The issue here is all wrong. Our society has taken to demonizing certain kinds of specific behavior, without thinking the general problem.
We shouldn't be demonizing laptop use (or even cell phone use) in the car. Instead, we should be legislating and talking about drivers who don't pay attention, or who are impaired. To wit, using your rear-view mirror to look at your two darling children in the back seat, or fiddling with your radio controls, or unwrapping and feasting on a Quarter Pounder while you drive is just as or more hazardous as using a laptop in the front seat. And I'll bet you these situations happen far more often.
There's a subtext to some of these demonization statutes to "get the yuppie". I can't believe there's an epidemic of drivers using laptops and getting into accidents.
But I would pay extra for a phone network that doesn't drop calls and garble speech. I'd also pay for a phone with a surface that makes it easier to hold on to, so when you flip it open like the cool people on TV it doesn't fall to the ground and break.
Maybe this will come along in 9G or 12G.
In 1988, I worked with a guy who was a stereophile (sp?). He soldered his cable connections instead of just plugging them in, because the air gaps between the plug and the socket could ruin the sonic quality of the music. He had one chair, wood, in the center of his audio room, and that was all the furniture. He had a structural vibration isolation setup that looked like an Erector set that had gone through a transporter malfunction. Etc.
He swore to me up and down that playing a CD would damage my stereo equipment. The little square waves that go up and down would go through the wires and tubes, and their sharp edges would damage the equipment that was prepared for nice round edges. Maybe he felt that the little square waves would scrape off the inside of the wire? I dunno, at that time I used zip cord to connect my speakers.
Three years later, he bought a CD player. He spent something like $5K on it. (This was in ~ 1991.)
The more things change...
We need to catch up to the Russians in dog-killing technology. We have the means to do this with the space shuttle. If we pack 300 dogs into the cargo bay, and open up the bay doors in orbit, we could achieve tremendous dog-killing results. Our advantage would be in parallelizing dog killing, instead of doing it serially.
Agree with the review
on
Prey
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Typical Crichton book: great underlying idea, 2-dimensional characters, obvious plot contrivances saved by a couple of clever twists, and chapters laid out in a way tailor made to be a blueprint for a script.
It's worth a trip to the library, or buying it in paperback. Don't buy it hardcover.
Re:Anyone Rememebr The Last Few Season of Voyager?
on
Star Trek: Pick A Plot
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, and how come English is so common in the 4th quadrant, anyways?
Yep, it has a preferences manager. If you *wanted* to edit some flat text files, you could find them in your Mozilla folder.:-) But everything is GUI, you turn these features on and off by clicking on checkboxes....
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The issue here is all wrong. Our society has taken to demonizing certain kinds of specific behavior, without thinking the general problem.
We shouldn't be demonizing laptop use (or even cell phone use) in the car. Instead, we should be legislating and talking about drivers who don't pay attention, or who are impaired. To wit, using your rear-view mirror to look at your two darling children in the back seat, or fiddling with your radio controls, or unwrapping and feasting on a Quarter Pounder while you drive is just as or more hazardous as using a laptop in the front seat. And I'll bet you these situations happen far more often.
There's a subtext to some of these demonization statutes to "get the yuppie". I can't believe there's an epidemic of drivers using laptops and getting into accidents.
But I would pay extra for a phone network that doesn't drop calls and garble speech. I'd also pay for a phone with a surface that makes it easier to hold on to, so when you flip it open like the cool people on TV it doesn't fall to the ground and break. Maybe this will come along in 9G or 12G.
In 1988, I worked with a guy who was a stereophile (sp?). He soldered his cable connections instead of just plugging them in, because the air gaps between the plug and the socket could ruin the sonic quality of the music. He had one chair, wood, in the center of his audio room, and that was all the furniture. He had a structural vibration isolation setup that looked like an Erector set that had gone through a transporter malfunction. Etc. He swore to me up and down that playing a CD would damage my stereo equipment. The little square waves that go up and down would go through the wires and tubes, and their sharp edges would damage the equipment that was prepared for nice round edges. Maybe he felt that the little square waves would scrape off the inside of the wire? I dunno, at that time I used zip cord to connect my speakers. Three years later, he bought a CD player. He spent something like $5K on it. (This was in ~ 1991.) The more things change...
Scientology, by a hair.
We need to catch up to the Russians in dog-killing technology. We have the means to do this with the space shuttle. If we pack 300 dogs into the cargo bay, and open up the bay doors in orbit, we could achieve tremendous dog-killing results. Our advantage would be in parallelizing dog killing, instead of doing it serially.
Typical Crichton book: great underlying idea, 2-dimensional characters, obvious plot contrivances saved by a couple of clever twists, and chapters laid out in a way tailor made to be a blueprint for a script. It's worth a trip to the library, or buying it in paperback. Don't buy it hardcover.
Yeah, and how come English is so common in the 4th quadrant, anyways?
Yep, it has a preferences manager. If you *wanted* to edit some flat text files, you could find them in your Mozilla folder. :-) But everything is GUI, you turn these features on and off by clicking on checkboxes....