For entertainment, ask any worshippper of Abrahamic religion about the size and shape of God's penis (or Penis?;p ) and see how they struggle with the concept of their deity having such "unclean" part.
Also, ask them how existence of woman fits in (hint that their god might be a hermaphrodite)
Uhm...BS. Since automotive examples are a gold standard on Slashdot:
Look at the interface of a car and supporting infrastructure. It's great at this point (people tend to forget it wasn't always like this). And "idiots" routinelly can handle it, can use it. But not only them...heck, UI of a rally car or F1 car is basically the same.
As a matter of fact, it's quite safe to assume you also use it. That makes you an idiot, right?...
Mobile TV supposedly took off in Japan. And picoprojector (or whatever devices based on TI DLP tech are called these days) might be quite good for that...
They should have all this stuff implemented also relatively easily, I guess, and they appear quite "ultimate" when it comes to perception in bugs.
I seem to remember they follow some impressive flight pattern when pursuing their prey - first remaining stationary in relation to background image perceived by prey, and then, in final moments, stationary in relation to vision of prey.
Not disagreeing with you generally of course - but aren't protons & neutrons more accuratelly conceptualised as, indeed, a sphere with each of the quarks not occupying any specific point but being "mixed" together?
Optic fibers, transistors, structures in modern microchips hitting quantum effects more and more (requiring workarounds), magnetoresistive effect in HDDs, and so on...all speculation to you.
"On the other side of the pond" there are countries with two times smaller population density than the US, with far better experience of using cellphones (Finland for example; BTW, part of "guaranteed 1mbps for everyone" there that was discussed recently involves wireless access for areas where landlines aren't practical)
Don't fall into Stockholm Syndrome with US cellphone carriers.
Yeah, most Nokia phones are like that; seems like they understand the main purpose of mobile phones. Even their 20, without contract of course, 1280 (well, ok, 1280 isn't in the wild yet, but if 1100, 1200, 1202, 1208 performance is any indicator...). Helps them to be the largest phone manufacturer in the world, I imagine.
Plus - most applicable objects in the solar system are probably piles of rubble, with gravity just enough to hold them together. Which presents its own kinds of problems if you want to move them or make any contruction work with them.
As for water - yeah, comets are a good example of what would happen to exposed water ice in close solar orbits, though I imagine you can use thin external shields to limit exposure to sunlight or perhaps turning water into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete (lunar dust could work great for this?) But water has another problem - it's hard to build lightweight structures with it, limiting it's potential usage mostly to small radiation shelters on ships and...stationary bases not meant to be moved / launched. Like on the moon.
Seems like it has a potential to be mighty useful for some pet projects, like robotics or general motion capture (for whatever reason...), and with a pleasently low price.
Of course the "custom processor running proprietary software" is a bit unfortunate, even if totally expected and undestandable. Who knows though what perversions we'll see in the protocol...
Religions don't appear to be common at all in present species, though there are strong hints for the presence of them in Neanderthals. And, of course, homo sapiens sapiens. Granted, there's not a lot of data points in one of those subsets but, taking all things into consideration, there are strong hints that religions are memetic contructs.;p A bit out of scope of genetics and mutations (as commonly understood, regarding genes; even if there might be some that contributed to particular structure of society in our line of primates)
But your example (and few by other posters) don't contest per se the idea that it is a phenomena with US origin (origin being the key word here)
For example: Big Macs (and similar) are eaten and made throughout the world. Doesn't mean that they are no longer of US origin (and yes, the meals of that form might not be of US origin in reality, I don't know; but you get the idea...)
Also, it would be usefull to look at the scale of things; I guess US leads in production of zombie films by a large margin.
Adding to reasons you mention - vampires basically originate from slavic mythology (they were probably introduced to the western Europe by way of human trade in middle ages; for example, "nannies" of slavic descent were supposedly quite valued for some reason, so when they actually were left to care for children it's concievable they would tell some stories...)
And this was also the time of imposing Christianity on those regions. Very gradual of course; in Poland for example there is currently a widely held myth of "national baptism" in tenth century, when in reality this was of course a political gesture, even with Pagan Reaction in XI century (killing clergy, restoring old places of worship, forcing Christian ruler to escape, the usual; btw, he came back some years later and enforced new rules again with the help of borrowed German warriors...but don't mention that to most vivid current worshippers, they also often don't like Germans, they get confused;) ) and Christianity being mostly a facade even up to around XVII or XVIII century. A facade, but nonetheless with few crucial changes in officialy tolerated customs.
