"pfft. It's a fun movie. It has cars, robots, boobs, car chase & explosions. What more could you want."
Humor? Ahah that's okay, it had that, too. As a matter of fct, that's why my girlfriend liked the movie. (Color me surprised, she won't typically go to scifi movies.)
"It seems a Norwegian driving license is EXACTLY like that."
Fair enough. But here in the US, you pass a written and a driving test and you're good to go. If there is a fee, it was so negligible that I don't even remember what it was. As I recall, nobody I knew had trouble getting a license. The hard part was getting the car. The license came a week or two later. Maaaaybe a month in some cases. I actually had a tougher time getting my Ham Radio license than I did my driver's license.
For the record, I feel silly bragging about this. I like the Norwegian system better. Anybody can get a driver's license here... and it shows.
"While I agree that such a contraption can be called a flying car, it's not what most people imagine when they want a flying car. They want something that is as useful as a car, that can fly. What you described is something that is totally useless, but can still (technically) be described as a "flying car". We've seen these cars with wings (or planes with car chassis), and we're not impressed."
Yes, I know, we'd all like to be driving the Delorean from Back to the Future. Funny thing is, a car kind of like that exists in prototype form, today. It has four turbine engines that extend out from the body of the car. It has an aerodynamic form that has a hint of wings, but still fits within the size of a large car or SUV. It could even hover. Problem is, you still need a pilot's license, and it still hasn't been cleared to be sold. And no, you don't need to step out and affix wings to it. But, that's a different company working on that. What we did was more like you describe, only it did act as a car and the wings folded out on their own. It was meant to be used for making trips in between cities without needing to rent a car in the mean time. You wouldn't go drag racing in it, and it was a little... Demolition Man looking, but it would have sufficed so long as your interests didn't include landing on buildings. Heh.
"Oh please. If that was true, Michael Jackson would own one in Neverland, and ride around in it all the time (at least until he was arrested)."
If memory serves, he has a helicopter. Anyway, that rationale's amusing to me. Right now you can hire pilots to take you where you want to go. I'm not talking private jets, here (although that's what rich people often lean towards). I'm talking about going to a local airport and hiring a guy with his own prop-job. Pretty reasonable, really. Some companies actually use these services to quickly ship things like expensive computer systems from one city to another. Still, though, the vehicles I'm describing are not very fast compared to say a commercial jet. At best you'd buy yourself some privacy and more convenient schedule.
"Where are their flying cars? Don't tell me they aren't interested, because everybody else is. And why doesn't other organizations with money use them? Such as the military, rescue service, etc?"
Helicopters are more practical. They don't require a runway, etc. We're also not talking about vehicles here with incredible speed capabilities. As I recall the specs I heard about were somewhere around 200 mph. It miiiight have been 300, but I wouldn't swear to it. The engine that would fit in one of these vehicles wasn't not very high power and its hauling capacity was limited compared to a full on plane. At best it was a 4-person transport. Donald Trump would laugh at that.
Tough to market... I suppose in that respect you could call it a technical limitation. The reality, though, is that it gets a lot more attractive when you don't have to spend tons of money and time to get a license. (Not that I'm faulting the FAA for that...) Or, perhaps, if it had an automated piloting system (and that system scaled up to thousands or millions of users across the country) the FAA would be happier with it. Meh, I dunno. I guess the point is you're not entirely wrong about the technology behind it, but the big fear right now is these things falling from the sky. Nobody wants to be liable for that.
"In order to get a license for an ultralight motorized plane (microplane), you have to be 18, but it's still about half the price of a car drivers license. The cost of a pilot license for a small motorplane (i.e. Cessna, Piper) is about 1 1/2 - 2 times the cost of a car driving license."
Umm.. okay. In the United States, the expensive part of getting a pilot's license isn't getting the license. It's the many many hours of training, both book studies and actual flight experience. We're talking in the neighborhood of $5,000 and a minimum of 40 hours of flight time to get that license. Getting a driver's license is NOTHING like that.
"Getting a car drivers license is neither particularly easy nor cheap. But most people need a car drivers license, which means that they will put up with the studying and the economic cost."
