But in reality, it seems to be going the other way, towards larger (but thinner) phones. If this trend continues; by 2050 cellphones will twice as powerful, be as big as football fields, but only a few nanometers thick. And only Europe's three richest kings will be able to afford them.
No phone that I know has this feature - there's no "almost" or "but it's close" about it.
Just because no phone currently does this, doesn't mean it isn't close.
Current smartphones have processing power that is approaching that of the "netbook" computer. I'd expect that convergence to continue. These phones have video outputs, USB ports and Bluetooth. The "phone as computer" is not very far away at all.
Unless you're a younger Arthur C. Clarke, your predictions about the future will be mostly wrong.
How about a couple of possible scenarios:
1. Sex-bots and direct stimulation of the brain will become feasible. So people will spend their lives in virtual environments, and human-to-human interaction will become obsolete, so people won't need cellphones. But poorer countries won't be able to afford the technology. So, we'll establish perimeters of military robots around wealthy nations. The people living in these countries will die out. The people in poorer countries will keep breeding, and either continue the human species, or be slaughtered by the wealthy nations' military robots.
2. People will get so sick of virtual realities and annoying electronic gizmos, that we'll revert to a simpler lifestyle focused on good food and human relationships.
No it isn't. Just because somebody who you perceive to be liberal does something that you perceive to be stifling debate, does not suddenly make that a part of liberalism. Liberalism values freedom of speech very highly.
Note how many of the responses to my first post are personal attacks on me and attacks on conservatism. It isnt debate when one side is calling the other an idiot over and over.
But that's not actually happening. You had 6 replies to your post. Not a single one of them attacked you personally. Only two of them make attacks - but those are attacks against the "Intelligent Design" extremists for being idiots, not against conservatives in general. And the impression that ID proponents are idiots is pretty well demonstrated by the evidence.
All the other posts are simply people calmly explaining the reality to you. One of the responses is even from a self-described conservative, saying that the ID folk are wrong for pushing their views into science classes.
So, if that's your evidence of liberals shutting down the debate, that doesn't hold water. What you actually saw was people engaging in intelligent discussion (aside from a couple of provocative statements about religion). Why didn't you engage them? Seems more like you were trolling, as you were not willing to respond to their perfectly reasonable points. If you wanted debate, it was right there for the having.
I've never heard O'Reilly demand the other side be silenced, only his own right to be heard.
What the hell? He does it constantly. He screams at people to shut up, he says that liberals shouldn't protest or speak on an issue. He lies and brings up absurd strawmen which are designed to derail rational discussion.
It's not just O'Reilly. The same pattern is seen consistently across the right-wing and the Republican Party in particular. Dissent is simply not tolerated. Compare to the average liberal, who will try to engage in rational debate even with those who disagree. Unfortunately, that's often not possible, because so many on the right simply are not interested in rationality. See, for example the brouhaha going on over "Obama's Death Panels" which of course, don't exist, and have never been suggested by the administration. See the people going to Town Hall meetings and accusing Obama of being Hitler.
As the first high data rate K-band transmitter to fly on a NASA spacecraft, the 13-inch-long tube, called a Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier, is making it possible for NASA scientists to receive massive amounts of images
Why don't they just use bittorrent if they want high transfer speeds?
You *are* aware that most naval vessels are nuclear powered right?
I must have missed the memo. I would have thought that the number of recreational yachts, rowboats and power boats would vastly outnumber the nuclear-powered ships.
OK, I don't read Digg or Reddit so I'll take your word for it, but do you have a link to "hordes" of them defending censorship of the image because it is critical of Obama?
It's legal for me to make a backup copy of my media, in case of theft or destruction, except that owning or building the tools to allow me to create the copy is not legal -- although arguably this makes any turing machine attached to a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drive illegal.
No. It's illegal to distribute tools specifically intended to bypass DRM or copy-protection. This doesn't prevent you from making a backup copy of your DVD, because you don't need to bypass CSS in order to do that. Likewise with DRMed material. It's perfectly legal (and trivial) to copy those files if you don't remove the DRM. It's not illegal to own a "Turing machine" or general-purpose computer.
but it's illegal for me to stream media over the internet and capture the stream
Ask the OP, who said "It's not about money. It's about them retaining the control..." but also paradoxically said the purpose of this control was to make money. So, I'm not sure there's anything coherent or of value to take away from this thread.
