Especially for the many millions of Indians without a basic education and sanitation. They'll remain illiterate and crapping in the streets, but they will feel extatic about their fellow Indian in space.
For fuck's sake! Why does this garbage still manage to evade the Troll mod? Read my lips, idiot. Money spent ON space is not spent IN space. It's spent on the ground creating jobs and driving innovation and education, all of which helps to generate wealth and raise people out of poverty. Speaking of education, when, pray tell, are you planning on getting one? Hmmm?
Ah, the old 'Obama can't read without a teleprompter' canard. I guess you haven't actually watched him in a press conference and compared with er George uh W um Bush uh uh...
While in geo-synchronise orbit over every major continent, call center employees will be available to answer your computer questions both day and night.
Ha ha. Let's make fun of the Indians and run through the usual 'call center' jokes because nobody has ever though of that before, huh?
This announcement comes on the same day that it has emerged that the US administration has no intention of going to the moon, in a time when the US national debt clock has needed an extra digit added to it, when the US is still recovering from the diplomatic and geo-political catastrophe what was the Bush years, and all you can do is crack jokes about Indians because they have started turning a hugely populated and impoverished country around using the latest opportunities afforded to them by technology. Hmmm.
Enjoy your inflated sense of superiority while it lasts, because it isn't gonna as long as people like you sit back on the Apollo moon landing's laurels and fiddle while Rome burns. The developing world is emerging onto the world stage. The EU is already the world's biggest economy. China and India have poverty on the run and are making in-roads into LEO. What's the USA doing? Still putting out fires in Mesopotamia, trying to catch up to the rest of the industrialized world in figuring out how to treat people when they're sick, and figuring out how to stop consuming a quarter of the world's resources.
Yup, you go right on cracking your jokes. Ha fucking ha. You won't be laughing so loud when you see the red flag of China over the Sea of Tranquility.
This entire presentation seems a little disappointing. Really, it looks, acts, and feels like a giant iPod Touch. Whereas the iPhone and iPod really created a need , I don't see that this substantially innovate to make it a must-have. It doesn't seem to improve on anything so substantially that it is an obvious choice. Maybe I need to see a few more videos, but I don't see this pulling serious market share away from Kindle's targeted market segment.
Yes, quite.
Last time I saw a/. commenter speculating about the future of Apple's latest new thing, it read something like this:
Raise your hand if you have iTunes...
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port...
Raise your hand if you have both...
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device...
There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.
TFA gets it completely wrong on the 'Kindle'
on
Thomas Edison's Kindle
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The author of TFA seems to have misunderstood what he has posted:
Even the pages of books may be made of steel, though Edison regards nickel as a better substitute for paper”Why not?” asks Edison. “Nickel will absorb printer’s ink. A sheet of nickel one twenty-thousandth of an inch thick is cheaper, tougher, and more flexible than an ordinary sheet of book-paper. A nickel book, two inches thick, would contain 40,000 pages. Such a book would weigh only a pound. I can make a pound of nickel sheets for a dollar and a quarter.”
Hereis a prospect of real culture for the masses Forty thousand pages in a volume! A single volume the equivalent in printing space of two hundred paper-leaved books of two hundred pages each! What a library might be placed between two steel covers and sold for, perhaps, two dollars!
He wasn't talking about having a small device that could 'download' content remotely. He was just talking about using nickel as a substitute for paper, but the book would still essentially be a printed one and the content would be 'hard coded' in ink, albeit you'd still get a lot more pages in there.
Have you ever had a conversation with someone, only to find out a few seconds later they were on a Bluetooth talking to someone else?
That happened to me the other day - saw an old friend from Highschool on the train, he was half facing the other way because it was crowded.
I somehow went 3 whole minutes of conversation seeming completely fluid and comprehensible, only to see him turn and be like "Wow I haven't seen you since High School!"
You can imagine my baffled reaction.
That drives me fucking crazy! I used to have a house mate who talked incessantly on her phone with headset attached and would inflict her conversations on all of us. Every time she'd come into the kitchen asking a question I'd have to say "are you talking to me?" Nine times out of ten she wasn't.
It's not just cellphones. All technology has an integral etiquette, from cars to scissors. If you think about it, you can find examples for pretty much anything on your desk, and can probably come up with good reasons for why we have the social mores that we do. Everything from not chewing on other people's pencils to not touching someone else's monitor screen.
Cellphones only draw our attention because they're fairly new technology (compared to, say, pencils) and the offenses commitable with a phone can be extremely annoying and in some cases deadly.
This is a much broader topic if you take the time to look into it.
