it also seems stupid to use a turbine that requires water in the middle of a desert and is subject to the energy lost in conversion. I'm a fan of the "by all means necessary" approach to solving our energy problems but this is just a huge waste IMO. Perhaps it has use as a prototype, otherwise I'm not convinced it's a good idea, at all.
Can you think of another way of generating electricity from heat on a commercial scale?
You really are fixated on that phrase. Has someone been telling you that your whole life?
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need
on
How BlackBerry Blew It
·
· Score: 1
you should not go by first week sales. Apple have a hardcore base where they will always sell out early with there opening sales more an indicator of how much they can manufacture. What is more telling is the negative press on features and consumer backlash on IOS7 problems combined with their shinking market share..
Judging from their sales record that "hardcore base" seems to have jumped from a few determined nerds, musicians, and graphic artists, to full fledged commercial userbase that may very well take over the planet. Apple isn't really concerned about not having the first in market share when it's the richest kid in the club. They're making a dammed good profit, and they aren't seeing any real decline in usage.
This indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of what the iPhone was at launch.
And what that was, was simply the most FUNCTIONAL smartphone that existed at the time. But a huge margin.
This is revisionist history. The iPhone barely functioned as a phone when it was introduced. Remember: "You're holding it wrong."
That's distortionist history. If the only person that could like the original iPhone were Apple fanboys and boutique geeks, it would have died on first release and been another string of Apple footnote failures. It succeeded because it had appeal beyond a niche audience, even with the occasional glitch and wart.
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need
on
How BlackBerry Blew It
·
· Score: 1
. Adding that FM radio, command line shell, and sweedish ball tickler makes the device less functional for everyone who's outside those function's use cases.
And being someone who's been forced back into Android by buying a used EVO after having my iphone stolen, I can tell you that the FM Radio function is pretty much crap. And I live in the NYC media area which is not exactly a radio desert.
they never were a world leader either. them being a world leader in smartphones either needs very clever defining of smartphones or very clever defining of what counts as "world".
they never penetrated certain markets, because they were tied to operators - their phones were never cheap enough to be world leader in unit numbers.
practically nobody bought blackberries with their own money for full price happily.
That wasn't their business model. For a good while Blackberry had a thing going with being THE corporate standard for a smartphone. If you owned one, it was because your company gave it to you as an extension of a chain running from the chairleg of your desk. It was secure and reliable push email and appointment manager. No more than that, and no less. The end came however when smartphones started being marketed to the general public and many of Blackberry's corporate customers chafed at the comparatble limits of their phones compared to the iphone and the better Androids. The problem was that Blackberry was more than just a phone to buy, it was a complete service package, and upgrading something like that while still meeting corporate IT standards was not a trivial exercise.
Quite frankly you should be getting him a child oriented phone, one that has preset buttons to call the numbers that need to be called.... YOU, one or two other family members, and 911. At the very least the phone should have maximum parental control, with major controls on who can CALL that phone. Under no circumstances should this be an iphone (way too subject to theft!) or standard android smartphone.
Phones to consider.
Kajeet. Maximum parental control options
Firefly GloPhone Simple few button design, easy for kids to relate to.
LG Migo pretty much the same reason
oh... and the term mesosphere, means the middle section of Earth's atmosphere. It is a part of an atmosphere.
The atmosphere of Europa may be of very low pressure, but it's still there.
And so is the atmosphere of the Moon.... but then you're talking about an "atmosphere" so thin an ephemeral that it's density was multiplied by the exhaust of the Apollo rocket engines which landed and took off from it.
That's not exactly news. The big unknown however is how much ice is between us and that water. Estimates could be anything up to 20 miles of ice, which could pretty much be a deal breaker for any conceivable technology in the near term. The other big unknown is how much pressure would that water be under. You could be talking at a minimum something with greater crush depth than the bottom of the Mariannas Trench.
Everyone wants to go to Europa though, because it has oxygen in its atmosphere and (frozen) water on its surface.
Europa does not have an atmosphere. It has a fluctuating mesophere like our moon from occasional venting, and water ice as hard as Earth rock, but if you're thinking of skinny dipping on Europa, you're a bit shy of reality.
Because they are orders of magnitude more productive.
The principal investigator for the Mars rovers said that if he were on Mars he could do in 45 seconds what the rovers do in a day.
