I can read for hours on my iPad. I just turn the backlight down, or, if I'm reading in bed, go to white text on black. It's funny, I see people with iPads (haven't seen a non iPad tablet out in the wild just yet) with the screen brightness up at +11. Yeah, that gives me a headache. But it turn it down to something more reasonable and no problem.
eBooks are meant for eReaders with eInk not iPads with nasty iCancer light emitting screens.
Backlights cause cancer now? Must not have read that memo.
We're doomed.
Re:It's a serious tablet design flaw!
on
The eBook Backlash
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· Score: 1
If _only_ tablets and eReaders came with more self control, I'd read more!
There's an app for that!
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
on
The eBook Backlash
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· Score: 2
Even on the iPad, illustrations and maps are pretty substandard. That's my biggest beef with Amazon's offerings. They seem to use some horribly compressed jpg that doesn't scale to the full reader screen, much less above that. It's a real problem with anything other than pure text.
Yes. Post-nature began shortly after the invention of agriculture. Given that, I think that if they tried to build a zoo they'd... just have to point people to the nearest farm.
Or the nearest Erlenmeyer flask. Most petting zoos who feature microorganisms don't last all that long.
1) Installing a different version of windows (and having the PC not work right for weeks).
I don't quite get this. Do you have to train the PCI slots on your motherboard to accept the new RAM? Give it little treats? Feed it tiny resistors? Spank it?
It's 'religious' in that it relies on system of beliefs rather than facts and experiment, but it it's important anyway. Not everything can be reduced to logic.
Codifying something, be it religious, scientific, engineering or what have you has validity. It's how you start a framework for discussion.
There many instances of the doctor writing the individual off as almost dead when they live for years afterwards.
True enough, but it's the best information we have.
Doctors currently can't predict how long you are going to live accurately enough to legitimize allowing them to give experimental treatment to people they think have a month to live.
I would disagree. The key is informed consent. Do you carefully explain all of the relevant information? Do you explain where you could be wrong? Do you give an accurate accounting of potential benefits and potential harms? Can the patient understand all of that?
Informed consent is hard to do, but lacking every potential bit of information is not an absolute barrier.
The reason that we're exporting petroleum product (and a tiny amount of that) is because of fairly rapid shifts of consumption and production and the lead time it takes to build a refinery.
US demand has dropped a few points since 2008, but refineries need to run through crude within fairly narrow ranges in order to work efficiently. This gives up an excess in product. So the product needs to go elsewhere and the nice thing about liquid fuels is that they are comparatively easy to ship. That, coupled with the fact that quite a bit of crude these days is heavy and sour, something that European refineries have a limited capacity for, makes exporting a no brainer.
But it's a tiny fraction of the overall energy flow and will likely be temporary anyway.
Plenty of room for the best and brightest to go into fossil fuel research and have some go pretty much everywhere else. We've lots of bright people. We just need to get off our collective, overweight asses and decide that we need to actually spend a significant part of the GDP on something useful - like creating a sane energy policy.
Short of breakthrough that makes Mr. Fusion possible, any reasonably successful future will include power from multiple sources. It's not like we're really good at anything (other than fossil fuels) just yet. Solar conversion rates are low, wind / geo / biomass / etc. are still in their engineering infancy. Nuclear is a mess - we're still running 40+ year old reactors in most places.
Oil shale and 'unconventional' fossil fuels are important but they are still very short term - we can kick the can down the road for perhaps another generation at best. And we still have the human population increasing for the next 4 - 7 decades before it starts to drop back down (from a number that's too high for the planet to support in the long term).
Unless of course, we solve the problem the way nature has solved similar problems of resource allocation in the past - dramatic reduction of the affected organisms population for a while. Nature doesn't care much one way or the other - your grand kids might.
Well this election season, we're going to spend most of our limited intellectual capital arguing about abortion, birth control and the fact that we're AMERICANS!
Once we solve those problems, we just might attempt dealing with reality.