I spent roughly $400 on my driver's license, and that included the price of the car, the gas, and the fee. (For the record: It was a VERY cheap car. Hehe.) The $5,000 figure I mentioned earlier came from some information I obtained when I worked at a company that built airplanes. Since I was staff, they were willing to let me earn my flight time more-or-less at-cost, which was in the neighborhood of $1,500 to $2,000. Now, I can happily accept that in other countries, it may be considerably cheaper and more practical to get a pilot's license. But here in the USA, it's very expensive, and that doesn't include the cost of buying or renting a plane to use this license with.
"If Joe Sixpack can afford his brand new SUV, he can afford to get a pilot license."
No, this really isn't true. He may be able to round up 5k, but that's not the same as 'affording' it. Plane rentals and fuel are expensive.
"A flying car would change that, but we haven't got flying cars, and that's the main problem, not the FAA."
The technology to build a flying car is already there. I should know, I helped design one. It's actually possible to build a small plane that'll fold up into roughly the form factor of a car and 'drive'. And that was just our simple model, there's a few prototypes out there of stuff that's far more interesting and borderline scifi-ish to look at. The problem with these things, though, is that they're still well over 100k, difficult to get certified for flight AND for driving, and there aren't enough people with pilot's licenses ready to plunk down the cash. They cannot be mass marketed because the pilot's license requirements are so steep. Even then, there's concerns about that many flying vehicles in the air. (That one actually is a technical problem, better auto-pilots etc.)
We've been able to build flying cars since the 50's. Technology isn't the problem.
"and a lot of peoples' desire to tear it down or create any FUD they can to dissuade interested people from possibly buying an iPhone "
From what I've seen, it's less about dissuading people to buy phones and more about illustrating the hypocrisy. Take any fanboy debate (Sony vs. Nintendo, Star Wars vs. Star Trek, Garbage Pail Kids vs. Baseball cards) and you'll generally find that the behaviour is the same on BOTH sides. You'll praise things that one side does that you'll chastise the other for. Do this for long enough, and other people will draw extra attention to FUDdy events, even if unjustified. Why? Because they've seen the fanboys do it and want to teach them a lesson. People just have no idea how their behaviour incites the behaviour they hate. They behave even worse when their motives are explained in such a way that their own guilt is not established.
I'll give you an example: I frequent a sci-fi forum. The Star Wars prequels were generally not well recieved. The criticism of it reached such an extreme, people were saying things like "George Lucase raped my childhood!" There were a few people that really did enjoy the prequels. But since public opinion was against them, they laid low. But then... something miraculous happened: Enterprise was cancelled. Suddenly these guys had some ammo, plus public opinion on their side. "B&B bastardized Star Trek! Roddenberry's spinning in his grave!" The prequel fans were happy for a while. Eventually one of them gathered up the courage to defend Star Wars again. "You guys can't be saying that Star Wars sucks. It's just your OPINION that it sucks, not a fact, so you haveta say it's just an opinion." (Be thankful I summarized it... the original post was four paragaraphs!) This seemed like a reasonable well intentioned request, for about five minutes until he posted in the next thread that Poseidon 'sucked'. He was called out on it, but never responded. This angered quite a few people, so the cycle continues...
Zealotry breeds zealotry. It can be stopped simply by not going to ridiculous extremes to make a point about how some company/product/franchise sucks. Unfortunately, most people would rather play Verbal Kombat. So, the bed's been made, lay down, and try to enjoy it.;)
"Tell me whether or not "the Touch" is played during the climactic battle in Bay's flick."
No, not during the climactic battle anyway. When the battle's over, they all sing it at the end... sort of like Shrek. Bumblebee's R2D2'esque solo is a scream!
"And I can assure you that they will never make any hindrances for you in creating a car that isn't driven by a person."
Misunderstanding. I didn't mean an automated car, I meant drivers are so stupid I'm surprised people are generally allowed to drive. Expanding on that idea a bit: Drivers can cause a lot more damage when they're in the air. Poor choice of words on my part, my bad.
"Arguing that we haven't got flying cars because of FAA restrictions on who is allowed to pilot a plane..."
That wasn't exactly my argument, but I'll work with it. Getting a pilot's license is no easy task. It's expensive and it takes many many hours of training. It's nothing like getting a driver's license, and that will certainly prevent Joe Sixpack from owning one. That's not the only problem the FAA would pose, but that's a biggie.
"... is about as stupid as arguing that we haven't got teleportation devices because of ethical concerns about what happens at the transmitting end.
