"Separation of Church and State" was a coin termed by Thomas Jefferson to describe the effects of the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses.
Doesn't matter; the term doesn't exist in our constitution, and therefore is not law. Further, from your own quote: "the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect "a wall of separation between church and State."
You later go on to say,
True, because a court room is a government facility and therefore placing religious reference to any religion in that court room is unconstitutional. So is asking someone to swear on a religious text.
You are contradicting yourself. It is very obvious even by your own quotes that the relevant section of the first amendment - the "separation of church and state" - was specifically intended to prevent our government from passing a law that establishes a state religion.
Then you go on to say that placing religious reference in a court room or asking someone to swear on a religious text is in violation. How is this akin to a law being passed?
If a teacher prays with his students, how is that passing a law? I understand that he is an "agent of the government" and his endorsement of religion could be taken by some to be government endorsement of religion, but the constitution has still not been violated because no law has been passed.
Why can't public school students be allowed to attend an optional religious class? If they aren't forced to attend, what's the problem? No law has been passed.
Laws have, however, been passed in the other direction, which seems to contradict "prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
My primary point is that "separation of church and state" does not, nor was it ever intended to mean an actual, physical separation. The context in which Jefferson used those words must be taken into account, and that context clearly states a limiting factor of a law being passed. If no law is passed, church and state are separated, based on the full context of the statement.
Further backing this up is the simple fact that our founding fathers were, in part, escaping religious persecution. In England, you were Catholic - or else. They wanted to ensure you could be whatever you wanted to be in America. Allowing optional religious teachings in school does not violate this in any way, shape or form.
How about the attempts to ban stemp cell research and abortion for religious reasons
There is right and wrong outside of religion. One can believe abortion is murder without having a religious basis behind it. The argument about when a fetus becomes human is not strictly a religious argument. Plenty of non-religious people disagree with abortion, as well as the other issues you mentioned.
AND NO SCHOOL SYSTEM DOES - The law [constitution] states that the school cannot lead them in prayer
Neither does it allow students to lead other students in prayer, such as during graduation ceremonies, which I feel unconstitutionally limits the students' freedom of expression.
While they are at school they are agents of the US Government. They may pray while at school in private, they made not lead their students in prayer.
Teachers aren't even allowed to be present when students pray, even if the teacher has nothing to do with the prayer!
"Borden has been the football coach at East Brunswick High School for 23 years and gained national attention in October after he quit his job when told by school officials that he could no longer lead his team in prayer or even be present if his team prayed." Link.
I'm not convinced it is a matter of parenting because it is simply not possible to watch older children or teens every waking moment.
Except that teens need guidance more than they need rules. They're basically adults. If my teenage son wanted to play GTA, I'd first have a talk with him to make sure he fully understood what he was getting into. I'd explain the reasons such a game might not be a good idea. And if he still wanted to go out and buy it, I'd let him. A teenager is old enough to make his own choices as well as live with any consequences.
For crying out loud, if we keep telling 17 year olds exactly how to live their lives, what happens in a year when they turn 18 and they're free to do whatever they want? Better that we let them make their own decisions and face consequences while we still have some influence over their lives. How else are they going to learn to make decisions?
In my experience, the kids that abuse alcohol, drugs, etc, are the kids whose parents were crazy uptight about it. My parents never freaked out if I drank a glass of their wine at 15, in fact they were happy to give it to me along with information on alcohol and personal responsibility. As a result, when I was old enough to buy my own alcohol, I didn't go crazy with this "newfound freedom" like so many of my friends because it simply wasn't new to me. My parents didn't turn it into one of those "forbidden fruit" type of things that screws up so many young people.
Tolerate christians band togeather, stand next to us atheists/agnostics in defense of the seperation of chruch and state - show the fundamentalsts they will not be tolerated.
There is no seperation of church and state.
The first amendment reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
Anti-religious people have taken this to the extreme. Children aren't allowed to organize and hold voluntary prayer groups on school property. Many schools have prohibited children from wearing crosses. A judge has been prohibited from putting the ten commandments in his courtroom.
