Sure some phones now come with mini-sd slots and what not. But still, if I want a camera my 5MP Canon will do much better.
Yes, but I don't have my camera on me every moment of the day, whereas I have my phone in my pocket every waking moment. I find that I have a lot of use for a camera on a daily basis, and it doesn't matter that the pictures aren't the best quality. It's the same story with other non-phone features of my smartphone - I use them extensively. Just because these features aren't useful for YOU, doesn't mean there's no market for them. This point gets made on Slashdot literally every time a phone article is published, so I'm surprised we're still having to have this discussion.
Unless you see phones with a 4MP camera, 128MB of ram, 500 MHz ARM, etc... it's hard to say they're really "replacing" anything.
Which is exactly why no one IS saying they're "replacing" anything. The claim is that they "complement" your other devices by being always available in a pinch.
So rather than deploy weapons into space to defend terrestrial resources, why not get our resources from space? The cost to do either are pretty much the same
The costs are pretty much the same? I'd really like to see the cost analysis on that one. I strongly suspect that you pulled that "estimate" out of your nether regions.
We did, in fact, build such a system. It consisted of a bunch of nuclear-tipped SAMs, plus cueing radars, etc - 60's era technology was not sufficiently accurate to do anything but get the interceptor in the general vicinity of the incoming - hence the need for nuclear warheads. My impression is that the system wasn't considered very cost-effective.
This article is highly amateurish and just about content-free. Shorter "Space Review":
Myth: The US already has satellite killers.
The Space Review: No they don't! (no citation given)
Myth: The US wants to deny space to those it considers hostile.
TSR: No they don't! (no citation given)
Myth: The US is planning to place weapons in space for the purpose of ground attack.
TSR: No they aren't! (no citation given)
Myth: The US ballistic missile defense systems have the capability to shoot down satellites.
TSR: So what, the Russians have the same capability!
Myth: Tests of space based BMD systems also are preparations for an ASAT capability.
TSR: Let's confuse the issue by only talking about boost-phase BMD intercept!
Myth: The Russians have declared a moratorium on ASAT weapons testing.
TSR: No they haven't! (no citation given)
Myth: The Russian's "killer satellite" never worked very well.
TSR: Yes it did! (no citation given)
I stopped reading at this point. This whole article is nothing more than a fact-free propaganda screed. I can't believe Slashdot even bothered to post it... on second thought, yes I can.
Who the hell came up with the putrid expression "telematics"? Remember the days when you could look at a word made out of Latin and Greek bits, and even if you'd never seen it before, you could understand its meaning because you knew what the individual parts of the word meant?
So let's see: "tele", meaning "at a distance", and "matics", meaning "action". So it must be some kind of spooky action at a distance! Quantum entanglement! Or at least remote control! Cool! Oh, wait, it's just a video screen in the back so the kids can watch cartoons.
I guess being able to analyze words is going to come to a halt now that the marketing "professionals" of the world have taken over absolutely every aspect of life, up to and including our language.
The system works on short and intermediate range missiles - the kind presumably launched from submarines.
Short and intermediate range ballistic missiles are not typically launched from submarines. The only ballistic missiles launched from US subs are no-kidding ICBMs - Trident II's. With a few exceptions (the Brits, Russians, maybe a few others), no one else has a subsurface ballistic missile capability at all. And the THAAD system would not be capable of intercepting that kind of missile (if I understand it correctly).
Actually, short and intermediate range ballistic missiles are pretty much always land-based. Think Pershing II in the US, or SCUD overseas. These are the kinds of systems THAAD is meant to counter.
So, Americans get cheaper products, but have to pay for "Extended Apple Care" and such.
Actually, I can decide for myself whether I want to buy the "extended care" plan or not. I typically don't. And the products almost never fail prematurely anyway, so on balance, I'd rather skip paying extra for a reliability guarantee that I'm not likely to need.
Don't get me wrong - I'm generally in favor of more-European style consumer product regulation in the US. But it doesn't always work out in your favor.
Seriously, practically every phone either comes with a cheap case or you can pick one up cheap. Or you can slap on one of those protective film sheets. I don't think yours is a realistic objection to this design.
... what does come out of general revenue is the enormous military expense required to ensure that the supply of oil continues to flow from the Middle East without obstruction. If we weren't so dependent on fossil fuels, we could leave that part of the world to settle its own problems, and our military could be significantly smaller.
Maybe it's not so unreasonable to ask motorists to pony up to fund some of these gigantic defense expenditures.