Not really, no. Not even in the same ballpark, really. If teleportation carried a risk of randomly causing explosions around the planet, well then we'd sort of be in sync with this silly comparison.
"The chances of this occurring on another planet seem remote."
Maybe. But it is still a question of how evolution chooses the 'winner'. It may turn out that our form is one of the most likely to lead towards a space-travelling situation. An octopus, for example, may end up really really intelligent, but never live the sort of life that would drive it to build things like shelters. If it never does that, what would inspire it to move all the way up to a space ship?
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't think you're necessarily right, either. It's easy to imagine the universe is teeming with all kinds of creatures we would find to be 'bizarre'. But bizarre AND evolved AND driven to visit another planet... well that is such a mind boggling number of factors that I can picture either scenario working out. Either there are a huge number of ways a species can evolve to become space travellers, OR, there's only a very narrow set of requirements it would take (both based on physical form AND their history as a developing society) for that to ever happen on a practical level. We could discover, for example, that six-legged mammals had an evolutionary advantage that, for reasons that become very complex over a period of millions of years, never drove them to investigate fire. We just have no way of knowing this until we encounter another civilization. Until that happens, anything's just as likely as anything else.
"He didn't pay any attention to millions of people. Why the fuck would he care what one computer predicts?"
I know this was rhetorical, but those millions of people don't have all the information to work from he does. The computer would, presumably, have that information, too.
I wouldn't normally mind but it's hard to take masses of people seriously after hearing about people getting paid $1,500 to wait in line for somebody to pick up an iPhone.
"E: A man made brain? That's a revolutionary idea! With our deep understanding of the human psyche and physiological complexities, we could whip this problem in no more than 20 years. Why haven't we been working on this since the 60's?"
I think the idea was that they're working on a new processing paradigm (can't believe I actually used that word) to make computers friendlier to humans. I think the idea is we'll be able to tell computers what we want instead of giving them a literal list of instructions for what to do. For example, today we get our email by opening our email app, clicking 'get email', and we get a list of our messages to browse. Sometime down the road, instead we'll say something like: "Computer, what's in my inbox today?" And it'll say: "A friend of yours sent you an email with an amusing image you might like, but the rest of your messages are unimportant."
Maybe I'm wrong, but I didn't get the impression from the article that it was about building an emo computer.
My phone is not an ATM, why are they trying to make it like one? Sure, I can transfer balances on a whim to different accounts, but who really needs to do this on a regular (i.e. more than once a month) basis? And for those transfers like credit card payments, i'm sure you sit down in front of your computer at least ONCE a month.
I agree with you today, but I'm not sure how I'd feel a year from now. I recently bought a Treo and have an unlimited data plan with Sprint. More and more I find myself using it to do things I normally do on the computer. I frequent Wikipedia, IMDB, Google News, and so on. Heck, I even found myself browsing Amazon a bit with it. The reason I'm using the phone instead of the computer? I'm often away from it. Amazon, for example, is great to peek at if I'm at a store and I find something I might want to get. I'll get a review and an idea of if the price is roughly in the right ballpark.
Okay, I'm probably not thrilling you with my tales of my mighty Treo browsing experience, but hear me out. I often get hit with an idea to do something when I'm away from the computer, and the Treo's awfully available. Sometimes I'll be out and about and realize I haven't paid my credit card bill yet. Well, that's when I notice how limited it can be sometimes. I've found out that the silly site they use won't support it. That's a bummer, I end up having to remember to take care of it when I get home. That's all fine and dandy, nothing wrong with that, except it's crunch mode where I work right now. My mind is full of tasks and I have precious few hours in the day to handle my home expenses. My point is that I can see the appeal of something like this if it's handled well and securely. Necessary? Nah, but there are people out there it has the potential to be convenient to.
I'm tired and I'm not sure how clear I'm being, so I'll put it a little more concisely: Yes, I am in front of a computer enough to take care of bills. However, I also find my phone is available at times when my computer isn't. It's not a cure for cancer, but it's semi-interesting to somebody like me who finds spare time to be a bit pricey.