Nowhere do I see congress making any laws. I do, however, see the court system, via lawsuits from athiests, "prohibiting the free exercise thereof." If anything, I believe the anti-religious side is in violation of the constitution. When the public school system says my child can't pray because of some fscking lawsuit, they're prohibiting the free exercise of her religion. That clause is intended to ensure everyone is allowed to practice whatever religion they want, or no religion at all. Not to force religious people to hide their religion from people who don't wish to see it.
So, no, I won't stand by you while you illegally restrict my right to pray, wear religious symbols, or post religious messages in certain places. I won't stand by and support you telling teachers they aren't allowed to talk about God, as if that is somehow equal to congress passing a law.
However, if the government ever passes a law forcing you to attend chuch, or to pray to God, then I'll stand, and if necessary fight to the death, alongside you.
It means that he will attempt to hold other Christians accountable for their actions. To give an example:
If him & I are out for a drive, and I say, "Hey, why don't you stop at this titty bar, I need to go in for a quick lap dance", I can bet we're going to have a nice long discussion about the immorality of my actions. Further, if I refused to listen, he would be a good friend to inform other Christians and church elders about this so they can band together and attempt to help me get my life back on a Christian track.
On the other hand, if you and he were out for a drive, and you said the same thing, it's doubtful you would get a lecture at all. I wouldn't lecture you on your immoral behavior because it isn't immoral to you. What would be the point?
+ State tax, if any + Sales tax + Gas tax + Misc special taxes, like your phone bill - did you know phones are taxed in excess of 90%? A $12 phoone line comes up to nearly $25 after all of the taxes and fees are added in.
By the time you add it all up, I wouldn't be surprised if it approached 50%.
Of course, even the people who have these strong fundamentalist ideologies have this feeling that they're naturally "entitled" to motion picture entertainment, and it's the responsibility of the movie industry to contort to their desires, and their morals.
It works both ways. An awful lot of athiests want to stamp God out of everything because they're offended by Him and, for whatever reason, they think everyone else should (to use your words) "contort to their desires".
Both sides need to chill out. We all live in the same society, we have to put up with one another. Christians are going to see things we consider sinful and immoral. Athiests are going to see references to God and religion. There's nothing either group should do about it. (I'd say there's nothing they can do about it, but all of the laws and lawsuits and bitching and moaning from both sides seem to indicate otherwise. Unfortunately, all this does is further restrict personal freedom on both sides.)
My job as the Bible mandates is to enforce responsibility in my brothers and sisters in Christ, and be a model for non-believers. I can not control a non-believer and using Caesar to do so is wrong.
I just want to thank you for starting this thread. In it's responses, I'm finding there are a lot more Christians just like me, and I'm adding them (and you) to my "friends" list.
It's refreshing to see others in my faith who are not intent on converting the world by force. Jesus said to spread the good word, not to force it upon people. If someone isn't interested in religion, no big deal, we can still be friends (as long as he isn't bitter enough to hate Christians).
Christian groups who want to stomp sin out of everyone's lives by creating a police state are just as bad as athiests who want to stomp God out of everyone's lives. Why can't we all sit down, chill out, and respect - or at least tolerate - one another?
I guess you've proved your own point when it comes to childish behavior.
It was a joke, not a personal attack. The idea of a stereotypical slashdotter living in his mother's basement is prevalent in half the threads here. You've been around long enough to know that, so I can only guess you were trolling.
You win, here's your response, I hope it was entertaining.:)
just as (most) people give up childish behavior as they grow up.
Have you ever left the confines of your mother's basement?
I, like most here, work in an office. And let me tell you, virtually none of the so-called adults I work with have given up childish behavior. The only difference is the stakes are higher.
Clustered filesystems are your friend. They give you speed and flexibility unattainable by other filesystems.
Further, why does Apple need "ultra expensive super fast storage"? I think you're getting a little too excited about the idea of serving that many songs and forgetting the basic logistics. They sell, what, a million songs a month? At ~4MB a piece, they're pulling 4T a month off disk. Yes, I know, they serve previews for every song, etc, but let's just tackle these issues one at a time.
4T a month is 133 megs a day. Hell, you COULD string 100 Seagate drives together and pull 133 megs per SECOND off the array.