The Apple mouse doesn't have three buttons. I spent a whole $9 for a Logitech optical wheel mouse, and all the buttons (including the scroll wheel) work just fine with no configuration.
I have a Powerbook, and I don't want to plug a damn external mouse into it. I want to use the touchpad, and I want said touchpad to be more useful... by including a second freakin' mouse button. I get tired of being thwarted by the one button disciples, whose reasons for opposing the second button seem to be variants on the theme of "but we've always done it this way". It's a lot easier for people who only want to use button to just ignore any other buttons, than it is for me to have to go find some software utility to simulate the other buttons.
And don't start with "you can just use Cmd-click" (or whatever the key combo is) to simulate the second button. Sometimes I'm doing something with my other hand - um, y'know, like holding my coffee cup. Yeah, that's it.
... you just made up 10 numbers and multiplied them together. To say: "out of 10,000,000 candidates, let's say 1 in 10 develops simple life" or "out of 1,000,000 planets with simple life, 1 in 10 develops complex life" is to beg the question. We have no evidence whatsover of how likely it is that planets with the "right" conditions develop life. In fact, we have a sample size of exactly one. I can say "only 1 out of every 100 trillion planets with the "right" conditions (whatever they are) will develop simple life", and I'll have exactly as much evidence to support my position as you do to support yours - which is to say, none.
Speculating about how many planets contain advanced civiliations, while entertaining, is pointless without any evidence one way or the other.
What an apt name. As others have pointed out, how can inanimate collections of ones and zeros be free? Your error is that the user is, in fact, more free. You've carefully crafted your statement to say that the user is no more free with GPL software than he is with BSD or public domain software. Well, that's true, as far as it goes. But the vast majority of software that the average Joe uses is neither public domain nor BSD-licensed. It's proprietary. And the GPL beats the snot out of that for the user.
Keep working on it, and maybe you can aspire to become "MediocreAnalogyGuy".
Sean
No voice command for me, thanks
on
A New Kind of OS
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· Score: 1
Of course, everyone has their own preferred way of interacting with their computer... but I personally shudder in horror to think about a world in which voice command was the norm. Can you imagine working in a cube farm where everyone was talking to their computers literally all day long? I used to get annoyed enough when I was forced to listen in on people's speakerphone conversations.
Sean
I'm not seeing your iPhoto problem
on
A New Kind of OS
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· Score: 1
One of my biggest complaints about Apple's declining UI standards (which used to be top-notch) has been the way that iPhoto organizes it's albums [snip]. When you create an album in iPhoto, and move your photos into there, it's not actually creating a folder on the HD and moving or even copying your photos into that. The iPhoto album grouping is contained entirely in iPhoto. This means that if I want to send someone an album, I can't just zip some folder in my iPhoto library and send it... I've got to go into iPhoto and "export" those photos.
I think the problem is really in the way you're looking at this. iPhoto, in effect, is a photo database. The "folders" you see in the iPhoto interface aren't supposed to represent file system folders - they're really more like queries. You wouldn't expect, Access, for example, to actually store records in file system folders that mapped to different views of the data, and you wouldn't expect to use an OS file system explorer to get at the data - you're content to let Access store the data however is most efficient, and use its interface to get at the data when you need it. iPhoto is the same thing, but for pictures.
Now it's possible that the "folder" metaphor used by iPhoto leads you down the wrong path, so maybe that could be improved. But in practice, I think that any attempt to provide a more accurate database type metaphor would baffle the hell out of Apple's customers, most of who don't know diddly about how databases work. So we're back to square one: users aren't getting everything they could out of their computers, because they don't really understand how their hardware and software works. But the chances of them actually putting forth the effort to learn what they need to know are very small. It's a conundrum.
Technically it refers to everything that's not baryonic matter (aka "regular" matter -- the category that includes every particle we have ever directly observed, including neutrinos).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that baryonic particles only included those made of quarks - your protons, neutrons, etc. To be even more specific, my recollection was that to be a baryon ("heavy particle"), a particle had to have three quarks. The two quark models (your pions, kaons, etc.) are called mesons ("mid-weight particles"). And your neutrinos, electrons, etc, were yet a third type - the leptons ("light particles") - that weren't made of quarks at all.
In practice, I doubt this distinction matters very much, because the leptons don't weigh much of anything, and the mesons are too unstable to be a very big contituent of the universe.
Anyhow, the point is that it is easy to imageine how overloading "pluton" could result in a lot of unnecessary confusion in the planetary sciences
I, for one, find it virtually impossible to imagine how overloading "pluton" could result in a lot of confusion. In context, it's going to be obvious to the most casual observer which meaning is actually intended. This whole objection is ridiculous.