Besides, visiting a foreign country is different from looking at it through a webcam. A robot probe is just an improvement over a telescope. Humans want to go to places.
What worries me is that the site has only one passing mention of radiation, for a mission to Jupiter orbit. Aren't humans in that region going to be almost literally fried?
On the budget it would take to send that ONE human to Mars and keep him alive in one place, We could have more rovers operating on Mars than NYPD has cop cars.
Yeah. By the time this mission could launch, our robots will actually be a lot more capable of doing useful research on Europa than the human settlers, especially when you control for all the mass that needs to be launched in order to keep people alive (and not crazy) for as long as this would take. Instead of people, why not send a nuclear submarine that could use its reactor to melt through all the ice and then navigate the sea beneath? If we have a chance of finding something cool, it will be down there.
The nuclear submarine would still face one major problem. The ice layer surrounding the ocean is MILES thick, maybe as thick as the crust here on Earth. Perhaps a nuclear sub might be able to melt its way through. (that assumes that you could get that much payload to Europa.... a pile with that kind of wattage just for waste heat is going to be HEAVY. That still leaves the rather thorny issue of the ice tunnel immediately freezing above it. How in tarnation are you going to get your data through?
This isn't new, and unfortunately it isn't science either. Fact of the matter is brain death is brain death, total and absolute degenerative collapse of the nervous system. Whether it's whole body cryogenics, or the low cost "head" only operation, the only thing that cryonics can promise you is that some day someone may take out your frozen remains and make a clone of them. And that's of course assuming the company actually remains afloat and doesn't go belly up as at least one cryonics company did, leaving thier "clients" high and... rather warmed over.
It might even look like you. But it won't be you, it won't have your memories, and probably not even your personality. Nothing has changed since the decades this came out to make it any less pseudoscience than it was back then.
I suspect we're looking at Tim Cook as being relatively unenthuiastic or lukewarm, because he's getting an unfair comparison to Steve Jobs.
It would be extremely hard to flat out impossible to replicate Apple's co-founder, and Cook is wise enough not to try. The thing is, Apple is more than Steve Jobs, it's also the apparatus that he put together. The bulk of those people are still doing what they did under Jobs. The Prophent/Messiah may have moved on, but the disciples are more than capable.
It may well be that Jobs may have lived just long enough to put Apple on the course it needs to be. The crew should be able to manage keeping the ship properly steered. And for at least now, it's a good course. In fact without Jobs' manic obsession on destroying Google, there's a chance that some of Apple's biggest problems, like this unneccessary jihad might work themselves out over time.
Does anyone ever enter or leave the habitat? Or open doors to send or receive cargo? That ups your volatile loss like nothing silly, no matter how much you try to reduce your losses by pumping.
Like most schemes to move off of this planet which we are in the process of destroying, this "solution" will be incredibly expensive and only accommodate a very small proportion of our 7 billion population. Of course, the rich will claim the space (along with a few essential maintenance people such as the phone sanitizers), leaving the rest of us stranded on Earth to deal with climate change, toxins, etc.
So, yes, this could probably be done at great expense (paid for by all of us) for the benefit of the few, rich and powerful... but that's the way it usually works, isn't it?
The movie never made any attempt to explain how they maintain an atmosphere. Here on Earth, the gravitation of effect of Earth's mass does that for us. On Elysium, there is simulated gravity due to centripetal force, but that would only effect masses that are bound do it. Since the atmosphere floats above it, it would drift away and potentially escape through the open structure.
Apart from that, if they can create such a structure out in space that is a perfect habitable environment, it seems to me they should be able to create the same habitable environment on Earth for much greater cost. Not having to transport materials to space, not having to spend many dollars on researching ways around problems that don't exist here on Earth. You could certainly argue that the wealthy elite may want to simply distance themselves from the busted Earth as much as possible with the intent of making it difficult for the dregs to migrated to their utopia, but it seems like the idea of Earth being so wrecked that they HAD to go into space doesn't really line up.
Ringworld managed it by having 1000 mile high walls at the ring's edges, as you might recall the top was open to space. Of course it also had a rotational velocity of 770 miles per second, and a diameter of 2 AU. It'd be rather hard to scale that down to Elysium's scale. But then again since they have Niven style magic transmutation of elements, what's a magic forcefield between friends? (and I don't even want to mention Teela Brown) Niven's stuff is frequently labeled science fiction, but it's really magic disguised in glass and chrome. His Known Space world also featured spacecraft with magic transparent hulls that could not be dented by anything (save anti-matter) and Null-Time panic buttons to prevent imminent destruction. To his credit, Niven himself realised how crazy he had made his Known Space "science" when he lampshaded his tropes in the last Known Space story he ever wrote. (that is before he started churning out Ringworld books by the bushel.)