"I've always thought that the Xbox has pretty much gotten a fair deal on slashdot. "
Well.. not 'always'. Just before launch, the 360 was a big joke on Slashdot. When the name was announced, there were jokes about Microsoft spinning in circles. When the machine was launched and demand exceeded supply, lots of complaints were made that Microsoft was doing that on purpose. ("We'll make more money by having less units available for sale!") There were complaints about the different SKUs and the lack of a harddrive in one model somehow being a bad thing. It really wasn't until Sony came along and made total asses of themselves that Slashdot's opinion of the 360 cooled.
Otherwise, I pretty much agree with your statement. I've heard more bashing of the Wii than of the 360 in the last 9 months or so. In some ways, it's almost like the 360's been forgotten.
"Is this preference for OSS or Microsoft a true reflection of differing political philosophies? "
Um, no. Candidate says "Gimme a website". Contractor says "ok". He may say things about the color he wants or which font to use, but he certainly is not interested in which OS is being used. He won't even know the difference between PHP and ASP.
"The idiots in Kansas who got intelligent design into schools were voted out. (Although I think it took a few years.) So the system works, just slowly."
Now if we can just get the rest of the world to realize that a few noisy people doesn't necessarily mean a few hundred million followers....
"There were some kids that stole cars after playing GTA because they thought it was cool. What kind of things could we expect those kids to do after playing this game?"
I expect them to go "Huh, stealing cars landed me in jail. I don't want to do that again."
"Right. Opera has been completely free since 2005."
Erm... This is a true statement. Why was it modded as flamebait? Opera has been free since 2005, and before that it was ad supported. (At least since version 5, which goes back to... oh I want to say 2000'ish.) It's been a long time (if ever) that you had to 'buy' Opera, and the ad supported argument died not all that recently. This isn't flamebait.
Slashdot Mirror
"pfft. It's a fun movie. It has cars, robots, boobs, car chase & explosions. What more could you want."
Humor? Ahah that's okay, it had that, too. As a matter of fct, that's why my girlfriend liked the movie. (Color me surprised, she won't typically go to scifi movies.)
"It seems a Norwegian driving license is EXACTLY like that."
Fair enough. But here in the US, you pass a written and a driving test and you're good to go. If there is a fee, it was so negligible that I don't even remember what it was. As I recall, nobody I knew had trouble getting a license. The hard part was getting the car. The license came a week or two later. Maaaaybe a month in some cases. I actually had a tougher time getting my Ham Radio license than I did my driver's license.
For the record, I feel silly bragging about this. I like the Norwegian system better. Anybody can get a driver's license here... and it shows.
"While I agree that such a contraption can be called a flying car, it's not what most people imagine when they want a flying car. They want something that is as useful as a car, that can fly. What you described is something that is totally useless, but can still (technically) be described as a "flying car". We've seen these cars with wings (or planes with car chassis), and we're not impressed."
Yes, I know, we'd all like to be driving the Delorean from Back to the Future. Funny thing is, a car kind of like that exists in prototype form, today. It has four turbine engines that extend out from the body of the car. It has an aerodynamic form that has a hint of wings, but still fits within the size of a large car or SUV. It could even hover. Problem is, you still need a pilot's license, and it still hasn't been cleared to be sold. And no, you don't need to step out and affix wings to it. But, that's a different company working on that. What we did was more like you describe, only it did act as a car and the wings folded out on their own. It was meant to be used for making trips in between cities without needing to rent a car in the mean time. You wouldn't go drag racing in it, and it was a little... Demolition Man looking, but it would have sufficed so long as your interests didn't include landing on buildings. Heh.
"Oh please. If that was true, Michael Jackson would own one in Neverland, and ride around in it all the time (at least until he was arrested)."
If memory serves, he has a helicopter. Anyway, that rationale's amusing to me. Right now you can hire pilots to take you where you want to go. I'm not talking private jets, here (although that's what rich people often lean towards). I'm talking about going to a local airport and hiring a guy with his own prop-job. Pretty reasonable, really. Some companies actually use these services to quickly ship things like expensive computer systems from one city to another. Still, though, the vehicles I'm describing are not very fast compared to say a commercial jet. At best you'd buy yourself some privacy and more convenient schedule.
"Where are their flying cars? Don't tell me they aren't interested, because everybody else is. And why doesn't other organizations with money use them? Such as the military, rescue service, etc?"