So how many previews are they streaming? I bet that's where the mass of their I/O is. If they serve 10 previews for every song that's 10 million per month, or 3.8 per second. They can't be more than half a meg each. So 1.9 megs per second of I/O. Of course this isn't linear, the data comes and goes in bursts, but tell me again how their arrays have to be "EXTREAMELY high I/O" and "1000 times more" expensive?
This is a simple solution. You don't need to spend tens of millions of dollars on storage and, quite frankly, I doubt Apple did. You're challenging me on this issue but I'm not sure you realize that high performance, highly available, very large storage is my job. It's what I do, every day. I analyze storage needs, recommend and implement solutions. And I don't waste my employer's money on expensive fiber channel SANs when there's no chance they'll ever need the bandwidth.
I know how many drives, floor space, power, and maintenance you need to run a datacenter with 30 TB of data (required to run a site with 1 million + songs). I know how much bandwidth and servers you need to deliver these songs to the desktop. This is not cheap.
Sorry, that's funny. I run a 400TB high performance data archive, all on disk. 30TB is nothing. It's piddly crap. A tiny investment even a small company could swing. This is nothing to Apple. It's not even a drop in their collective bucket of money.
Drives, floor space, power and maintenance? For 30TB? LOL! My 400TB fits into 5 racks. I could run it out of a spare bedroom in my house, performing maintenance with my free time. 30TB would fit under my desk and require a couple hours a week worth of tinkering to keep online.
The web interface - the "human" part of the equation - and the bandwidth is where their costs really lie, not in the disk archive. That part barely counts at all.
As an aside, if somebody just wants to store bookmarks online & off, I've got a better alternative. There are several Digg-type "social bookmarking" sites, but none concentrate purely on the storage of bookmarks in a personal way as well as memFrag.
Of course, having developed the site, I'm heavily biased. But I wanted to share, anyway.
You know, I don't mean to be insensitive, but why are we negotiating or even considering these ridiculous requests? Other countries don't want us to control the Internet? Tough shit, we created it. They can go build their own network if they don't like it.
To build what I want, you'd literally just have to attach the guts of a LifeDrive to a bigger screen and battery, and you'd have $500 extra to spend to do it. Now tell me it can't be done!
It can't be done!;)
Actually, I'm serious. Your 1/4" thick requirement is the deal killer. The LifeDrive is 0.8 inches thick. You want to cut that by more than 2/3rds and put a huge battery hogging screen in. Where are you going to get the power to drive it with no room for batteries in your quarter inches of space? And how are you going to make it all so thin?
If we can keep it at 0.8" thick I'm on board with you. Totally possible, even relatively easy.
But after I got out of highschool I graduated to mags that were much more in depth and took the time to actually reasearch and even use the products in question.
Like?
(no, really. I want to know. I'd be interested in subscribing to said magazines.)
Nonsense. PADDs, unlike much of Treknology, could be built today.
Barely. And not anywhere near the price he wants. I say again, the technology to build what he asks for does not exist. I could have clarified by adding "at his price" but that was implicit in my statement, as price was included in his list of requirements.
Besides, if it were built today, it wouldn't be good enough for him because he left out his numerous other requirements. I expect he'd want some sort of reasonable battery life that can't be provided in a device this thin with a screen that large (yes yes, e-ink, you can bring that up again when the price comes down and the technology matures). Oh, and he wants more storage than flash memory can provide - hence the call for a 1/8" hard drive. +size +heat +power draw.
At any rate, I wasn't slamming the guy. I just thought it was funny, and intended my post to be taken the same way.:)
quarter-inch thick; similar thickness to an iPod Nano letter (or A4) size screen costs less than $1000 think of a PADD from Star Trek
Wow. That's all you ask for? I mean, while you're dreaming about technology that doesn't exist, why not go all out? Throw in some hologram projectors embedded in a watch, or something?;)
Right. He engaged in hand to hand combat. Good way to get killed unless you're well trained.
When you're perched on a large ship, watching this dinky little "pirate ship" approach - for crying out loud, it was barely big enough to hold the four pirates - you totally have the tactical advantage. Unless you're not paying attention to your radar, you should see these fools coming a good long time before they're close enough to launch their attack, let alone board your ship.
If they've boarded your ship, everything changes, of course.
the sheer size of the newest models cause visual pollution
Only to whiny people.