Aeroplanes are another. If your zone or row number hasn't been called yet, then get back from the freaking gate already and stop looking like I have to stand behind you in a line! Jeez! People who crowd the gate before their number has been called are up there with people who drive too slow in the fast lane.
1. It is NOT rude to talk on your cell phone in a public place eg on a train or bus or w/e. just like how it isnt rude to have a conversation with a real person there. It pisses me off that on some busses I take they say "please dont use cellphones, it may disturb others" when it doesnt say "people dont talk, it may disturb others". in fact, on a phone there's less talking to be disturbed bya s thre's only 1/2 the conversation.
You are completely, absolutely, positively 100% incorrect. Studies have been done to prove it. It is WAY more irritating when you can only hear one side of the conversation, irritation amplified by the need that people have to raise their voices on a cellphone since they don't have the feedback that old analog landlines had. If you're not irritated by Incosiderate Cell Phone Man, you, sir, are in a small minority.
Incidentally, from TFA:
* 1. Lower your voice when taking calls in public. * 2. Avoid personal topics when others can hear you. * 3. Avoid taking calls when you're already engaged in a face-to-face conversation. * 4. If you do take a call, ask permission of the people with you. * 5. Avoid texting during a face-to-face conversations. * 6. Put your phone's ringer on "silent" in theaters and restaurants. * 7. Don't light up your phone's screen in a dark theater. * 8. Hang up and drive. * 9. Acknowledge the delay * 10. Don't use Google Voice call screening with family and close friends * 11. Don't blame the other guy for a dropped call * 12. Avoid looking things up during a conversation * 13. Be mindful about Facebook tagging * 14. Avoid inappropriate profile pictures
At first glance I thought this article would be stating the obvious, but it's got some good stuff when you get past 8. Acknowledging the delay and reassuring the other person that you're not talking over the top of him is a great start, although I must say I haven't had that problem so much since I switched from Verizon. The delay on that service was so bad I ended up dreading every call.
There's no reasonable explanation for why they would want to enslave us, or eat us, or otherwise exploit us.
It's conceivable that they might want to wipe us out and repurpose Earth, as it does have some useful minerals, but especially given our nuclear arsenal and the (minor) headaches that would cause, I don't see why they'd go for Earth over the many uninhabited rocks in the universe. Direct harvesting of solar energy would be far more effective than exploiting us, whatever their goals are. We're far less useful than robots.
I'm sure the people of South America, with all the environmental problems they were having, probably thought the same. But the Spaniards saw value in stuff that the Incas and Aztecs took for granted. Who's to say that ET won't come here and take a liking to our stocks of salt water for reasons unbeknownst to us?
Indian exo-atmospheric 'kill vehicle': *knock* *knock* Jim @ International Space Station: "WTF?! We didn't order any take-out! Goddamn annoying fuckards! *flushes* That'll teach ya!" Bob @ ISS: "Holy fuck! You took 'em out with only one flush!" Jim @ ISS: "Yeah... Had vindaloo for lunch."
I knew I wouldn't have to scroll too far to see anti-Indian racism. Sad but true.
Yes I've read Tolstoy, the only bits I skipped were some of the philosophical digressions in War and Peace. The rest was pretty good. You might not have been able to finish anything he wrote but that's no reason to project your shortcomings on others.
The only Star Wars movie that didn't suck, The Empire Strikes Back, was written by a woman named Leigh Brackett.
Quoth wiki:
Brackett worked on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. The movie won the Hugo Award in 1981. This script was a departure for Brackett, since until then, all of her science fiction had been in the form of novels and short stories.
The exact role which Brackett played in writing the script for Empire is the subject of some dispute. What is agreed on by all is that George Lucas asked Brackett to write the screenplay based on his story outline. It is also known that Brackett wrote a finished first draft which was delivered to Lucas shortly before Brackett's death from cancer on March 18, 1978. The screenplay was revised for filming by Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan, and both Brackett and Kasdan (though not Lucas) were given credit for the final script.
Many reviewers believed that they could detect traces of Brackett's influence in both the dialogue and the treatment of the space opera genre in Empire.[3] However, Laurent Bouzereau, in his book Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, states that Lucas disliked the direction of Brackett's screenplay and discarded it. He then produced two screenplays before turning the results over to Kasdan, who did not work directly with Brackett's script at all. By this scenario, Lucas' assignment of credit to Brackett was a mere courtesy or mark of respect for the work she had done during her illness.[4] Support for this view comes from Stephen Haffner, owner of the press that printed Martian Quest: The Early Brackett, who has read Brackett's script, and claims that—outside Lucas' storyline—nothing of Brackett's personal contributions survives in the finished movie.