Helicopters are more practical. They don't require a runway, etc. We're also not talking about vehicles here with incredible speed capabilities. As I recall the specs I heard about were somewhere around 200 mph. It miiiight have been 300, but I wouldn't swear to it. The engine that would fit in one of these vehicles wasn't not very high power and its hauling capacity was limited compared to a full on plane. At best it was a 4-person transport. Donald Trump would laugh at that.
Tough to market... I suppose in that respect you could call it a technical limitation. The reality, though, is that it gets a lot more attractive when you don't have to spend tons of money and time to get a license. (Not that I'm faulting the FAA for that...) Or, perhaps, if it had an automated piloting system (and that system scaled up to thousands or millions of users across the country) the FAA would be happier with it. Meh, I dunno. I guess the point is you're not entirely wrong about the technology behind it, but the big fear right now is these things falling from the sky. Nobody wants to be liable for that.
"In order to get a license for an ultralight motorized plane (microplane), you have to be 18, but it's still about half the price of a car drivers license. The cost of a pilot license for a small motorplane (i.e. Cessna, Piper) is about 1 1/2 - 2 times the cost of a car driving license."
Umm.. okay. In the United States, the expensive part of getting a pilot's license isn't getting the license. It's the many many hours of training, both book studies and actual flight experience. We're talking in the neighborhood of $5,000 and a minimum of 40 hours of flight time to get that license. Getting a driver's license is NOTHING like that.
"Getting a car drivers license is neither particularly easy nor cheap. But most people need a car drivers license, which means that they will put up with the studying and the economic cost."
I spent roughly $400 on my driver's license, and that included the price of the car, the gas, and the fee. (For the record: It was a VERY cheap car. Hehe.) The $5,000 figure I mentioned earlier came from some information I obtained when I worked at a company that built airplanes. Since I was staff, they were willing to let me earn my flight time more-or-less at-cost, which was in the neighborhood of $1,500 to $2,000. Now, I can happily accept that in other countries, it may be considerably cheaper and more practical to get a pilot's license. But here in the USA, it's very expensive, and that doesn't include the cost of buying or renting a plane to use this license with.
"If Joe Sixpack can afford his brand new SUV, he can afford to get a pilot license."
No, this really isn't true. He may be able to round up 5k, but that's not the same as 'affording' it. Plane rentals and fuel are expensive.
"A flying car would change that, but we haven't got flying cars, and that's the main problem, not the FAA."
The technology to build a flying car is already there. I should know, I helped design one. It's actually possible to build a small plane that'll fold up into roughly the form factor of a car and 'drive'. And that was just our simple model, there's a few prototypes out there of stuff that's far more interesting and borderline scifi-ish to look at. The problem with these things, though, is that they're still well over 100k, difficult to get certified for flight AND for driving, and there aren't enough people with pilot's licenses ready to plunk down the cash. They cannot be mass marketed because the pilot's license requirements are so steep. Even then, there's concerns about that many flying vehicles in the air. (That one actually is a technical problem, better auto-pilots etc.)
We've been able to build flying cars since the 50's. Technology isn't the problem.
"and a lot of peoples' desire to tear it down or create any FUD they can to dissuade interested people from possibly buying an iPhone "
;)
From what I've seen, it's less about dissuading people to buy phones and more about illustrating the hypocrisy. Take any fanboy debate (Sony vs. Nintendo, Star Wars vs. Star Trek, Garbage Pail Kids vs. Baseball cards) and you'll generally find that the behaviour is the same on BOTH sides. You'll praise things that one side does that you'll chastise the other for. Do this for long enough, and other people will draw extra attention to FUDdy events, even if unjustified. Why? Because they've seen the fanboys do it and want to teach them a lesson. People just have no idea how their behaviour incites the behaviour they hate. They behave even worse when their motives are explained in such a way that their own guilt is not established.
I'll give you an example: I frequent a sci-fi forum. The Star Wars prequels were generally not well recieved. The criticism of it reached such an extreme, people were saying things like "George Lucase raped my childhood!" There were a few people that really did enjoy the prequels. But since public opinion was against them, they laid low. But then... something miraculous happened: Enterprise was cancelled. Suddenly these guys had some ammo, plus public opinion on their side. "B&B bastardized Star Trek! Roddenberry's spinning in his grave!" The prequel fans were happy for a while. Eventually one of them gathered up the courage to defend Star Wars again. "You guys can't be saying that Star Wars sucks. It's just your OPINION that it sucks, not a fact, so you haveta say it's just an opinion." (Be thankful I summarized it... the original post was four paragaraphs!) This seemed like a reasonable well intentioned request, for about five minutes until he posted in the next thread that Poseidon 'sucked'. He was called out on it, but never responded. This angered quite a few people, so the cycle continues...