Actually, you have a good point. You need to watch carefully to see what the media is comparing. Oil Futures prices are easy to get (they fall out of the computer) but have no real basis in current reality. They're just trading chits. It's very hard to determine what an an actual barrel of oil is sold for - it varies significantly for one thing - depends on grade and location. The only thing that oil futures prices are good for is speculating and making inflammatory news articles.
Gasoline-at-the-pump prices, OTOH are 'real' but tend to vary quite a bit as well.
The REASON we don't have any new refineries is that they're being shut down because of underutilization. They're not money making. The US, in fact, is exporting product (Gasoline, Diesel) to Europe. And that's just a weird sideline because quite of bit of crude these days is heavy sour (thick, full of sulfur and vanadium which need special filter / cracking units).
Refineries need to run within a fairly narrow range of flows otherwise things get icky. Especially older units which are pretty much designed to run flat out and have a harder time moving distillation fractions around. If you're not producing the product, you have to shut the whole refinery down.
I can't believe you're serious. If you put the electrons that have been used to technically decimate the Lightsquared proposal together in a row you could probably make a wire that stretched to Alpha Centuri.
I'm not even going to make a LMGTFY link. You'll have to do it yourself.
No, I think it more likely that they ran afoul of the Mandatory Driver Download Size rules. When they put a whole OS / application stack in a file 1/10 the size of a typical WIndows print driver, they pissed off a whole bunch of people with higher seniority.
Slashdot Mirror
I can read for hours on my iPad. I just turn the backlight down, or, if I'm reading in bed, go to white text on black. It's funny, I see people with iPads (haven't seen a non iPad tablet out in the wild just yet) with the screen brightness up at +11. Yeah, that gives me a headache. But it turn it down to something more reasonable and no problem.
eBooks are meant for eReaders with eInk not iPads with nasty iCancer light emitting screens.
Backlights cause cancer now? Must not have read that memo.
We're doomed.
If _only_ tablets and eReaders came with more self control, I'd read more!
There's an app for that!
Even on the iPad, illustrations and maps are pretty substandard. That's my biggest beef with Amazon's offerings. They seem to use some horribly compressed jpg that doesn't scale to the full reader screen, much less above that. It's a real problem with anything other than pure text.
So you are implying that people who make me-too copycat games on computers never die?
Well, that does explain the Apple App Store to a large degree.
Speak for yourself.
Yes. Post-nature began shortly after the invention of agriculture. Given that, I think that if they tried to build a zoo they'd... just have to point people to the nearest farm.
Or the nearest Erlenmeyer flask. Most petting zoos who feature microorganisms don't last all that long.
1) Installing a different version of windows (and having the PC not work right for weeks).
I don't quite get this. Do you have to train the PCI slots on your motherboard to accept the new RAM? Give it little treats? Feed it tiny resistors? Spank it?
So, the solution to the increasingly expensive upkeep of America's failing roadway infrastructure is ... camels?
Ponies and wireless cams?
You pervert.
It's 'religious' in that it relies on system of beliefs rather than facts and experiment, but it it's important anyway. Not everything can be reduced to logic.
Codifying something, be it religious, scientific, engineering or what have you has validity. It's how you start a framework for discussion.
My karma ran over your dogma, as it were.
There many instances of the doctor writing the individual off as almost dead when they live for years afterwards.
True enough, but it's the best information we have.
Doctors currently can't predict how long you are going to live accurately enough to legitimize allowing them to give experimental treatment to people they think have a month to live.
I would disagree. The key is informed consent. Do you carefully explain all of the relevant information? Do you explain where you could be wrong? Do you give an accurate accounting of potential benefits and potential harms? Can the patient understand all of that?
Informed consent is hard to do, but lacking every potential bit of information is not an absolute barrier.
So they're going to find an alien fighter in the bowels of Area 51, fly it up to the ISS and upload a virus?
Sounds like the plot of a dumb science fiction movie.