When did it become the rule that each word could have one and only one meaning? Who really thinks there's going to be confusion over this? It's ridiculous.
... he said she shouldn't HAVE to know. There's an important difference. In my house, my wife is the one who sets up the televisions, stereos, etc, and although I could figure it out if I needed to, I don't particularly WANT to. I just want it to work. The point here is that you shouldn't need to be an expert on how the system is set up just to be able to use it.
I have thought for a long time that singularities were impossible due to conservation of angular momentum. Velocity is all relative, so if you have a spinning basketball and squish it down to half it's original circumference, the relative velocity of two opposing points on it's equator will double.
And its angular momentum will be unchanged. So what's the problem?
The math is difficult to reproduce on a slashdot posting, but I'll leave it to anyone interested as homework. Suffice it to say that for L = angular momentum, I = moment of inertia, and w = angular velocity, L = I * w. Also, for a uniform sphere, I = 2/5 m r^2, where m = mass of the sphere, and r = radius of the sphere. It's easy to show that if r (before) = 2 * r(after), then w(before) =.25 w(after) (where "before" and "after" mean before and after squashing the basketball). And since the velocity v of a point on the equator of the spinning sphere is v = 2 * pi *r *w, it's also easy to show that every time you halve the diameter of the sphere, the linear velocity of a point on the surface doubles. This means that when angular momentum is unchanged, the limit of the linear velocity of any point on the sphere is finite as the radius goes to zero.
In case it wasn't obvious, IWAPMIC (I was a physics major in college).
Perhaps I misread TFA, but my impression was that this was really some sort of telepresence. How does it save you any time, if you have to be wired up to some control system for the robot to make all these lifelike motions, and you have to pay attention to the meeting to be able to speak intelligently if called upon? You might as well just be physically present.
It would be different if there was travel involved - then you would at least save the time of going to the meeting. But for local events, this seems like overkill. It's just a very expensive form of telecommunting.
I was pretty much with you until #5. Don't boot from read/write media? What exactly do you want me to boot from? Telling people not to boot from their hard disk is pretty radical. And even my Deb CD is really a CD-R - which is, you know, writeable.
#6 is even more out there. Unplug from the network? Being as how you're posting to Slashdot, obviously you're not taking your own advice. What am I missing here?
I think you need to get your tinfoil hat adjusted.
... for the IE blues. I'm a Navy reservist, which means I frequently have to use NMCI. Not only does NMCI prevent you from INSTALLING anything, it prevents any application not on its approved list from using the network. So even Portable FF on a thumb drive won't work.
If anyone knows a way to (legally) get FF to work on an NMCI machine, I'd sure be happy to know about it.
You're misunderstanding the need for right-wing politicians to appear to be doing something to crack down on activities perceived as "sinful" to their base.
Yes and no. With the iPod, you are locked into the iTunes music store, but also the iPod itself.
Umm, no. As was pointed out about a hundred times elsewhere in this discussion, you're perfectly free not to use iTMS with the iPod. I have about 1700 songs on mine, and I think two of them came from iTMS (one of those was a free download). The rest are all MP3s. So how am I "locked in" again?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but I don't have my camera on me every moment of the day, whereas I have my phone in my pocket every waking moment. I find that I have a lot of use for a camera on a daily basis, and it doesn't matter that the pictures aren't the best quality. It's the same story with other non-phone features of my smartphone - I use them extensively. Just because these features aren't useful for YOU, doesn't mean there's no market for them. This point gets made on Slashdot literally every time a phone article is published, so I'm surprised we're still having to have this discussion.
Which is exactly why no one IS saying they're "replacing" anything. The claim is that they "complement" your other devices by being always available in a pinch.
The costs are pretty much the same? I'd really like to see the cost analysis on that one. I strongly suspect that you pulled that "estimate" out of your nether regions.
We did, in fact, build such a system. It consisted of a bunch of nuclear-tipped SAMs, plus cueing radars, etc - 60's era technology was not sufficiently accurate to do anything but get the interceptor in the general vicinity of the incoming - hence the need for nuclear warheads. My impression is that the system wasn't considered very cost-effective.
This article is highly amateurish and just about content-free. Shorter "Space Review":
The Space Review: No they don't! (no citation given)
TSR: No they don't! (no citation given)
TSR: No they aren't! (no citation given)
TSR: So what, the Russians have the same capability!
TSR: Let's confuse the issue by only talking about boost-phase BMD intercept!