A good closed cycle life support system could work. Power is near-limitless from solar. Minaturised manufacturering and recycling can be done. If you want minimal-maintainance, the main concern would be altitude: Something so big would eventually deorbit due to drag, so LEO isn't going to cut it. There would still be a need for occasional replacement parts and top-ups for any air escaping from pinhole leaks or accidents, but if it were designed for sustainability you could probably get by with a rocket every ten years or so.
Your main problem is loss of volatiles. That is an unavoidable loss over time. That by itself is an achilles heel for any space city. Now a Lunar city might be able to come up with water depending how much is actually available in the perpetually shaded areas of the Moon. That last however is fairly big unknown.
Maybe just put all the baddies into space...remember Australia? Isn't this just the reverse of the movie's premise?
The thing is... Forced Transportation to America, and then Australia was a cheap way to dispose of the surplus and the undesirable, plus serving a dual version of taming a colonial area for the expanded glory and commercial wealth of the British Empire. No such return would be found for the expense in this case.
It has a LOT of fan references. Basically, the USA has become Ultra-'Green', and very technophobic (except 'approved' tech, of course). Even Sci-Fi is frowned upon (unofficially of course:ahem:). This has resulted in a drop in CO2 emissions, and the start of another Ice Age. Like in glaciers up to the Canada/USA border. Some orbital stations have held out, but they need a regular infusion of new air. One ship on a 'scoop' run is shot down, and it's Sci-Fi fans to the rescue!
When I was a sci fi fan back in the transition between the '70's and 80's the sci fi fans and the environmental movement held each other in pretty much mutual contempt, although it was the sci fi fanboys who were more vocal about it. The fanboys didn't give two bits about the environment as their focus was entirely on ditching this planet and heading out into space, which did not endear them that much to the environmentalist crowd. I'm honest enough to admit that I was among the would-be Technocrats of the time, although I'd like to think that I've learned a bit of wisdom of some type. Enough to know that you can't appreciate the universe if you are going to hold the part of it that spawned you in contempt. I don't see how we as a species can survive out there in the forbidding depths of space, if we can't manage a long term relationship with the most friendliest environment we'll ever see in the Universe.
Jerry Pournelle I see, hasn't made that transition. He's still the same person who was writing pseudo science fiction with Larry Niven back in the era of Known Space and Ringworld. He's not only still hostile to the environmental movements, he's resorted to caricature worthy of Ayn Rand. Maybe he's earnest about it, or maybe he's just hacking it to make a quick buck amongst his fandom. Either way, the result is the same.
Thats just using energy to convert elements and molecules into different molecules, but it doesn't change the fact that you will be constantly losing molecules over time and they will eventually need to be replaced some how.
You talk about changing elements as if it was as casual a process as repainting a car. Elemental transmutation takes place only in one place in nature... in the cores of dying stars which later explode into novae. That's pretty much responsible for everything we have that's not hydrogen or helium. Duplicating THAT on a macro level isn't going to be as easy as you think, given all the problem of just getting simple fusion to hit the break even point.
Without Star Trek we probably would still have had cell phones. Perhaps not the flip phone but other styles.
It's also worth noting that the flip phone was only a transitional design. It's pretty much dying out, save for the ultra cheap phones used for no contract services like Virgin Mobile. I'd also go on and further state that we'd probably have had Ipads without ST TNG.
3.) was there a stated rule against taking pictures? If not, you're firing someone for breaking a rule that wasn't stated? If so, is firing the man really the example you want to set for a first offense, instead of requiring that the image be deleted?
If you're trying to set the image of a hardball kickass and ruthless, (Remember kids, in the corporate world, being "ruthless" is considered a virtue, not a vice.) Then yes, on the spot firings like this are excellent tools for keeping the sheep in line. And very few work laws have provisions that prevent this sort of thing, especially at the boardroom level.
Slashdot Mirror
it also seems stupid to use a turbine that requires water in the middle of a desert and is subject to the energy lost in conversion. I'm a fan of the "by all means necessary" approach to solving our energy problems but this is just a huge waste IMO. Perhaps it has use as a prototype, otherwise I'm not convinced it's a good idea, at all.