I love the huge turbines. I can see a medium sized wind farm from my home. They're beautiful to me because they represent pure, clean power. Not to mention, they're quite graceful in their movements and fun to watch.
The whiners who oppose them have their heads up their collective rear ends. Ask these people how they prefer to get their electricity and they can't answer you. Wind is ugly and kills birds. Solar is ugly and full of nasty chemicals. Coal is bad. Nuclear is scary. Tidal hurts whales and hydroelectric kills fish. Yet none of these whiners are willing to turn off their electricity and go back to oil lamps.
You can't have it both ways, folks. I believe an intelligent person should see through the "big ugly propeller" and find the beauty in it's cleanliness. I certainly do.
In any event, we're told to just do whatever the pirates say, and don't try to act like a hero.
Screw that. That just encourages them to continue attacking. If people would fight back, maybe this would end.
I mean, look: These are the pirates - and their pirate "ship" - that attacked the cruise ship. The news is calling this a "speedboat". It looks like the ratty, $500 fishing boat the poor people down the street from me own.
Don't tell me you couldn't fend off these rascals with the appropriate weapons. I know I could. Sure, they've got machine guns and rocket fired grenandes. Big whoop. The ships they're attacking are huge. I mean, I'd sit on top of the ship and pick these twerps off with a high powered rifle before they even got close enough to launch their attacks. Or toss a few grenandes back at them. Get one in that boat and - poof - no more pirates.
Do this a few times and watch how fast the pirate problem disappears.
Slashdot Mirror
Especially since he can't spell "yacht".
(at least he got "Esprit" right...)
I clicked. It's interesting. You want to click on mine? ;)
"Separation of Church and State" was a coin termed by Thomas Jefferson to describe the effects of the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses.
Doesn't matter; the term doesn't exist in our constitution, and therefore is not law. Further, from your own quote: "the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect "a wall of separation between church and State."
You later go on to say,
True, because a court room is a government facility and therefore placing religious reference to any religion in that court room is unconstitutional. So is asking someone to swear on a religious text.
You are contradicting yourself. It is very obvious even by your own quotes that the relevant section of the first amendment - the "separation of church and state" - was specifically intended to prevent our government from passing a law that establishes a state religion.
Then you go on to say that placing religious reference in a court room or asking someone to swear on a religious text is in violation. How is this akin to a law being passed?
If a teacher prays with his students, how is that passing a law? I understand that he is an "agent of the government" and his endorsement of religion could be taken by some to be government endorsement of religion, but the constitution has still not been violated because no law has been passed.
Why can't public school students be allowed to attend an optional religious class? If they aren't forced to attend, what's the problem? No law has been passed.
Laws have, however, been passed in the other direction, which seems to contradict "prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
My primary point is that "separation of church and state" does not, nor was it ever intended to mean an actual, physical separation. The context in which Jefferson used those words must be taken into account, and that context clearly states a limiting factor of a law being passed. If no law is passed, church and state are separated, based on the full context of the statement.
Further backing this up is the simple fact that our founding fathers were, in part, escaping religious persecution. In England, you were Catholic - or else. They wanted to ensure you could be whatever you wanted to be in America. Allowing optional religious teachings in school does not violate this in any way, shape or form.
How about the attempts to ban stemp cell research and abortion for religious reasons
There is right and wrong outside of religion. One can believe abortion is murder without having a religious basis behind it. The argument about when a fetus becomes human is not strictly a religious argument. Plenty of non-religious people disagree with abortion, as well as the other issues you mentioned.
AND NO SCHOOL SYSTEM DOES - The law [constitution] states that the school cannot lead them in prayer
Neither does it allow students to lead other students in prayer, such as during graduation ceremonies, which I feel unconstitutionally limits the students' freedom of expression.
While they are at school they are agents of the US Government. They may pray while at school in private, they made not lead their students in prayer.
Teachers aren't even allowed to be present when students pray, even if the teacher has nothing to do with the prayer!
"Borden has been the football coach at East Brunswick High School for 23 years and gained national attention in October after he quit his job when told by school officials that he could no longer lead his team in prayer or even be present if his team prayed." Link.