TSR: No they haven't! (no citation given)
TSR: Yes it did! (no citation given)
I stopped reading at this point. This whole article is nothing more than a fact-free propaganda screed. I can't believe Slashdot even bothered to post it... on second thought, yes I can.
Sean
[etymology nazi alert]
Who the hell came up with the putrid expression "telematics"? Remember the days when you could look at a word made out of Latin and Greek bits, and even if you'd never seen it before, you could understand its meaning because you knew what the individual parts of the word meant?
So let's see: "tele", meaning "at a distance", and "matics", meaning "action". So it must be some kind of spooky action at a distance! Quantum entanglement! Or at least remote control! Cool! Oh, wait, it's just a video screen in the back so the kids can watch cartoons.
I guess being able to analyze words is going to come to a halt now that the marketing "professionals" of the world have taken over absolutely every aspect of life, up to and including our language.
Yeah, I'm off topic. Sue me.
[/etymology nazi alert]Short and intermediate range ballistic missiles are not typically launched from submarines. The only ballistic missiles launched from US subs are no-kidding ICBMs - Trident II's. With a few exceptions (the Brits, Russians, maybe a few others), no one else has a subsurface ballistic missile capability at all. And the THAAD system would not be capable of intercepting that kind of missile (if I understand it correctly).
Actually, short and intermediate range ballistic missiles are pretty much always land-based. Think Pershing II in the US, or SCUD overseas. These are the kinds of systems THAAD is meant to counter.
Sean
Actually, I can decide for myself whether I want to buy the "extended care" plan or not. I typically don't. And the products almost never fail prematurely anyway, so on balance, I'd rather skip paying extra for a reliability guarantee that I'm not likely to need.
Don't get me wrong - I'm generally in favor of more-European style consumer product regulation in the US. But it doesn't always work out in your favor.
Sean
Seriously, practically every phone either comes with a cheap case or you can pick one up cheap. Or you can slap on one of those protective film sheets. I don't think yours is a realistic objection to this design.
... what does come out of general revenue is the enormous military expense required to ensure that the supply of oil continues to flow from the Middle East without obstruction. If we weren't so dependent on fossil fuels, we could leave that part of the world to settle its own problems, and our military could be significantly smaller.
Maybe it's not so unreasonable to ask motorists to pony up to fund some of these gigantic defense expenditures.
Sean
I have a Powerbook, and I don't want to plug a damn external mouse into it. I want to use the touchpad, and I want said touchpad to be more useful... by including a second freakin' mouse button. I get tired of being thwarted by the one button disciples, whose reasons for opposing the second button seem to be variants on the theme of "but we've always done it this way". It's a lot easier for people who only want to use button to just ignore any other buttons, than it is for me to have to go find some software utility to simulate the other buttons.
And don't start with "you can just use Cmd-click" (or whatever the key combo is) to simulate the second button. Sometimes I'm doing something with my other hand - um, y'know, like holding my coffee cup. Yeah, that's it.
Sean
... you just made up 10 numbers and multiplied them together. To say: "out of 10,000,000 candidates, let's say 1 in 10 develops simple life" or "out of 1,000,000 planets with simple life, 1 in 10 develops complex life" is to beg the question. We have no evidence whatsover of how likely it is that planets with the "right" conditions develop life. In fact, we have a sample size of exactly one. I can say "only 1 out of every 100 trillion planets with the "right" conditions (whatever they are) will develop simple life", and I'll have exactly as much evidence to support my position as you do to support yours - which is to say, none.
Speculating about how many planets contain advanced civiliations, while entertaining, is pointless without any evidence one way or the other.
What an apt name. As others have pointed out, how can inanimate collections of ones and zeros be free? Your error is that the user is, in fact, more free. You've carefully crafted your statement to say that the user is no more free with GPL software than he is with BSD or public domain software. Well, that's true, as far as it goes. But the vast majority of software that the average Joe uses is neither public domain nor BSD-licensed. It's proprietary. And the GPL beats the snot out of that for the user.
Keep working on it, and maybe you can aspire to become "MediocreAnalogyGuy".
Sean
Of course, everyone has their own preferred way of interacting with their computer... but I personally shudder in horror to think about a world in which voice command was the norm. Can you imagine working in a cube farm where everyone was talking to their computers literally all day long? I used to get annoyed enough when I was forced to listen in on people's speakerphone conversations.