Can you think of another way of generating electricity from heat on a commercial scale?
You really are fixated on that phrase. Has someone been telling you that your whole life?
you should not go by first week sales. Apple have a hardcore base where they will always sell out early with there opening sales more an indicator of how much they can manufacture. What is more telling is the negative press on features and consumer backlash on IOS7 problems combined with their shinking market share. .
Judging from their sales record that "hardcore base" seems to have jumped from a few determined nerds, musicians, and graphic artists, to full fledged commercial userbase that may very well take over the planet. Apple isn't really concerned about not having the first in market share when it's the richest kid in the club. They're making a dammed good profit, and they aren't seeing any real decline in usage.
This indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of what the iPhone was at launch.
And what that was, was simply the most FUNCTIONAL smartphone that existed at the time. But a huge margin.
This is revisionist history. The iPhone barely functioned as a phone when it was introduced. Remember: "You're holding it wrong."
That's distortionist history. If the only person that could like the original iPhone were Apple fanboys and boutique geeks, it would have died on first release and been another string of Apple footnote failures. It succeeded because it had appeal beyond a niche audience, even with the occasional glitch and wart.
. Adding that FM radio, command line shell, and sweedish ball tickler makes the device less functional for everyone who's outside those function's use cases.
And being someone who's been forced back into Android by buying a used EVO after having my iphone stolen, I can tell you that the FM Radio function is pretty much crap. And I live in the NYC media area which is not exactly a radio desert.
they never were a world leader either. them being a world leader in smartphones either needs very clever defining of smartphones or very clever defining of what counts as "world".
they never penetrated certain markets, because they were tied to operators - their phones were never cheap enough to be world leader in unit numbers.
practically nobody bought blackberries with their own money for full price happily.
That wasn't their business model. For a good while Blackberry had a thing going with being THE corporate standard for a smartphone. If you owned one, it was because your company gave it to you as an extension of a chain running from the chairleg of your desk. It was secure and reliable push email and appointment manager. No more than that, and no less. The end came however when smartphones started being marketed to the general public and many of Blackberry's corporate customers chafed at the comparatble limits of their phones compared to the iphone and the better Androids. The problem was that Blackberry was more than just a phone to buy, it was a complete service package, and upgrading something like that while still meeting corporate IT standards was not a trivial exercise.
Quite frankly you should be getting him a child oriented phone, one that has preset buttons to call the numbers that need to be called.... YOU, one or two other family members, and 911. At the very least the phone should have maximum parental control, with major controls on who can CALL that phone. Under no circumstances should this be an iphone (way too subject to theft!) or standard android smartphone. Phones to consider. Kajeet. Maximum parental control options Firefly GloPhone Simple few button design, easy for kids to relate to. LG Migo pretty much the same reason
How in tarnation are you going to get your data through?
Leave the radio transmitter on the surface and winch a cable from the sub. The only issue is having a cable on board that will be surely long enough.
And quite likely dealing with a crush pressure that's more intense than the bottom of the Mariannas Trench?
oh... and the term mesosphere, means the middle section of Earth's atmosphere. It is a part of an atmosphere.
The atmosphere of Europa may be of very low pressure, but it's still there.
And so is the atmosphere of the Moon.... but then you're talking about an "atmosphere" so thin an ephemeral that it's density was multiplied by the exhaust of the Apollo rocket engines which landed and took off from it.
That's not exactly news. The big unknown however is how much ice is between us and that water. Estimates could be anything up to 20 miles of ice, which could pretty much be a deal breaker for any conceivable technology in the near term. The other big unknown is how much pressure would that water be under. You could be talking at a minimum something with greater crush depth than the bottom of the Mariannas Trench.
Everyone wants to go to Europa though, because it has oxygen in its atmosphere and (frozen) water on its surface.
Europa does not have an atmosphere. It has a fluctuating mesophere like our moon from occasional venting, and water ice as hard as Earth rock, but if you're thinking of skinny dipping on Europa, you're a bit shy of reality.
Because they are orders of magnitude more productive.
The principal investigator for the Mars rovers said that if he were on Mars he could do in 45 seconds what the rovers do in a day.
Besides, visiting a foreign country is different from looking at it through a webcam. A robot probe is just an improvement over a telescope. Humans want to go to places.
