At the current rate of discovery, astronomers will have identified more than a million exoplanets by the year 2045. That means, if life is at all common in the Milky Way, astronomers could soon detect it.
It means nothing of the sort. The methods that we're using to identify exoplanets cannot detect life on those plants.
I didn't conveniently leave anything out. I highlighted the introduction of the idea and the demand from people that existed before any company (including PARC) started developing the idea into an actual product.
The Dynabook concept was introduced two years before PARC was created, so it's a bit ridiculous to suggest that they created the idea.
Neither of those scenarios happened, so you are remembering wrong.
Pad-like devices showed up in science fiction first. Some of the most visible examples are Star Trek (1966), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978). Millions and millions of people were introduced to the concept of handheld computing devices through fiction and lots of those people wanted one.
One of those people was Alan Kay, who was a PhD candidate at the time. He developed the idea more fully into something he called a Dynabook in 1978, long before any company had even thought about anything of the sort.
Science fiction authors gave us the idea and it was so appealing that people wanted it to exist. Companies eventually recognized the demand for those devices and worked toward creating them, but they didn't create the idea or the demand.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/20...
From the NYT:
Some borrowers say their cars were disabled when they were only a few days behind on their payments, leaving them stranded in dangerous neighborhoods. Others said their cars were shut down while idling at stoplights. Some described how they could not take their children to school or to doctorâ(TM)s appointments. One woman in Nevada said her car was shut down while she was driving on the freeway.
From the summary:
Some borrowers say their cars were disabled when they were only a few days behind on their payments, leaving them stranded in dangerous neighborhoods. Others said their cars were shut down while idling at stoplights. Some described how they could not take their children to school or to doctor's appointments. One woman in Nevada said her car was shut down while she was driving on the freeway.
HughPickens.com may not be able to write for crap, but he can plagiarize like a motherfucking champ.
It'd be the equivalent of mounting a windmill to a blimp.
Guns must not be simply reliable. They must be infallible. They must work instantly, every time. Otherwise, any gun is useless.
See how fucking idiotic that sounds?
Just what we need. One more argument against even trying to come up with something better. Clearly we're the pinnacle of civilization and technology, so the status quo is always the best we can do.
Oh look, a 370 year old house made of wood.
Building a house out of wood doesn't automatically mean that it'll fall down in 10 years. If a wood framed structure fails that early, the fault lies either with the architectural planning or the use of low quality wood that isn't suitable for construction.
It doesn't mean they can bottle piss and sell it as Sprite.
Well duh. The color is all wrong. You have to sell it as lemonade, Mello Yellow, Mountain Dew or something else with at least a vaguely similar coloration.
Back at you. I don't see any reason I need to answer that any more than you do. One could also read my post.
I'm happy to go on record as saying that earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons (and they damage they cause) are natural disasters. I'll even go so far as to say that only an idiot would argue otherwise.
Were you trying to reply to some other comment? I said nothing about dismantling dams or nuclear reactors.
Are you suggesting that the earthquake and ensuing tsunami were somehow not natural disasters?
Or are you suggesting that this was a disaster that couldn't have been prepared for, despite the fact that TEPCO had been warned of the possibility years before? They dismissed the prediction as an unrealistic scenario and literally didn't bother preparing for it, so yeah... they were unprepared.
I believe you're thinking of the 2007 Carancas meteor impact.
The dam failures that you linked to were primarily caused by a typhoon that dumped over a meter of water in the area in less than 24 hours. It was pretty clearly a natural disaster that they weren't prepared for.
It is less than 1/9 the size of the 10" of an iPad.
You either entirely missed the point of the submission or you are actually trolling despite implying that you aren't.
The $20 cell phone is less than 1/15th the cost of the cheapest iPad. There are a lot of people who don't have an extra $300 for an ebook reader and live in areas without easy access to books.
A $20 device may not be the best reader available, but it's affordable and provides access to books that might not be available any other way.
Why cares?
This may be hard for you to believe, but some of us aren't entirely self-centered and we actually give a shit about poor people who can't afford the same access to information that others have.
Why is this slashvertisment posted on
A slashvertisement would be an article about a specific product, not a general discussion of $20 cell phones and their capability as ebook readers. If you're going to throw insults around, at least try to make them relevant to the thing you're insulting.
The optimum committee has no members. -- Norman Augustine