Sean
I think the problem is really in the way you're looking at this. iPhoto, in effect, is a photo database. The "folders" you see in the iPhoto interface aren't supposed to represent file system folders - they're really more like queries. You wouldn't expect, Access, for example, to actually store records in file system folders that mapped to different views of the data, and you wouldn't expect to use an OS file system explorer to get at the data - you're content to let Access store the data however is most efficient, and use its interface to get at the data when you need it. iPhoto is the same thing, but for pictures.
Now it's possible that the "folder" metaphor used by iPhoto leads you down the wrong path, so maybe that could be improved. But in practice, I think that any attempt to provide a more accurate database type metaphor would baffle the hell out of Apple's customers, most of who don't know diddly about how databases work. So we're back to square one: users aren't getting everything they could out of their computers, because they don't really understand how their hardware and software works. But the chances of them actually putting forth the effort to learn what they need to know are very small. It's a conundrum.
Sean
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that baryonic particles only included those made of quarks - your protons, neutrons, etc. To be even more specific, my recollection was that to be a baryon ("heavy particle"), a particle had to have three quarks. The two quark models (your pions, kaons, etc.) are called mesons ("mid-weight particles"). And your neutrinos, electrons, etc, were yet a third type - the leptons ("light particles") - that weren't made of quarks at all.
In practice, I doubt this distinction matters very much, because the leptons don't weigh much of anything, and the mesons are too unstable to be a very big contituent of the universe.
Sean
I, for one, find it virtually impossible to imagine how overloading "pluton" could result in a lot of confusion. In context, it's going to be obvious to the most casual observer which meaning is actually intended. This whole objection is ridiculous.
Sean
When did it become the rule that each word could have one and only one meaning? Who really thinks there's going to be confusion over this? It's ridiculous.
Sean
... he said she shouldn't HAVE to know. There's an important difference. In my house, my wife is the one who sets up the televisions, stereos, etc, and although I could figure it out if I needed to, I don't particularly WANT to. I just want it to work. The point here is that you shouldn't need to be an expert on how the system is set up just to be able to use it.
Sean
And its angular momentum will be unchanged. So what's the problem?
The math is difficult to reproduce on a slashdot posting, but I'll leave it to anyone interested as homework. Suffice it to say that for L = angular momentum, I = moment of inertia, and w = angular velocity, L = I * w. Also, for a uniform sphere, I = 2/5 m r^2, where m = mass of the sphere, and r = radius of the sphere. It's easy to show that if r (before) = 2 * r(after), then w(before) = .25 w(after) (where "before" and "after" mean before and after squashing the basketball). And since the velocity v of a point on the equator of the spinning sphere is v = 2 * pi *r *w, it's also easy to show that every time you halve the diameter of the sphere, the linear velocity of a point on the surface doubles. This means that when angular momentum is unchanged, the limit of the linear velocity of any point on the sphere is finite as the radius goes to zero.
In case it wasn't obvious, IWAPMIC (I was a physics major in college).
Sean
Perhaps I misread TFA, but my impression was that this was really some sort of telepresence. How does it save you any time, if you have to be wired up to some control system for the robot to make all these lifelike motions, and you have to pay attention to the meeting to be able to speak intelligently if called upon? You might as well just be physically present.
It would be different if there was travel involved - then you would at least save the time of going to the meeting. But for local events, this seems like overkill. It's just a very expensive form of telecommunting.
Sean
I was pretty much with you until #5. Don't boot from read/write media? What exactly do you want me to boot from? Telling people not to boot from their hard disk is pretty radical. And even my Deb CD is really a CD-R - which is, you know, writeable.
#6 is even more out there. Unplug from the network? Being as how you're posting to Slashdot, obviously you're not taking your own advice. What am I missing here?
I think you need to get your tinfoil hat adjusted.
Sean
... in capitalist America, even Duke Nukem Forever ships before Vista.
Sean
... for the IE blues. I'm a Navy reservist, which means I frequently have to use NMCI. Not only does NMCI prevent you from INSTALLING anything, it prevents any application not on its approved list from using the network. So even Portable FF on a thumb drive won't work.
If anyone knows a way to (legally) get FF to work on an NMCI machine, I'd sure be happy to know about it.
Sean
You're misunderstanding the need for right-wing politicians to appear to be doing something to crack down on activities perceived as "sinful" to their base.
Jesus, save us from your followers.
Sean
Umm, no. As was pointed out about a hundred times elsewhere in this discussion, you're perfectly free not to use iTMS with the iPod. I have about 1700 songs on mine, and I think two of them came from iTMS (one of those was a free download). The rest are all MP3s. So how am I "locked in" again?
Sean