What worries me is that the site has only one passing mention of radiation, for a mission to Jupiter orbit. Aren't humans in that region going to be almost literally fried?
On the budget it would take to send that ONE human to Mars and keep him alive in one place, We could have more rovers operating on Mars than NYPD has cop cars.
Yeah. By the time this mission could launch, our robots will actually be a lot more capable of doing useful research on Europa than the human settlers, especially when you control for all the mass that needs to be launched in order to keep people alive (and not crazy) for as long as this would take. Instead of people, why not send a nuclear submarine that could use its reactor to melt through all the ice and then navigate the sea beneath? If we have a chance of finding something cool, it will be down there.
The nuclear submarine would still face one major problem. The ice layer surrounding the ocean is MILES thick, maybe as thick as the crust here on Earth. Perhaps a nuclear sub might be able to melt its way through. (that assumes that you could get that much payload to Europa.... a pile with that kind of wattage just for waste heat is going to be HEAVY. That still leaves the rather thorny issue of the ice tunnel immediately freezing above it. How in tarnation are you going to get your data through?
This isn't new, and unfortunately it isn't science either. Fact of the matter is brain death is brain death, total and absolute degenerative collapse of the nervous system. Whether it's whole body cryogenics, or the low cost "head" only operation, the only thing that cryonics can promise you is that some day someone may take out your frozen remains and make a clone of them. And that's of course assuming the company actually remains afloat and doesn't go belly up as at least one cryonics company did, leaving thier "clients" high and ... rather warmed over.
It might even look like you. But it won't be you, it won't have your memories, and probably not even your personality. Nothing has changed since the decades this came out to make it any less pseudoscience than it was back then.
I suspect we're looking at Tim Cook as being relatively unenthuiastic or lukewarm, because he's getting an unfair comparison to Steve Jobs. It would be extremely hard to flat out impossible to replicate Apple's co-founder, and Cook is wise enough not to try. The thing is, Apple is more than Steve Jobs, it's also the apparatus that he put together. The bulk of those people are still doing what they did under Jobs. The Prophent/Messiah may have moved on, but the disciples are more than capable. It may well be that Jobs may have lived just long enough to put Apple on the course it needs to be. The crew should be able to manage keeping the ship properly steered. And for at least now, it's a good course. In fact without Jobs' manic obsession on destroying Google, there's a chance that some of Apple's biggest problems, like this unneccessary jihad might work themselves out over time.
Does anyone ever enter or leave the habitat? Or open doors to send or receive cargo? That ups your volatile loss like nothing silly, no matter how much you try to reduce your losses by pumping.
Like most schemes to move off of this planet which we are in the process of destroying, this "solution" will be incredibly expensive and only accommodate a very small proportion of our 7 billion population. Of course, the rich will claim the space (along with a few essential maintenance people such as the phone sanitizers), leaving the rest of us stranded on Earth to deal with climate change, toxins, etc. So, yes, this could probably be done at great expense (paid for by all of us) for the benefit of the few, rich and powerful... but that's the way it usually works, isn't it?
I'm actually surprised that no one seems to remember that classic comic from FIRST publications in this theme, American Flagg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Flagg.
The movie never made any attempt to explain how they maintain an atmosphere. Here on Earth, the gravitation of effect of Earth's mass does that for us. On Elysium, there is simulated gravity due to centripetal force, but that would only effect masses that are bound do it. Since the atmosphere floats above it, it would drift away and potentially escape through the open structure.
Apart from that, if they can create such a structure out in space that is a perfect habitable environment, it seems to me they should be able to create the same habitable environment on Earth for much greater cost. Not having to transport materials to space, not having to spend many dollars on researching ways around problems that don't exist here on Earth. You could certainly argue that the wealthy elite may want to simply distance themselves from the busted Earth as much as possible with the intent of making it difficult for the dregs to migrated to their utopia, but it seems like the idea of Earth being so wrecked that they HAD to go into space doesn't really line up.
Ringworld managed it by having 1000 mile high walls at the ring's edges, as you might recall the top was open to space. Of course it also had a rotational velocity of 770 miles per second, and a diameter of 2 AU. It'd be rather hard to scale that down to Elysium's scale. But then again since they have Niven style magic transmutation of elements, what's a magic forcefield between friends? (and I don't even want to mention Teela Brown) Niven's stuff is frequently labeled science fiction, but it's really magic disguised in glass and chrome. His Known Space world also featured spacecraft with magic transparent hulls that could not be dented by anything (save anti-matter) and Null-Time panic buttons to prevent imminent destruction. To his credit, Niven himself realised how crazy he had made his Known Space "science" when he lampshaded his tropes in the last Known Space story he ever wrote. (that is before he started churning out Ringworld books by the bushel.)