When you buy music, make sure to check http://riaaradar.com/ [riaaradar.com] to see if the album is from a company that funds the RIAA. If they do, don't buy it and stick it to them a couple dollars of lost earnings at a time.
Yeah, because heaven forbid if we buy music from artists we enjoy listening to.
Maybe. I think what they are going for is a "pay a monthly fee and get all the games/music/etc you can download" and plan to pay the rights holders from the monthly fees..
Which, for the end user translates as "pay money for filesharing, contribute to the evil media conglomerates you hate, and still face the same risk of exposure to filesharing lawsuits as you did before, only now you're easier to track down because we have your credit card details!"
I can confirm this. I'm excellent at spelling, and have never learned it by rote. Instead, I read lots of literature from a young age. Typing is my weakness, as I also learned that at a young age by experimenting and programming, rather than being taught proper technique. So it's always my fingers getting in the way of my brain, not the other way around, as so many excellent typists, but poor spellers, here on slashdot are attesting to.
Working in a large business where writing professional emails helps as well; I purposely try to use proper capitilisation and punctuation as required.
I wouldn't be surprised if in some not-too-distant idiocratic future, you'd be fired for using proper spelling and grammar in business correspondence, because you "talk like a fag."
I see comments of all flavors that get modded up here - Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Populist (well, maybe not those). I do love it here.
The main problem though, is that the most important category of comment - Intelligent - is not as often modded up as those other categories. And there's a couple of categories - Stupid, and Totally Incorrect - that are frequently very highly moderated.
but his actual intention with the image was to protest about Obama not being liberal enough.
I read the article, and I'm not sure where you got that interpretation from. Alkhateeb was simply messing around with Photoshop, trying to improve his skills. There doesn't appear to be any intended political message. He put his work up on Flickr, and somebody else added the "Socialism" caption, and started putting them up around LA.
Nowhere in the article does Alkhateeb claim that he doesn't think Obama is "liberal enough," and in fact prefers Republicans on domestic issues. If his images are only about politics, can somebody please explain the political message behind Alkaheeb's awesome "Napoleon riding a motorcycle" image?
What I find funny is that the hordes of Obama-worshipers are now coming out trying to defend Flickr and everyone else involved in this blatant censorship, simply because the "speech" involved is critical of their messiah.
Hang on, where are you finding those "hordes of Obama worshippers"? Admittedly I haven't looked very far, but there don't appear to be any here on slashdot, and the article linked in the story is filled with dozens of comments saying "SOCIALISM IS TEH EVIL!!!!!1111111" or "OBAMA IS HITLER AND SATAN COMBINED", only with worse spelling.
Rarely? Practically every laptop I come into contact with uses that C7/C8 connector. The Toshibas and Apples we use at work all have them. The laptops I'm seeing with 3-pin IEC connectors are mostly older ones.
In all fairness, I only know what I saw two weeks ago at the store.
There's your problem. You won't get any kind of accurate impression based on floor models in your typical retailer. Their sets aren't properly calibrated, lighting conditions are usually poor, and the video source driving them is often sub-par. You need to go to a decent screening room, or to someone's home who has one set up and calibrated properly, to see what they really look like.
Well, I have a PS2 (and a PS3 without backward compatibility) and the PS2 is gathering dust, despite the fact that I'd quite like to play games on it sometimes. The reason is that it's a hassle having another unit to plug into the TV, and it's difficult to go back to being tethered to the console with wires, after getting used to the luxury of wireless controllers. I'd like to be able to use my wireless controllers with my PS2 games, and also use the handy hard drive storage and backup facilities of the PS3 to replace those puny and inconvenient memory cards.
It's got nothing to do with safety. It's just technology.
Technology has nothing to do with safety, or the way people behave? I'm not sure what kind of bizarro reality you must live in. These things are intimately related. Technology does not exist in a vacuum.
Slashdot Mirror
Amy: "I swallowed my phone again!"
But in reality, it seems to be going the other way, towards larger (but thinner) phones. If this trend continues; by 2050 cellphones will twice as powerful, be as big as football fields, but only a few nanometers thick. And only Europe's three richest kings will be able to afford them.
No phone that I know has this feature - there's no "almost" or "but it's close" about it.
Just because no phone currently does this, doesn't mean it isn't close.
Current smartphones have processing power that is approaching that of the "netbook" computer. I'd expect that convergence to continue. These phones have video outputs, USB ports and Bluetooth. The "phone as computer" is not very far away at all.
