akin to claiming that Gates invented the operating system.
What is interesting is that the US contribution to the inventions you think of as American appears to be the mass production and marketing. It is clear that both Edison and Ford were fantastic businessmen. They knew what people wanted and what they would pay and found a way to deliver wildly popular products. This, in itself, is a very worthy and useful contribution to society...but it does not mean that they actually came up with the original invention. A more modern equivalent would be Gates. Whatever you say about Windows he is a fantastic businessman. He knew what businesses wanted and delivered it.Personally I think they should update the criteria too but I was thinking more along the lines of giving the award for "activities that show absolutely no evidence of intelligent design"!
Ah, that would be Austrian wine flavoured ice-cream then?
The comment that struck me is one board member stating that they were "Opposed to teaching Evolution as a fact."
....but I bet, never the less that he BELIEVES in it as a fact. Lawrence Lessig (of Physics of Star Trek fame) gave an excellent talk at a Canadian physics conference I was at last year where he explained that scientists should not take too much to heart all these medieval occurances since deap down people really did believe in evolution.
His example was the bird flu scare. Absolutely nobody went around say: "don't worry it cannot possible evolve into something deadly to us, it was designed for birds and will stay that way". So when push comes to shove these people really do believe in science and evolution. So in the end they are really nothing more than hypocrits which, since most of them are politicians, we already knew anyway.
...and if you can achieve point 4 then they aren't really a good programmer.
Telling everyone that X is bad and Y is good and you should avoid X and do Y instead just makes people resentful, because they like doing X and then feel guilty when they do it.
...and so on. So is it any wonder than most people just ignore it and do what they want?
Actually it is a lot worse than that. Part of the problem is that the media jump all over new results and publicize them before they have been scientifically confirmed (although the huge number of conflicting reports which the medical profession apparently produces does give one pause to consider the level of scientific rigour). As a result the message tends to be: X is good and Y is bad. Oops sorry, actually X is bad too, oh now Y is good, err...sorry actually neither are particularly great, have you tried Z?
Imagine what chaos aspiring electronics buffs will be able to create with Wii controllers!
Fortunately more useful things like an interactive whiteboard for $40. The only problem I've had is trying to get my hand on a Wii Remote to try it out but the idea is brilliant...at least if you are a professor: I can teach them physics at the same time as using physics to teach!
I fail to see how it's the copyright law that is letting artists get screwed over by the recording labels
It is not, it is allowing US to get screwed over by the recording labels/Hollywood. Think about it: copyright is very much like a patent in that it grants a monopoly for a limited period of time in order to encourage creativity. The difference is that the "customer" for patent holders are often other firms and it is certainly other firms which have their rights limited most by patents. Now compare the term of a patent (20 years) to the term of copyright (70+ years), where we are the customers and it is us who have our rights limited the most.
I understand that legally copyrights and patents are separate things but conceptually they are very similar. So why is it that we have such huge term lengths for copyrights? If artists can live off their old work for the best part of a century why can't inventors? The main difference to me seems to be the lobbying power of the group whose rights are restricted.
War is Peace,
Freedom is Slavery,
Ignorance is Strength
Well thanks to Mr. Bush the US has managed to achieve 2 out of 3 so I guess now he's working on the 'freedom' angle...
You are correct if you go far enough back but at least we can run a fair election when we try. As I see it the US is trying to run a fair election but literally cannot.
In the end the anonymous vote allows us to vote secure in our liberty. This has always been everyone's first priority. It is only a second priority that the vote be accurate and the result a representation of the public will.
Perhaps for everyone in the US. Elsewhere the top priority has been accuracy and secrecy combined: it is not hard to manage. We've been doing it in Europe since before North America was discovered, although admittedly not everyone got to vote until more recently. We are still working on the "...and the result a representation of the public will" bit though. The main problem seems to be that once elected the buggers decide to go off and line their own pockets. So if you do come up with a solution to that be sure to let the rest of us know!
It doesn't say what it can teleport. Teleportation of a single electron has been achieved in the lab so it might be a rather unimpressive add on.
No: In Soviet Russia, YOU drive CZAR (out).
Broadly speaking CC works well, but with photography, it's a particularly thorny issue because there's a lot more complexity in how copyright and other legal issues work with a photo.
IN THE US. It is worth remembering that there are an awful lot more people not subject to the strange photo copyright rules of the US than are. I understood that CC, like the GPL, was supposed to be a worldwide license, not just a US based one.