Maybe everyone should get together and file a class action suit - the lawyers will get millions, the users will get 30 seconds of their life back.
The reason that we're exporting petroleum product (and a tiny amount of that) is because of fairly rapid shifts of consumption and production and the lead time it takes to build a refinery.
US demand has dropped a few points since 2008, but refineries need to run through crude within fairly narrow ranges in order to work efficiently. This gives up an excess in product. So the product needs to go elsewhere and the nice thing about liquid fuels is that they are comparatively easy to ship. That, coupled with the fact that quite a bit of crude these days is heavy and sour, something that European refineries have a limited capacity for, makes exporting a no brainer.
But it's a tiny fraction of the overall energy flow and will likely be temporary anyway.
Plenty of room for the best and brightest to go into fossil fuel research and have some go pretty much everywhere else. We've lots of bright people. We just need to get off our collective, overweight asses and decide that we need to actually spend a significant part of the GDP on something useful - like creating a sane energy policy.
Short of breakthrough that makes Mr. Fusion possible, any reasonably successful future will include power from multiple sources. It's not like we're really good at anything (other than fossil fuels) just yet. Solar conversion rates are low, wind / geo / biomass / etc. are still in their engineering infancy. Nuclear is a mess - we're still running 40+ year old reactors in most places.
Oil shale and 'unconventional' fossil fuels are important but they are still very short term - we can kick the can down the road for perhaps another generation at best. And we still have the human population increasing for the next 4 - 7 decades before it starts to drop back down (from a number that's too high for the planet to support in the long term).
Unless of course, we solve the problem the way nature has solved similar problems of resource allocation in the past - dramatic reduction of the affected organisms population for a while. Nature doesn't care much one way or the other - your grand kids might.
Well this election season, we're going to spend most of our limited intellectual capital arguing about abortion, birth control and the fact that we're AMERICANS!
Once we solve those problems, we just might attempt dealing with reality.
Actually, you have a good point. You need to watch carefully to see what the media is comparing. Oil Futures prices are easy to get (they fall out of the computer) but have no real basis in current reality. They're just trading chits. It's very hard to determine what an an actual barrel of oil is sold for - it varies significantly for one thing - depends on grade and location. The only thing that oil futures prices are good for is speculating and making inflammatory news articles.
Gasoline-at-the-pump prices, OTOH are 'real' but tend to vary quite a bit as well.
The REASON we don't have any new refineries is that they're being shut down because of underutilization. They're not money making. The US, in fact, is exporting product (Gasoline, Diesel) to Europe. And that's just a weird sideline because quite of bit of crude these days is heavy sour (thick, full of sulfur and vanadium which need special filter / cracking units).
Refineries need to run within a fairly narrow range of flows otherwise things get icky. Especially older units which are pretty much designed to run flat out and have a harder time moving distillation fractions around. If you're not producing the product, you have to shut the whole refinery down.
I can't believe you're serious. If you put the electrons that have been used to technically decimate the Lightsquared proposal together in a row you could probably make a wire that stretched to Alpha Centuri.
I'm not even going to make a LMGTFY link. You'll have to do it yourself.
Perhaps you can elaborate?
It's Obama's fault!
Further explanations are unnecessary and might complicate things.
Actually it was only 8K for the Senate seat. The Dems returned $20,000.
Must have been running a special that week.
He attempt to do what many /.ers say happen all the time, and got busted.
Oh, that's just because he tried to cheap it out. 28K for a Senate Seat, 50K for Obama.
When you're in the big leagues, you've got to drop the big bucks. Remember this kids, you get what you pay for!
My thought, too. You'd think that after the Y2K madness coders would have learned to adopt more robust calendar implementations.
Yeah, like the Mayan Long Date!
No, I think it more likely that they ran afoul of the Mandatory Driver Download Size rules. When they put a whole OS / application stack in a file 1/10 the size of a typical WIndows print driver, they pissed off a whole bunch of people with higher seniority.