I'm not convinced it is a matter of parenting because it is simply not possible to watch older children or teens every waking moment.
Except that teens need guidance more than they need rules. They're basically adults. If my teenage son wanted to play GTA, I'd first have a talk with him to make sure he fully understood what he was getting into. I'd explain the reasons such a game might not be a good idea. And if he still wanted to go out and buy it, I'd let him. A teenager is old enough to make his own choices as well as live with any consequences.
For crying out loud, if we keep telling 17 year olds exactly how to live their lives, what happens in a year when they turn 18 and they're free to do whatever they want? Better that we let them make their own decisions and face consequences while we still have some influence over their lives. How else are they going to learn to make decisions?
In my experience, the kids that abuse alcohol, drugs, etc, are the kids whose parents were crazy uptight about it. My parents never freaked out if I drank a glass of their wine at 15, in fact they were happy to give it to me along with information on alcohol and personal responsibility. As a result, when I was old enough to buy my own alcohol, I didn't go crazy with this "newfound freedom" like so many of my friends because it simply wasn't new to me. My parents didn't turn it into one of those "forbidden fruit" type of things that screws up so many young people.
Tolerate christians band togeather, stand next to us atheists/agnostics in defense of the seperation of chruch and state - show the fundamentalsts they will not be tolerated.
There is no seperation of church and state.
The first amendment reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
Anti-religious people have taken this to the extreme. Children aren't allowed to organize and hold voluntary prayer groups on school property. Many schools have prohibited children from wearing crosses. A judge has been prohibited from putting the ten commandments in his courtroom.
Nowhere do I see congress making any laws. I do, however, see the court system, via lawsuits from athiests, "prohibiting the free exercise thereof." If anything, I believe the anti-religious side is in violation of the constitution. When the public school system says my child can't pray because of some fscking lawsuit, they're prohibiting the free exercise of her religion. That clause is intended to ensure everyone is allowed to practice whatever religion they want, or no religion at all. Not to force religious people to hide their religion from people who don't wish to see it.
So, no, I won't stand by you while you illegally restrict my right to pray, wear religious symbols, or post religious messages in certain places. I won't stand by and support you telling teachers they aren't allowed to talk about God, as if that is somehow equal to congress passing a law.
However, if the government ever passes a law forcing you to attend chuch, or to pray to God, then I'll stand, and if necessary fight to the death, alongside you.
what the fuck does this mean?
It means that he will attempt to hold other Christians accountable for their actions. To give an example:
If him & I are out for a drive, and I say, "Hey, why don't you stop at this titty bar, I need to go in for a quick lap dance", I can bet we're going to have a nice long discussion about the immorality of my actions. Further, if I refused to listen, he would be a good friend to inform other Christians and church elders about this so they can band together and attempt to help me get my life back on a Christian track.
On the other hand, if you and he were out for a drive, and you said the same thing, it's doubtful you would get a lecture at all. I wouldn't lecture you on your immoral behavior because it isn't immoral to you. What would be the point?
I'm a well paid software developer and I pay 35%
Federal tax only.
+ State tax, if any
+ Sales tax
+ Gas tax
+ Misc special taxes, like your phone bill - did you know phones are taxed in excess of 90%? A $12 phoone line comes up to nearly $25 after all of the taxes and fees are added in.
By the time you add it all up, I wouldn't be surprised if it approached 50%.
Of course, even the people who have these strong fundamentalist ideologies have this feeling that they're naturally "entitled" to motion picture entertainment, and it's the responsibility of the movie industry to contort to their desires, and their morals.
It works both ways. An awful lot of athiests want to stamp God out of everything because they're offended by Him and, for whatever reason, they think everyone else should (to use your words) "contort to their desires".
Both sides need to chill out. We all live in the same society, we have to put up with one another. Christians are going to see things we consider sinful and immoral. Athiests are going to see references to God and religion. There's nothing either group should do about it. (I'd say there's nothing they can do about it, but all of the laws and lawsuits and bitching and moaning from both sides seem to indicate otherwise. Unfortunately, all this does is further restrict personal freedom on both sides.)
(I am Christian and proud of it)
My job as the Bible mandates is to enforce responsibility in my brothers and sisters in Christ, and be a model for non-believers. I can not control a non-believer and using Caesar to do so is wrong.