Nano technology makes nearly everything possible, and at the same time makes nearly everything ubiquitous and therefore worthless. The only true things of value are those labour intensive things made by hand.
I have not read the book but I fail to see the logic in that. If it makes nearly everything possible then surely it can create everything which is made by hand as well in such a manner that it is hard/impossible to distinguish between the two. In such a world I would have thought that new ideas are the one thing which has value.
Pretty much anything out there was hacked if someone had an interest in it (and mostly the interest wasn't commercial, just "for fun").
What is worse is that after 7+ hours on a transatlantic flight just about anything will look interesting.
I think he just gave me a terrorist look! But a central task is to recognize microfacial expressions -- a flash of feelings that in a fraction of a second reflects emotions such as fear, anger, surprise or contempt, said Carl Maccario, who helped start the program for TSA.
The average passenger nowadays lives in fear of flight delays/cancellations (or ironically a fear of terrorism!), is angry at the treatment they often receive and holds a lot of the airlines in contempt. So I'm not quite sure how the "terrorist look" will differ from the "average passenger look".
it's illegal to go 70 mph; nobody would ever find out about it if Ford did that since we all would obey the law.
70 mph is the standard motorway speed limit in the UK, 120 or 130 km/h in most of the rest of Europe (which are both over 70 mph) and unlimited on parts of the German autobahn (or used to be). Even in the US the limit is 75 mph on your motorways in some states. Since I'm assuming that you'd know the speed limit in your own country I'm now curious to know where you live since I would guess that this covers a good fraction of Ford's market.
We have the same system in the UK and it works fine for higher population densities (200 times that of Canada) just fine. From what I understand of the US system it was perfect for coping with the communication system of the 18th century but come on guys it's the 21st century now! In fact I think the US system was actually best summed up by one of your past presidents (Carter IIRC) who stated that if a dictatorship adopted the US system it would not be recognised as fully democratic by the UN.
There is apparently only a limited amount of energy available as the universe appears to be both finite and without external sources of energy.
At the risk of sounding like a theorist (I'm actually an experimentalist!): this is an experimental problem not a theoretical one. Supposing the Universe had been created with twice as much energy and identical physical laws? As such this is a practical limit but not a theoretical limit on the temperature. For example in theory worm holes may be possible in practice they are not because you need a negative mass to hold the ends open.
If we assume this continues then we can get a bound based on the theoretical lamda_min (the planck length).
Why is the planck length the minimum wavelength? This is only the peak of the distribution and any blackbody will be emitting wavelengths well above this at significantly lower temperatures. At these energies you probably have a black hole rather than a black body so it will be Hawking radiation rather than black body radiation.
These laws were derived by experimentation and suggest that there is no upper bound. There is no reason to suppose that these laws are not valid up to at least the Planck scale. Beyond that we can't say for certain. So while you are technically correct and we have to keep an open mind about what the laws might be at some as yet unreached energy there is, so far, absolutely no suggestion that there is a maximum energy. The biggest indication of this is that the energy scale actually defines the physics regime we need to consider. As someone once said: "the trick with science is to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out"!
warning i'm not a physicist: but as things speed up don't they gain mass?
That is a very popular misconception that Einstein himself warned against falling into. Particles do not gain mass as they more faster anymore than the electron's charge changes when it is moving faster. What is actually happening is that space-time are distorted relative to a non-moving object. The problem comes because, while the mass is not changing, you can use your old, familiar classical physics equations by pretending that it is.
and propelling them to the speed of light requires infinite amount of energy so...there must be a point where an atom/ion cannot go any faster thus raise the temperature of some space
If you think about it you have answered your own question here! You say it takes an infinite amount of energy to get a mass moving at the speed of light which is correct. Conservation of energy says that this energy has to go some where...and it does: it goes into the kinetic energy of the gas/plasma particles. Hence you already understand that there is no limit to the kinetic energy of the gas particles - they have a finite velocity but not a finite energy, this is not classical physics with the familiar 0.5mv^2 KE formula. Hence there is no theoretical limit to temperature in standard SR.
Temperature is directly related to the velocity of the atoms in a gas or plasma.
No - it is directly related to the kinetic energy of the atoms in a gas and the electrons and ions/nuclei in a plasma (there are no atoms in a plasma). In classical physics this is 0.5mv^2 but this is just the low energy approximation of the true KE which is "ymc^2-mc^2" where y=gamma=1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). As you can see this has no upper bound.