You see, Pagan Slavs generally burned their dead. Leaving a body to slowly decompose was a big no-no. But it was one of essential things back then for Christianity. A very potent recipe for greatly elevated fears of dead returning to life that you mention (also because at the beginning it was actually widely realised they didn't get "proper" burial)
PS. In a very twisted way, original poster has some point - religious circumstances helped greatly, perhaps it was even sometimes fear of the "old gods";p
Oh well, for me its enough that I can run few OSS apps found here and there without any issues (from what I remember - only typical "are you sure you want to install this unsigned app"? at the time of installation)
As for SE - yes and no. They do have better prices in large chunk of feature phones segment (heck, my second phone is a SE G502, a fabulous deal for the price when I bought it), but their smartphones were always much more expensive (which doesn't neccessarily mean comparable Nokia ones are not, just that SE doesn't have cheap ones). Just look at prices of Satio or Idou or whatever their recent touchscreens are called now. Plus, it doesn't seem to work for SE, with their constant losses...
Nokia ships multiple lines of products, perhaps also that's why it is by far the largest phone manufacturer in the world.
They currently have S30/S40, Symbian S60v3, S60v5 and Maemo. In that order from cheapest to most expensive devices. In that order from most to least popular. And I'm not even sure whether or not phones like Nokia 1100 (the most popular single model of consumer electronic device in history; more than families of other "most popular" products) fall even under S30...
Microkernel, specifically, EKA2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EKA2 It appears decently suited: "The Symbian kernel (EKA2) supports sufficiently-fast real-time response to build a single-core phone around itthat is, a phone in which a single processor core executes both the user applications and the signalling stack. This is a feature which is not available in Linux. This has allowed Symbian EKA2 phones to become smaller, cheaper and more power efficient than their predecessors". Certainly Symbian devices seem to be by far the cheapest smartphones on the market...
Perhaps "Active objects" are similar in that they actually reasonably fit into such kinds of devices?
Also, Qt seems to be pushed as the API for Symbian^3 or ^4, and you can always self-sign (though perhaps handsets available in the US are more locked...)
- Symbian chips on slighly more than half of smartphones (which is another way of saying "it ships more devices than all other players combined") - vast majority of phones sold all over the world aren't smartphones, but feature phones (for example with Nokia S30 or S40) - Nokia seems to be pushing Symbian into the place of S40 (I guess Maemo wil be at the top)
Symbian isn't going anywhere. It will grow bigtime. Out of OSes you list only Android, IMHO, has similar potential (it also seems to be coming to cheap devices). They won't even really have to compete with each other, with such huge market for the taking.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't that funny though.
For entertainment, ask any worshippper of Abrahamic religion about the size and shape of God's penis (or Penis? ;p ) and see how they struggle with the concept of their deity having such "unclean" part.
Also, ask them how existence of woman fits in (hint that their god might be a hermaphrodite)
Uhm...BS. Since automotive examples are a gold standard on Slashdot:
Look at the interface of a car and supporting infrastructure. It's great at this point (people tend to forget it wasn't always like this). And "idiots" routinelly can handle it, can use it. But not only them...heck, UI of a rally car or F1 car is basically the same.
As a matter of fact, it's quite safe to assume you also use it. That makes you an idiot, right?...
Mobile TV supposedly took off in Japan. And picoprojector (or whatever devices based on TI DLP tech are called these days) might be quite good for that...
They should have all this stuff implemented also relatively easily, I guess, and they appear quite "ultimate" when it comes to perception in bugs.
I seem to remember they follow some impressive flight pattern when pursuing their prey - first remaining stationary in relation to background image perceived by prey, and then, in final moments, stationary in relation to vision of prey.
I would be also interested in determining which stimulus can trick even fly system...
Not disagreeing with you generally of course - but aren't protons & neutrons more accuratelly conceptualised as, indeed, a sphere with each of the quarks not occupying any specific point but being "mixed" together?
Black hole doesn't need to rotate to have accretion zone / disk; simple orbital mechanics form it.
Optic fibers, transistors, structures in modern microchips hitting quantum effects more and more (requiring workarounds), magnetoresistive effect in HDDs, and so on...all speculation to you.
"On the other side of the pond" there are countries with two times smaller population density than the US, with far better experience of using cellphones (Finland for example; BTW, part of "guaranteed 1mbps for everyone" there that was discussed recently involves wireless access for areas where landlines aren't practical)
Don't fall into Stockholm Syndrome with US cellphone carriers.
Yeah, most Nokia phones are like that; seems like they understand the main purpose of mobile phones. Even their 20, without contract of course, 1280 (well, ok, 1280 isn't in the wild yet, but if 1100, 1200, 1202, 1208 performance is any indicator...). Helps them to be the largest phone manufacturer in the world, I imagine.
So...I take it it's even more plausible in the case of US space program, given that it actually lost much larger number of flight personnel?
Well, you wrote your post like you were ignoring a bit that we are practicing near Earth for half a century already...
Plus - most applicable objects in the solar system are probably piles of rubble, with gravity just enough to hold them together. Which presents its own kinds of problems if you want to move them or make any contruction work with them.
As for water - yeah, comets are a good example of what would happen to exposed water ice in close solar orbits, though I imagine you can use thin external shields to limit exposure to sunlight or perhaps turning water into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete (lunar dust could work great for this?) But water has another problem - it's hard to build lightweight structures with it, limiting it's potential usage mostly to small radiation shelters on ships and...stationary bases not meant to be moved / launched. Like on the moon.