I just want to thank you for starting this thread. In it's responses, I'm finding there are a lot more Christians just like me, and I'm adding them (and you) to my "friends" list.
It's refreshing to see others in my faith who are not intent on converting the world by force. Jesus said to spread the good word, not to force it upon people. If someone isn't interested in religion, no big deal, we can still be friends (as long as he isn't bitter enough to hate Christians).
Christian groups who want to stomp sin out of everyone's lives by creating a police state are just as bad as athiests who want to stomp God out of everyone's lives. Why can't we all sit down, chill out, and respect - or at least tolerate - one another?
I guess you've proved your own point when it comes to childish behavior.
:)
It was a joke, not a personal attack. The idea of a stereotypical slashdotter living in his mother's basement is prevalent in half the threads here. You've been around long enough to know that, so I can only guess you were trolling.
You win, here's your response, I hope it was entertaining.
just as (most) people give up childish behavior as they grow up.
Have you ever left the confines of your mother's basement?
I, like most here, work in an office. And let me tell you, virtually none of the so-called adults I work with have given up childish behavior. The only difference is the stakes are higher.
4T a month is 133 megs a day. Hell, you COULD string 100 Seagate drives together and pull 133 megs per SECOND off the array.
Boy, I blew that sentence. 92 megs per minute, 1.54 megs per second. Trivial, regardless.
You must have missed the part where I said, "High performance data archive."
Stuff I am talking about costs 1000 times more.
No it doesn't: http://www.lustre.org/
Clustered filesystems are your friend. They give you speed and flexibility unattainable by other filesystems.
Further, why does Apple need "ultra expensive super fast storage"? I think you're getting a little too excited about the idea of serving that many songs and forgetting the basic logistics. They sell, what, a million songs a month? At ~4MB a piece, they're pulling 4T a month off disk. Yes, I know, they serve previews for every song, etc, but let's just tackle these issues one at a time.
4T a month is 133 megs a day. Hell, you COULD string 100 Seagate drives together and pull 133 megs per SECOND off the array.
So how many previews are they streaming? I bet that's where the mass of their I/O is. If they serve 10 previews for every song that's 10 million per month, or 3.8 per second. They can't be more than half a meg each. So 1.9 megs per second of I/O. Of course this isn't linear, the data comes and goes in bursts, but tell me again how their arrays have to be "EXTREAMELY high I/O" and "1000 times more" expensive?
This is a simple solution. You don't need to spend tens of millions of dollars on storage and, quite frankly, I doubt Apple did. You're challenging me on this issue but I'm not sure you realize that high performance, highly available, very large storage is my job. It's what I do, every day. I analyze storage needs, recommend and implement solutions. And I don't waste my employer's money on expensive fiber channel SANs when there's no chance they'll ever need the bandwidth.
I know how many drives, floor space, power, and maintenance you need to run a datacenter with 30 TB of data (required to run a site with 1 million + songs). I know how much bandwidth and servers you need to deliver these songs to the desktop. This is not cheap.
Gahahahaha haHAahahHA Hhahaha!!!! *snort*.. HAHahahaha!!!!!
Sorry, that's funny. I run a 400TB high performance data archive, all on disk. 30TB is nothing. It's piddly crap. A tiny investment even a small company could swing. This is nothing to Apple. It's not even a drop in their collective bucket of money.
Drives, floor space, power and maintenance? For 30TB? LOL! My 400TB fits into 5 racks. I could run it out of a spare bedroom in my house, performing maintenance with my free time. 30TB would fit under my desk and require a couple hours a week worth of tinkering to keep online.
The web interface - the "human" part of the equation - and the bandwidth is where their costs really lie, not in the disk archive. That part barely counts at all.
As an aside, if somebody just wants to store bookmarks online & off, I've got a better alternative. There are several Digg-type "social bookmarking" sites, but none concentrate purely on the storage of bookmarks in a personal way as well as memFrag.
Of course, having developed the site, I'm heavily biased. But I wanted to share, anyway.
Don't let any, you know, actual FACTs get in the way of your bigotry.
Wow. He said China has 25% of the world's population and isn't free. That's bigoted?
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
LOL!