Zealotry breeds zealotry. It can be stopped simply by not going to ridiculous extremes to make a point about how some company/product/franchise sucks. Unfortunately, most people would rather play Verbal Kombat. So, the bed's been made, lay down, and try to enjoy it.
"Tell me whether or not "the Touch" is played during the climactic battle in Bay's flick."
No, not during the climactic battle anyway. When the battle's over, they all sing it at the end... sort of like Shrek. Bumblebee's R2D2'esque solo is a scream!
"CTFE Chlorotrifluoroethylene PVDF Polyvinylidene fluoride"
Hmm... I should write that down. Does anybody have an extremely loooong piece of paper?
Don't eat the hotdogs!
"And I can assure you that they will never make any hindrances for you in creating a car that isn't driven by a person."
Misunderstanding. I didn't mean an automated car, I meant drivers are so stupid I'm surprised people are generally allowed to drive. Expanding on that idea a bit: Drivers can cause a lot more damage when they're in the air. Poor choice of words on my part, my bad.
"Arguing that we haven't got flying cars because of FAA restrictions on who is allowed to pilot a plane..."
That wasn't exactly my argument, but I'll work with it. Getting a pilot's license is no easy task. It's expensive and it takes many many hours of training. It's nothing like getting a driver's license, and that will certainly prevent Joe Sixpack from owning one. That's not the only problem the FAA would pose, but that's a biggie.
"... is about as stupid as arguing that we haven't got teleportation devices because of ethical concerns about what happens at the transmitting end.
Not really, no. Not even in the same ballpark, really. If teleportation carried a risk of randomly causing explosions around the planet, well then we'd sort of be in sync with this silly comparison.
"The chances of this occurring on another planet seem remote."
Maybe. But it is still a question of how evolution chooses the 'winner'. It may turn out that our form is one of the most likely to lead towards a space-travelling situation. An octopus, for example, may end up really really intelligent, but never live the sort of life that would drive it to build things like shelters. If it never does that, what would inspire it to move all the way up to a space ship?
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't think you're necessarily right, either. It's easy to imagine the universe is teeming with all kinds of creatures we would find to be 'bizarre'. But bizarre AND evolved AND driven to visit another planet... well that is such a mind boggling number of factors that I can picture either scenario working out. Either there are a huge number of ways a species can evolve to become space travellers, OR, there's only a very narrow set of requirements it would take (both based on physical form AND their history as a developing society) for that to ever happen on a practical level. We could discover, for example, that six-legged mammals had an evolutionary advantage that, for reasons that become very complex over a period of millions of years, never drove them to investigate fire. We just have no way of knowing this until we encounter another civilization. Until that happens, anything's just as likely as anything else.
"If you can come up with a technical solution that is better, please do!"
Technically the FAA wouldn't let me do that. Oh.. hey.. when I put it that way, you're right, it is a 'technical' problem!!
"Where's my flying car? Damn it - it's still in the labs."
To be fair, that's not strictly a technical problem. I'm amazed they even let people drive their own personal cars.
"He didn't pay any attention to millions of people. Why the fuck would he care what one computer predicts?"
I know this was rhetorical, but those millions of people don't have all the information to work from he does. The computer would, presumably, have that information, too.
I wouldn't normally mind but it's hard to take masses of people seriously after hearing about people getting paid $1,500 to wait in line for somebody to pick up an iPhone.
"Sounds like the start of another cold war."
If any of you sees an APC carrying Engineers, OPEN FIRE IMMEDIATELY!
"E: A man made brain? That's a revolutionary idea! With our deep understanding of the human psyche and physiological complexities, we could whip this problem in no more than 20 years. Why haven't we been working on this since the 60's?"
I think the idea was that they're working on a new processing paradigm (can't believe I actually used that word) to make computers friendlier to humans. I think the idea is we'll be able to tell computers what we want instead of giving them a literal list of instructions for what to do. For example, today we get our email by opening our email app, clicking 'get email', and we get a list of our messages to browse. Sometime down the road, instead we'll say something like: "Computer, what's in my inbox today?" And it'll say: "A friend of yours sent you an email with an amusing image you might like, but the rest of your messages are unimportant."