Unless you're a younger Arthur C. Clarke, your predictions about the future will be mostly wrong.
How about a couple of possible scenarios:
1. Sex-bots and direct stimulation of the brain will become feasible. So people will spend their lives in virtual environments, and human-to-human interaction will become obsolete, so people won't need cellphones. But poorer countries won't be able to afford the technology. So, we'll establish perimeters of military robots around wealthy nations. The people living in these countries will die out. The people in poorer countries will keep breeding, and either continue the human species, or be slaughtered by the wealthy nations' military robots.
2. People will get so sick of virtual realities and annoying electronic gizmos, that we'll revert to a simpler lifestyle focused on good food and human relationships.
A few funny bits in any book is fine, but to read an entire book that was suppose to be funny.
I'm not sure how we're supposed to take your opinion on literature seriously, after you wrote that sentence.
Actually it is.
No it isn't. Just because somebody who you perceive to be liberal does something that you perceive to be stifling debate, does not suddenly make that a part of liberalism. Liberalism values freedom of speech very highly.
Note how many of the responses to my first post are personal attacks on me and attacks on conservatism. It isnt debate when one side is calling the other an idiot over and over.
But that's not actually happening. You had 6 replies to your post. Not a single one of them attacked you personally. Only two of them make attacks - but those are attacks against the "Intelligent Design" extremists for being idiots, not against conservatives in general. And the impression that ID proponents are idiots is pretty well demonstrated by the evidence.
All the other posts are simply people calmly explaining the reality to you. One of the responses is even from a self-described conservative, saying that the ID folk are wrong for pushing their views into science classes.
So, if that's your evidence of liberals shutting down the debate, that doesn't hold water. What you actually saw was people engaging in intelligent discussion (aside from a couple of provocative statements about religion). Why didn't you engage them? Seems more like you were trolling, as you were not willing to respond to their perfectly reasonable points. If you wanted debate, it was right there for the having.
I've never heard O'Reilly demand the other side be silenced, only his own right to be heard.
What the hell? He does it constantly. He screams at people to shut up, he says that liberals shouldn't protest or speak on an issue. He lies and brings up absurd strawmen which are designed to derail rational discussion.
It's not just O'Reilly. The same pattern is seen consistently across the right-wing and the Republican Party in particular. Dissent is simply not tolerated. Compare to the average liberal, who will try to engage in rational debate even with those who disagree. Unfortunately, that's often not possible, because so many on the right simply are not interested in rationality. See, for example the brouhaha going on over "Obama's Death Panels" which of course, don't exist, and have never been suggested by the administration. See the people going to Town Hall meetings and accusing Obama of being Hitler.
no wonder the images NASA shows us are sweet, warm, smooth, full, and very detailed. Must be a NOS tube they are using
No, it's because the probe uses Monster Cable interconnects!
As the first high data rate K-band transmitter to fly on a NASA spacecraft, the 13-inch-long tube, called a Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier, is making it possible for NASA scientists to receive massive amounts of images
Why don't they just use bittorrent if they want high transfer speeds?
You *are* aware that most naval vessels are nuclear powered right?
I must have missed the memo. I would have thought that the number of recreational yachts, rowboats and power boats would vastly outnumber the nuclear-powered ships.
OK, I don't read Digg or Reddit so I'll take your word for it, but do you have a link to "hordes" of them defending censorship of the image because it is critical of Obama?
He was pointing out that they are liberals and they want to forbid any other comment on it.
But who are you talking about? Stifling debate is not a liberal characteristic.
Discourse is not prohibited in science, in fact, it's encouraged.
And it's very much encouraged in liberalism.
Well, that is up until you get a liberal who insist that their views are the only ones that should be allowed.
What about a conservative or neocon who does the same thing? Is that OK? You must never have heard of people like Bill O'Reilly.
Did I miss anything?
Yes.
It's legal for me to make a backup copy of my media, in case of theft or destruction, except that owning or building the tools to allow me to create the copy is not legal -- although arguably this makes any turing machine attached to a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drive illegal.
No. It's illegal to distribute tools specifically intended to bypass DRM or copy-protection. This doesn't prevent you from making a backup copy of your DVD, because you don't need to bypass CSS in order to do that. Likewise with DRMed material. It's perfectly legal (and trivial) to copy those files if you don't remove the DRM. It's not illegal to own a "Turing machine" or general-purpose computer.
but it's illegal for me to stream media over the internet and capture the stream
Since when?