Brackett's screenplay has never been published. According to Haffner, it can be read at the library of the Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico, but may not be copied or borrowed off-site.
The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits were all self-contained episodes. How on earth can you do a 're-boot' of these? Re-make the original series with a modern spin? I don't think so.
Have you read the Foundation series as an adult? It's not really very good. There are certainly some good ideas but the writing is trapped in the 1950s. It seems really awkward in places and overall (in my opinion) it hasn't aged well. It's nice to have classics in whatever genre but don't live in the past. There is a lot of fine writing now.
The movie and TV business is risky and they want to minimise their losses so they rehash what has worked in the past.
I agree, I read the whole series and it was a decent story overall, but not exactly in the same league as Tolstoy as far as writing goes.
Asimov's concepts were interesting, but his characters were as flat as pancakes. Plus, the concepts and plot devices he used in the books work well for written word fiction, but would be impossible to translate into a movie without taking substantial artistic license. Look at the scathing criticism people threw at iRobot, a collection of short stories that would have looked like crap if the director had stayed 'true to the book,' but with the way he did it it actually turned out as good movie in its own right IMHO, and still preserved the core point of the original story. Some people can't get it into their heads that movies and books are two different media, and if you want to transcribe a story from one to the other then you have to make a lot of changes to make it work. Being 'true to the book' is getting the book's original point across (even if you have to take a few liberties here and there), not making a chapter-by-chapter re-enactment.
I dunno, the amenities sound nicer than your run of the mill U-Store-It.
Reminds me of one of Michael Moore's stunts. He put the poor into storage! He furnished a self storage unit. It was affordable, had air conditioning, security, etc. Lack of a ceiling would have been a bit of a pain though, as would the lack of a window.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoosh!
Especially for the many millions of Indians without a basic education and sanitation. They'll remain illiterate and crapping in the streets, but they will feel extatic about their fellow Indian in space.
For fuck's sake! Why does this garbage still manage to evade the Troll mod? Read my lips, idiot. Money spent ON space is not spent IN space. It's spent on the ground creating jobs and driving innovation and education, all of which helps to generate wealth and raise people out of poverty. Speaking of education, when, pray tell, are you planning on getting one? Hmmm?
If it's a teleprompter.
Ah, the old 'Obama can't read without a teleprompter' canard. I guess you haven't actually watched him in a press conference and compared with er George uh W um Bush uh uh...
Presumably Apple has done a bit more market research than me,
You know what? I would presume that too.
and Obama hasn't actually changed anything, and isn't substantially different from Bush.
Yes he is. He can read.
While in geo-synchronise orbit over every major continent, call center employees will be available to answer your computer questions both day and night.
Ha ha. Let's make fun of the Indians and run through the usual 'call center' jokes because nobody has ever though of that before, huh?
This announcement comes on the same day that it has emerged that the US administration has no intention of going to the moon, in a time when the US national debt clock has needed an extra digit added to it, when the US is still recovering from the diplomatic and geo-political catastrophe what was the Bush years, and all you can do is crack jokes about Indians because they have started turning a hugely populated and impoverished country around using the latest opportunities afforded to them by technology. Hmmm.
Enjoy your inflated sense of superiority while it lasts, because it isn't gonna as long as people like you sit back on the Apollo moon landing's laurels and fiddle while Rome burns. The developing world is emerging onto the world stage. The EU is already the world's biggest economy. China and India have poverty on the run and are making in-roads into LEO. What's the USA doing? Still putting out fires in Mesopotamia, trying to catch up to the rest of the industrialized world in figuring out how to treat people when they're sick, and figuring out how to stop consuming a quarter of the world's resources.
Yup, you go right on cracking your jokes. Ha fucking ha. You won't be laughing so loud when you see the red flag of China over the Sea of Tranquility.
If you can free TV shows and movies streaming over Flash, why buy them on iTunes?
I don't expect Flash on this or the iPhone anytime soon.
Er, Flash isn't on the iPhone? How come I'm able to watch all those youtube and other web movies on mine then?
This entire presentation seems a little disappointing. Really, it looks, acts, and feels like a giant iPod Touch. Whereas the iPhone and iPod really created a need , I don't see that this substantially innovate to make it a must-have. It doesn't seem to improve on anything so substantially that it is an obvious choice. Maybe I need to see a few more videos, but I don't see this pulling serious market share away from Kindle's targeted market segment.
Yes, quite.