Orbital velocity at atmospheric heights?
That's going to hurt.
It's not a transit route for living beings obviously. Generally bulk cargo that can take the acceleration.
A good closed cycle life support system could work. Power is near-limitless from solar. Minaturised manufacturering and recycling can be done. If you want minimal-maintainance, the main concern would be altitude: Something so big would eventually deorbit due to drag, so LEO isn't going to cut it. There would still be a need for occasional replacement parts and top-ups for any air escaping from pinhole leaks or accidents, but if it were designed for sustainability you could probably get by with a rocket every ten years or so.
Your main problem is loss of volatiles. That is an unavoidable loss over time. That by itself is an achilles heel for any space city. Now a Lunar city might be able to come up with water depending how much is actually available in the perpetually shaded areas of the Moon. That last however is fairly big unknown.
Maybe just put all the baddies into space...remember Australia? Isn't this just the reverse of the movie's premise?
The thing is... Forced Transportation to America, and then Australia was a cheap way to dispose of the surplus and the undesirable, plus serving a dual version of taming a colonial area for the expanded glory and commercial wealth of the British Empire. No such return would be found for the expense in this case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(science_fiction_novel)
It has a LOT of fan references. Basically, the USA has become Ultra-'Green', and very technophobic (except 'approved' tech, of course). Even Sci-Fi is frowned upon (unofficially of course :ahem:). This has resulted in a drop in CO2 emissions, and the start of another Ice Age. Like in glaciers up to the Canada/USA border. Some orbital stations have held out, but they need a regular infusion of new air. One ship on a 'scoop' run is shot down, and it's Sci-Fi fans to the rescue!
When I was a sci fi fan back in the transition between the '70's and 80's the sci fi fans and the environmental movement held each other in pretty much mutual contempt, although it was the sci fi fanboys who were more vocal about it. The fanboys didn't give two bits about the environment as their focus was entirely on ditching this planet and heading out into space, which did not endear them that much to the environmentalist crowd. I'm honest enough to admit that I was among the would-be Technocrats of the time, although I'd like to think that I've learned a bit of wisdom of some type. Enough to know that you can't appreciate the universe if you are going to hold the part of it that spawned you in contempt. I don't see how we as a species can survive out there in the forbidding depths of space, if we can't manage a long term relationship with the most friendliest environment we'll ever see in the Universe. Jerry Pournelle I see, hasn't made that transition. He's still the same person who was writing pseudo science fiction with Larry Niven back in the era of Known Space and Ringworld. He's not only still hostile to the environmental movements, he's resorted to caricature worthy of Ayn Rand. Maybe he's earnest about it, or maybe he's just hacking it to make a quick buck amongst his fandom. Either way, the result is the same.
Thats just using energy to convert elements and molecules into different molecules, but it doesn't change the fact that you will be constantly losing molecules over time and they will eventually need to be replaced some how.
You talk about changing elements as if it was as casual a process as repainting a car. Elemental transmutation takes place only in one place in nature... in the cores of dying stars which later explode into novae. That's pretty much responsible for everything we have that's not hydrogen or helium. Duplicating THAT on a macro level isn't going to be as easy as you think, given all the problem of just getting simple fusion to hit the break even point.
Without Star Trek we probably would still have had cell phones. Perhaps not the flip phone but other styles.
It's also worth noting that the flip phone was only a transitional design. It's pretty much dying out, save for the ultra cheap phones used for no contract services like Virgin Mobile. I'd also go on and further state that we'd probably have had Ipads without ST TNG.
3.) was there a stated rule against taking pictures? If not, you're firing someone for breaking a rule that wasn't stated? If so, is firing the man really the example you want to set for a first offense, instead of requiring that the image be deleted?
If you're trying to set the image of a hardball kickass and ruthless, (Remember kids, in the corporate world, being "ruthless" is considered a virtue, not a vice.) Then yes, on the spot firings like this are excellent tools for keeping the sheep in line. And very few work laws have provisions that prevent this sort of thing, especially at the boardroom level.