Have you heard about Gagarin?
Seems like it has a potential to be mighty useful for some pet projects, like robotics or general motion capture (for whatever reason...), and with a pleasently low price.
Of course the "custom processor running proprietary software" is a bit unfortunate, even if totally expected and undestandable. Who knows though what perversions we'll see in the protocol...
You can see mostly cliffs that survive the elements for any significant amount of time? (owing to their structure - in this case, specific materials)
Religions don't appear to be common at all in present species, though there are strong hints for the presence of them in Neanderthals. And, of course, homo sapiens sapiens. Granted, there's not a lot of data points in one of those subsets but, taking all things into consideration, there are strong hints that religions are memetic contructs. ;p A bit out of scope of genetics and mutations (as commonly understood, regarding genes; even if there might be some that contributed to particular structure of society in our line of primates)
Don't you mean "braaainzzzzzzz..."?
Fear of death? Personally, I would much prefer to be undead than dead ;p
But your example (and few by other posters) don't contest per se the idea that it is a phenomena with US origin (origin being the key word here)
For example: Big Macs (and similar) are eaten and made throughout the world. Doesn't mean that they are no longer of US origin (and yes, the meals of that form might not be of US origin in reality, I don't know; but you get the idea...)
Also, it would be usefull to look at the scale of things; I guess US leads in production of zombie films by a large margin.
Adding to reasons you mention - vampires basically originate from slavic mythology (they were probably introduced to the western Europe by way of human trade in middle ages; for example, "nannies" of slavic descent were supposedly quite valued for some reason, so when they actually were left to care for children it's concievable they would tell some stories...)
And this was also the time of imposing Christianity on those regions. Very gradual of course; in Poland for example there is currently a widely held myth of "national baptism" in tenth century, when in reality this was of course a political gesture, even with Pagan Reaction in XI century (killing clergy, restoring old places of worship, forcing Christian ruler to escape, the usual; btw, he came back some years later and enforced new rules again with the help of borrowed German warriors...but don't mention that to most vivid current worshippers, they also often don't like Germans, they get confused ;) ) and Christianity being mostly a facade even up to around XVII or XVIII century. A facade, but nonetheless with few crucial changes in officialy tolerated customs.
You see, Pagan Slavs generally burned their dead. Leaving a body to slowly decompose was a big no-no. But it was one of essential things back then for Christianity. A very potent recipe for greatly elevated fears of dead returning to life that you mention (also because at the beginning it was actually widely realised they didn't get "proper" burial)
PS. In a very twisted way, original poster has some point - religious circumstances helped greatly, perhaps it was even sometimes fear of the "old gods" ;p
Oh well, for me its enough that I can run few OSS apps found here and there without any issues (from what I remember - only typical "are you sure you want to install this unsigned app"? at the time of installation)
As for SE - yes and no. They do have better prices in large chunk of feature phones segment (heck, my second phone is a SE G502, a fabulous deal for the price when I bought it), but their smartphones were always much more expensive (which doesn't neccessarily mean comparable Nokia ones are not, just that SE doesn't have cheap ones). Just look at prices of Satio or Idou or whatever their recent touchscreens are called now. Plus, it doesn't seem to work for SE, with their constant losses...
Nokia ships multiple lines of products, perhaps also that's why it is by far the largest phone manufacturer in the world.
They currently have S30/S40, Symbian S60v3, S60v5 and Maemo. In that order from cheapest to most expensive devices. In that order from most to least popular. And I'm not even sure whether or not phones like Nokia 1100 (the most popular single model of consumer electronic device in history; more than families of other "most popular" products) fall even under S30...
Microkernel, specifically, EKA2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EKA2
It appears decently suited: "The Symbian kernel (EKA2) supports sufficiently-fast real-time response to build a single-core phone around itthat is, a phone in which a single processor core executes both the user applications and the signalling stack. This is a feature which is not available in Linux. This has allowed Symbian EKA2 phones to become smaller, cheaper and more power efficient than their predecessors". Certainly Symbian devices seem to be by far the cheapest smartphones on the market...
Perhaps "Active objects" are similar in that they actually reasonably fit into such kinds of devices?
Also, Qt seems to be pushed as the API for Symbian^3 or ^4, and you can always self-sign (though perhaps handsets available in the US are more locked...)
- Symbian chips on slighly more than half of smartphones (which is another way of saying "it ships more devices than all other players combined")
- vast majority of phones sold all over the world aren't smartphones, but feature phones (for example with Nokia S30 or S40)
- Nokia seems to be pushing Symbian into the place of S40 (I guess Maemo wil be at the top)
Symbian isn't going anywhere. It will grow bigtime. Out of OSes you list only Android, IMHO, has similar potential (it also seems to be coming to cheap devices). They won't even really have to compete with each other, with such huge market for the taking.