Last time I saw a /. commenter speculating about the future of Apple's latest new thing, it read something like this:
Raise your hand if you have iTunes ...
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port ...
Raise your hand if you have both ...
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device ...
There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.
~LoudMusic
I prefer to take the 'wait and see' approach.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
The author of TFA seems to have misunderstood what he has posted:
Even the pages of books may be made of steel, though Edison regards nickel as a better substitute for paper”Why not?” asks Edison. “Nickel will absorb printer’s ink. A sheet of nickel one twenty-thousandth of an inch thick is cheaper, tougher, and more flexible than an ordinary sheet of book-paper. A nickel book, two inches thick, would contain 40,000 pages. Such a book would weigh only a pound. I can make a pound of nickel sheets for a dollar and a quarter.”
Hereis a prospect of real culture for the masses Forty thousand pages in a volume! A single volume the equivalent in printing space of two hundred paper-leaved books of two hundred pages each! What a library might be placed between two steel covers and sold for, perhaps, two dollars!
He wasn't talking about having a small device that could 'download' content remotely. He was just talking about using nickel as a substitute for paper, but the book would still essentially be a printed one and the content would be 'hard coded' in ink, albeit you'd still get a lot more pages in there.
Either that or I'm missing something.
How about everyone text? Its generally more efficient (no miscommunication), ....
You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding me!!
Are you seriously telling me you've never tried to be humorously sarcastic in text only to be misinterpreted as rude?
Have you ever had a conversation with someone, only to find out a few seconds later they were on a Bluetooth talking to someone else?
That happened to me the other day - saw an old friend from Highschool on the train, he was half facing the other way because it was crowded.
I somehow went 3 whole minutes of conversation seeming completely fluid and comprehensible, only to see him turn and be like "Wow I haven't seen you since High School!"
You can imagine my baffled reaction.
That drives me fucking crazy! I used to have a house mate who talked incessantly on her phone with headset attached and would inflict her conversations on all of us. Every time she'd come into the kitchen asking a question I'd have to say "are you talking to me?" Nine times out of ten she wasn't.
It's not just cellphones. All technology has an integral etiquette, from cars to scissors. If you think about it, you can find examples for pretty much anything on your desk, and can probably come up with good reasons for why we have the social mores that we do. Everything from not chewing on other people's pencils to not touching someone else's monitor screen.
Cellphones only draw our attention because they're fairly new technology (compared to, say, pencils) and the offenses commitable with a phone can be extremely annoying and in some cases deadly.
This is a much broader topic if you take the time to look into it.
Aeroplanes are another. If your zone or row number hasn't been called yet, then get back from the freaking gate already and stop looking like I have to stand behind you in a line! Jeez! People who crowd the gate before their number has been called are up there with people who drive too slow in the fast lane.
1. It is NOT rude to talk on your cell phone in a public place eg on a train or bus or w/e. just like how it isnt rude to have a conversation with a real person there. It pisses me off that on some busses I take they say "please dont use cellphones, it may disturb others" when it doesnt say "people dont talk, it may disturb others". in fact, on a phone there's less talking to be disturbed bya s thre's only 1/2 the conversation.
You are completely, absolutely, positively 100% incorrect. Studies have been done to prove it. It is WAY more irritating when you can only hear one side of the conversation, irritation amplified by the need that people have to raise their voices on a cellphone since they don't have the feedback that old analog landlines had. If you're not irritated by Incosiderate Cell Phone Man, you, sir, are in a small minority.
Incidentally, from TFA:
* 1. Lower your voice when taking calls in public.
* 2. Avoid personal topics when others can hear you.
* 3. Avoid taking calls when you're already engaged in a face-to-face conversation.
* 4. If you do take a call, ask permission of the people with you.
* 5. Avoid texting during a face-to-face conversations.
* 6. Put your phone's ringer on "silent" in theaters and restaurants.
* 7. Don't light up your phone's screen in a dark theater.
* 8. Hang up and drive.
* 9. Acknowledge the delay
* 10. Don't use Google Voice call screening with family and close friends
* 11. Don't blame the other guy for a dropped call
* 12. Avoid looking things up during a conversation
* 13. Be mindful about Facebook tagging
* 14. Avoid inappropriate profile pictures
At first glance I thought this article would be stating the obvious, but it's got some good stuff when you get past 8. Acknowledging the delay and reassuring the other person that you're not talking over the top of him is a great start, although I must say I haven't had that problem so much since I switched from Verizon. The delay on that service was so bad I ended up dreading every call.
I dunno. We were intelligent enough to learn how to calculate longitude, but it didn't make us any more moral.