What is the difference between money and control?
Ask the OP, who said "It's not about money. It's about them retaining the control..." but also paradoxically said the purpose of this control was to make money. So, I'm not sure there's anything coherent or of value to take away from this thread.
When you buy music, make sure to check http://riaaradar.com/ [riaaradar.com] to see if the album is from a company that funds the RIAA. If they do, don't buy it and stick it to them a couple dollars of lost earnings at a time.
Yeah, because heaven forbid if we buy music from artists we enjoy listening to.
It's much more like when you've gatecrashed a party full of drunken horny half naked cheerleaders,
Why are they only half-naked?
Maybe. I think what they are going for is a "pay a monthly fee and get all the games/music/etc you can download" and plan to pay the rights holders from the monthly fees..
Which, for the end user translates as "pay money for filesharing, contribute to the evil media conglomerates you hate, and still face the same risk of exposure to filesharing lawsuits as you did before, only now you're easier to track down because we have your credit card details!"
Such a great deal, where do I sign up?
I can confirm this. I'm excellent at spelling, and have never learned it by rote. Instead, I read lots of literature from a young age. Typing is my weakness, as I also learned that at a young age by experimenting and programming, rather than being taught proper technique. So it's always my fingers getting in the way of my brain, not the other way around, as so many excellent typists, but poor spellers, here on slashdot are attesting to.
Working in a large business where writing professional emails helps as well; I purposely try to use proper capitilisation and punctuation as required.
I wouldn't be surprised if in some not-too-distant idiocratic future, you'd be fired for using proper spelling and grammar in business correspondence, because you "talk like a fag."
Hmmm... all the recent iMacs I've seen are C13/14. Are you perhaps referring to older models, like the "desk lamp" iMac?
I see comments of all flavors that get modded up here - Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Populist (well, maybe not those). I do love it here.
The main problem though, is that the most important category of comment - Intelligent - is not as often modded up as those other categories. And there's a couple of categories - Stupid, and Totally Incorrect - that are frequently very highly moderated.
but his actual intention with the image was to protest about Obama not being liberal enough.
I read the article, and I'm not sure where you got that interpretation from. Alkhateeb was simply messing around with Photoshop, trying to improve his skills. There doesn't appear to be any intended political message. He put his work up on Flickr, and somebody else added the "Socialism" caption, and started putting them up around LA.
Nowhere in the article does Alkhateeb claim that he doesn't think Obama is "liberal enough," and in fact prefers Republicans on domestic issues. If his images are only about politics, can somebody please explain the political message behind Alkaheeb's awesome "Napoleon riding a motorcycle" image?
What I find funny is that the hordes of Obama-worshipers are now coming out trying to defend Flickr and everyone else involved in this blatant censorship, simply because the "speech" involved is critical of their messiah.
Hang on, where are you finding those "hordes of Obama worshippers"? Admittedly I haven't looked very far, but there don't appear to be any here on slashdot, and the article linked in the story is filled with dozens of comments saying "SOCIALISM IS TEH EVIL!!!!!1111111" or "OBAMA IS HITLER AND SATAN COMBINED", only with worse spelling.
Rarely? Practically every laptop I come into contact with uses that C7/C8 connector. The Toshibas and Apples we use at work all have them. The laptops I'm seeing with 3-pin IEC connectors are mostly older ones.
In all fairness, I only know what I saw two weeks ago at the store.
There's your problem. You won't get any kind of accurate impression based on floor models in your typical retailer. Their sets aren't properly calibrated, lighting conditions are usually poor, and the video source driving them is often sub-par. You need to go to a decent screening room, or to someone's home who has one set up and calibrated properly, to see what they really look like.
Well, I have a PS2 (and a PS3 without backward compatibility) and the PS2 is gathering dust, despite the fact that I'd quite like to play games on it sometimes. The reason is that it's a hassle having another unit to plug into the TV, and it's difficult to go back to being tethered to the console with wires, after getting used to the luxury of wireless controllers. I'd like to be able to use my wireless controllers with my PS2 games, and also use the handy hard drive storage and backup facilities of the PS3 to replace those puny and inconvenient memory cards.
It's got nothing to do with safety. It's just technology.
Technology has nothing to do with safety, or the way people behave? I'm not sure what kind of bizarro reality you must live in. These things are intimately related. Technology does not exist in a vacuum.