You know, I don't mean to be insensitive, but why are we negotiating or even considering these ridiculous requests? Other countries don't want us to control the Internet? Tough shit, we created it. They can go build their own network if they don't like it.
To build what I want, you'd literally just have to attach the guts of a LifeDrive to a bigger screen and battery, and you'd have $500 extra to spend to do it. Now tell me it can't be done!
;)
It can't be done!
Actually, I'm serious. Your 1/4" thick requirement is the deal killer. The LifeDrive is 0.8 inches thick. You want to cut that by more than 2/3rds and put a huge battery hogging screen in. Where are you going to get the power to drive it with no room for batteries in your quarter inches of space? And how are you going to make it all so thin?
If we can keep it at 0.8" thick I'm on board with you. Totally possible, even relatively easy.
But after I got out of highschool I graduated to mags that were much more in depth and took the time to actually reasearch and even use the products in question.
Like?
(no, really. I want to know. I'd be interested in subscribing to said magazines.)
Nonsense. PADDs, unlike much of Treknology, could be built today.
:)
Barely. And not anywhere near the price he wants. I say again, the technology to build what he asks for does not exist. I could have clarified by adding "at his price" but that was implicit in my statement, as price was included in his list of requirements.
Besides, if it were built today, it wouldn't be good enough for him because he left out his numerous other requirements. I expect he'd want some sort of reasonable battery life that can't be provided in a device this thin with a screen that large (yes yes, e-ink, you can bring that up again when the price comes down and the technology matures). Oh, and he wants more storage than flash memory can provide - hence the call for a 1/8" hard drive. +size +heat +power draw.
At any rate, I wasn't slamming the guy. I just thought it was funny, and intended my post to be taken the same way.
quarter-inch thick; similar thickness to an iPod Nano
;)
letter (or A4) size screen
costs less than $1000
think of a PADD from Star Trek
Wow. That's all you ask for? I mean, while you're dreaming about technology that doesn't exist, why not go all out? Throw in some hologram projectors embedded in a watch, or something?
Just because you dont watch TV, doesnt mean our wanting to watch TV is less important.
Did I miss something? Where did he infer anything about others?
Are you insecure in the amount of television you watch? I'm not sure how else one could take such a statement to be a negative reflection on himself.
Right. He engaged in hand to hand combat. Good way to get killed unless you're well trained.
When you're perched on a large ship, watching this dinky little "pirate ship" approach - for crying out loud, it was barely big enough to hold the four pirates - you totally have the tactical advantage. Unless you're not paying attention to your radar, you should see these fools coming a good long time before they're close enough to launch their attack, let alone board your ship.
If they've boarded your ship, everything changes, of course.
the sheer size of the newest models cause visual pollution
Only to whiny people.
I love the huge turbines. I can see a medium sized wind farm from my home. They're beautiful to me because they represent pure, clean power. Not to mention, they're quite graceful in their movements and fun to watch.
The whiners who oppose them have their heads up their collective rear ends. Ask these people how they prefer to get their electricity and they can't answer you. Wind is ugly and kills birds. Solar is ugly and full of nasty chemicals. Coal is bad. Nuclear is scary. Tidal hurts whales and hydroelectric kills fish. Yet none of these whiners are willing to turn off their electricity and go back to oil lamps.
You can't have it both ways, folks. I believe an intelligent person should see through the "big ugly propeller" and find the beauty in it's cleanliness. I certainly do.
In any event, we're told to just do whatever the pirates say, and don't try to act like a hero.
Screw that. That just encourages them to continue attacking. If people would fight back, maybe this would end.
I mean, look: These are the pirates - and their pirate "ship" - that attacked the cruise ship. The news is calling this a "speedboat". It looks like the ratty, $500 fishing boat the poor people down the street from me own.
Don't tell me you couldn't fend off these rascals with the appropriate weapons. I know I could. Sure, they've got machine guns and rocket fired grenandes. Big whoop. The ships they're attacking are huge. I mean, I'd sit on top of the ship and pick these twerps off with a high powered rifle before they even got close enough to launch their attacks. Or toss a few grenandes back at them. Get one in that boat and - poof - no more pirates.
Do this a few times and watch how fast the pirate problem disappears.