There's no reasonable explanation for why they would want to enslave us, or eat us, or otherwise exploit us.
It's conceivable that they might want to wipe us out and repurpose Earth, as it does have some useful minerals, but especially given our nuclear arsenal and the (minor) headaches that would cause, I don't see why they'd go for Earth over the many uninhabited rocks in the universe. Direct harvesting of solar energy would be far more effective than exploiting us, whatever their goals are. We're far less useful than robots.
I'm sure the people of South America, with all the environmental problems they were having, probably thought the same. But the Spaniards saw value in stuff that the Incas and Aztecs took for granted. Who's to say that ET won't come here and take a liking to our stocks of salt water for reasons unbeknownst to us?
Indian exo-atmospheric 'kill vehicle': *knock* *knock*
Jim @ International Space Station: "WTF?! We didn't order any take-out! Goddamn annoying fuckards! *flushes* That'll teach ya!"
Bob @ ISS: "Holy fuck! You took 'em out with only one flush!"
Jim @ ISS: "Yeah... Had vindaloo for lunch."
I knew I wouldn't have to scroll too far to see anti-Indian racism. Sad but true.
Asshole.
Yes I've read Tolstoy, the only bits I skipped were some of the philosophical digressions in War and Peace. The rest was pretty good. You might not have been able to finish anything he wrote but that's no reason to project your shortcomings on others.
The only Star Wars movie that didn't suck, The Empire Strikes Back, was written by a woman named Leigh Brackett.
Quoth wiki:
Brackett worked on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. The movie won the Hugo Award in 1981. This script was a departure for Brackett, since until then, all of her science fiction had been in the form of novels and short stories.
The exact role which Brackett played in writing the script for Empire is the subject of some dispute. What is agreed on by all is that George Lucas asked Brackett to write the screenplay based on his story outline. It is also known that Brackett wrote a finished first draft which was delivered to Lucas shortly before Brackett's death from cancer on March 18, 1978. The screenplay was revised for filming by Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan, and both Brackett and Kasdan (though not Lucas) were given credit for the final script.
Many reviewers believed that they could detect traces of Brackett's influence in both the dialogue and the treatment of the space opera genre in Empire.[3] However, Laurent Bouzereau, in his book Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, states that Lucas disliked the direction of Brackett's screenplay and discarded it. He then produced two screenplays before turning the results over to Kasdan, who did not work directly with Brackett's script at all. By this scenario, Lucas' assignment of credit to Brackett was a mere courtesy or mark of respect for the work she had done during her illness.[4] Support for this view comes from Stephen Haffner, owner of the press that printed Martian Quest: The Early Brackett, who has read Brackett's script, and claims that—outside Lucas' storyline—nothing of Brackett's personal contributions survives in the finished movie.
Brackett's screenplay has never been published. According to Haffner, it can be read at the library of the Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico, but may not be copied or borrowed off-site.
The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits were all self-contained episodes. How on earth can you do a 're-boot' of these? Re-make the original series with a modern spin? I don't think so.
Have you read the Foundation series as an adult? It's not really very good. There are certainly some good ideas but the writing is trapped in the 1950s. It seems really awkward in places and overall (in my opinion) it hasn't aged well. It's nice to have classics in whatever genre but don't live in the past. There is a lot of fine writing now.
The movie and TV business is risky and they want to minimise their losses so they rehash what has worked in the past.
I agree, I read the whole series and it was a decent story overall, but not exactly in the same league as Tolstoy as far as writing goes.
Asimov's concepts were interesting, but his characters were as flat as pancakes. Plus, the concepts and plot devices he used in the books work well for written word fiction, but would be impossible to translate into a movie without taking substantial artistic license. Look at the scathing criticism people threw at iRobot, a collection of short stories that would have looked like crap if the director had stayed 'true to the book,' but with the way he did it it actually turned out as good movie in its own right IMHO, and still preserved the core point of the original story. Some people can't get it into their heads that movies and books are two different media, and if you want to transcribe a story from one to the other then you have to make a lot of changes to make it work. Being 'true to the book' is getting the book's original point across (even if you have to take a few liberties here and there), not making a chapter-by-chapter re-enactment.
True, but that means the summary is saying that security breaches happen on a schedule...
No it doesn't.
I dunno, the amenities sound nicer than your run of the mill U-Store-It.
Reminds me of one of Michael Moore's stunts. He put the poor into storage! He furnished a self storage unit. It was affordable, had air conditioning, security, etc. Lack of a ceiling would have been a bit of a pain though, as would the lack of a window.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.