Maybe I'm wrong, but I didn't get the impression from the article that it was about building an emo computer.
I agree with you today, but I'm not sure how I'd feel a year from now. I recently bought a Treo and have an unlimited data plan with Sprint. More and more I find myself using it to do things I normally do on the computer. I frequent Wikipedia, IMDB, Google News, and so on. Heck, I even found myself browsing Amazon a bit with it. The reason I'm using the phone instead of the computer? I'm often away from it. Amazon, for example, is great to peek at if I'm at a store and I find something I might want to get. I'll get a review and an idea of if the price is roughly in the right ballpark.
Okay, I'm probably not thrilling you with my tales of my mighty Treo browsing experience, but hear me out. I often get hit with an idea to do something when I'm away from the computer, and the Treo's awfully available. Sometimes I'll be out and about and realize I haven't paid my credit card bill yet. Well, that's when I notice how limited it can be sometimes. I've found out that the silly site they use won't support it. That's a bummer, I end up having to remember to take care of it when I get home. That's all fine and dandy, nothing wrong with that, except it's crunch mode where I work right now. My mind is full of tasks and I have precious few hours in the day to handle my home expenses. My point is that I can see the appeal of something like this if it's handled well and securely. Necessary? Nah, but there are people out there it has the potential to be convenient to.
I'm tired and I'm not sure how clear I'm being, so I'll put it a little more concisely: Yes, I am in front of a computer enough to take care of bills. However, I also find my phone is available at times when my computer isn't. It's not a cure for cancer, but it's semi-interesting to somebody like me who finds spare time to be a bit pricey.
"Using an AOL CD was your first mistake. They are not made of plastic, the are forged of pure evil."
Boy is that true. I microwaved an AOL CD, it turned into pure evil, and a bunch of little dudes came in and took me on a wacky adventure!
"It's easier, when I want to store something, to GMail it to myself. They have over 5X this amount of storage..."
And a 20 megabyte attachment limit.
"I've always thought that the Xbox has pretty much gotten a fair deal on slashdot. "
Well.. not 'always'. Just before launch, the 360 was a big joke on Slashdot. When the name was announced, there were jokes about Microsoft spinning in circles. When the machine was launched and demand exceeded supply, lots of complaints were made that Microsoft was doing that on purpose. ("We'll make more money by having less units available for sale!") There were complaints about the different SKUs and the lack of a harddrive in one model somehow being a bad thing. It really wasn't until Sony came along and made total asses of themselves that Slashdot's opinion of the 360 cooled.
Otherwise, I pretty much agree with your statement. I've heard more bashing of the Wii than of the 360 in the last 9 months or so. In some ways, it's almost like the 360's been forgotten.
"Is this preference for OSS or Microsoft a true reflection of differing political philosophies? "
Um, no. Candidate says "Gimme a website". Contractor says "ok". He may say things about the color he wants or which font to use, but he certainly is not interested in which OS is being used. He won't even know the difference between PHP and ASP.
"I, and most folks I know, need a phone to do two things: Make phone calls and survive my day."
Okay. So why are you in an iPhone thread, then? Did I miss the rumor that the iPhone was built with K.I.T.T.'s molecular bonded shell or something?
"The idiots in Kansas who got intelligent design into schools were voted out. (Although I think it took a few years.) So the system works, just slowly."
Now if we can just get the rest of the world to realize that a few noisy people doesn't necessarily mean a few hundred million followers....
"There were some kids that stole cars after playing GTA because they thought it was cool. What kind of things could we expect those kids to do after playing this game?"
I expect them to go "Huh, stealing cars landed me in jail. I don't want to do that again."
"Yes, launch tons and tons of highly toxic quicksilver on a rocket to Moon. What could go wrong?"
Well I suppose killing all life on the Moon would violate the Prime Directive.
I really can't believe how contraversial that post was.
"Right. Opera has been completely free since 2005."
... oh I want to say 2000'ish.) It's been a long time (if ever) that you had to 'buy' Opera, and the ad supported argument died not all that recently. This isn't flamebait.
Erm... This is a true statement. Why was it modded as flamebait? Opera has been free since 2005, and before that it was ad supported. (At least since version 5, which goes back to