It's amazing how many prophets we have here on Slashdot! However, I don't think they are any better at prophesying than Harold Camping was in foretelling the end of the world. Of course Apple will greatly encourage the use of their App Store because they make money from it. That does not mean however they will prohibit Slashdot nerds from installing whatever software they wish. They will just make it harder, but not impossible for the ordinary user to do that.
The end of the world happens for you when you draw your last breath and your body releases your soul. For a lot of people on this earth the world ended on this day, May 21. So for these people the prophecy did come true, but for the rest of us this prophecy will also come true in due time. Harold Camping correctly prophesied to the fate of every human being, but he got the timing wrong for those of us who are still here breathing.
.....small, simple apps that do one thing. Do it exceedingly well, and do it quickly is a huge thing....
How about the idea of small modular apps that can be added to as needed. For example, a simple photo edit application that does most of the common things that people need to do most often. Anybody who needs to do more than the basics, can buy an additional module doing various specialized functions that are integrated with the main application. Sell the main application for five dollars and also each add-on module. If the application has say 10 modules, that together do most or all of what Photoshop does, it should be a big seller. That way, people can buy whatever functionality is needed at any time.
If someone discovered a simple technology whereby all secrets, no matter by whom they are held, could become known by anyone, would that be a good thing or would it be terrible? If all the thoughts and intentions of people could be read like an open book, some sort of universal mind scan technology, who would benefit more from this, those intent on doing evil or those intent on doing good?
Here is somebody who can read Arabic and claims that these symbols in the original text are in Arabic, not in Greek as is the rest of the New Testament.
How can an opinion be substantiated? Is an opinion not by definition an unprovable idea? If I express the opinion that Democrats are worse than Republicans, how can that be substantiated?
That is precisely why an my karma is in the cellar. Anyone who disagrees with the crowd anywhere, even on Slashdot, will get moderated into oblivion. I really think they ought to have a disagree option in the moderation system.
Nowhere ever, even once, has a crowd of people ever come up with anything great or outstanding. Progress in almost every human endeavor is made by people who are willing to swim against the current carrying all the dead fish that are floating downstream.
How will the police officer know that the electrons in your battery came from an untaxed source? Wouldn't it be simpler to have some sort of a weight-mileage-based tax? Every time you get a new sticker for your license plate, the DMV would read the odometer and charge you the appropriate tax. Even with the tax, electricity would be vastly cheaper than current gas prices.
Another advantage is that we would not be subsidizing terrorism from certain oil-rich countries.
I was thinking more in terms of a computer that you could talk to in order to tell it verbally to do a trend analysis on the million data points and possibly where to find those data points. The computer that would have a vocabulary of a two-year-old along with the ability to understand commands wouldn't be bad now would it?
Programming a computer is almost as tedious as it was when computers had a set of binary switches on the front panel. Speech to text programs, if they are trained to a particular speaker, are not bad, but they are still making a lot of mistakes. Computers are still a long ways off that will understand any human spoken language spoken by anyone. The dream of a telephone, where a person can speak English into at one end and flawless Chinese or French comes out at the other, is still a distant dream.
It is too bad that we still need keys at all. Even the most powerful computer is still incredibly dumb compared to my 17-month-old grandson. Last weekend we were in the kitchen and I asked him to show me his toy box with the new truck he just got. He had no trouble toddling all the way down the hall, into the living room straight to the toybox, and with a big smile on his face hold up and show me his new toy.
It seems to me that by now we should be able to talk to our computers at least as well as to a two-year-old. I wonder how far we are away from that.
Yup, a non-event. I was a missileer at a different base in the 1990s. We had something similar which was caused by an inspector crew who mistakenly screwed up their network credentials (for lack of a better term). The article describes the launch crews trying to "muscle up" their control over the noise then restarting the net, similar to removing power from a computer and givng the capacitors a little time to discharge. There are multiple redundant control and monitoring systems. Control was't lot, it just took a different form for a while as the crews restarted their network. The overwhelming majority of the time missile crew duty is as dull as you can possibly imagine while being conscious, punctuated by periods of extreme panic. The reality is that almost nothing happens, sort of like the Maytag repair man. Something like this gives 10 missileers text they can use on their yearly evaluations to document they accomplished something. Think about it, billions and billions of dollars were spent to create multiple layers of redundancy and security so that...nothing...will happen. The biggest challege a missileer has is not being bored. The systems really are that safe.
---So even if you could travel at 92% light speed, you'd still die before you got there.---
So then we would have to conquer death first it seems to me. It turns out that someone on this earth did that already. His name is Jesus Christ. He made the seemingly preposterous claim to be God himself come to earth in human form. As such he made the promise that anyone who believes him will also permanently escape death and be resurrected in a body that transcends time and space, just as he was.
Anyone who carefully studies what his body was like after the resurrection, will realize that it was recognizable as human, but also had powers and abilities which we deem supernatural. He was able to transcend the limits of time and space. He had a body of flesh and bone, no blood. In our earthbound natural thinking, we cannot see how this can be.
Of course most of
When Jesus finally left the Earth for "heaven" wherever that is, he did not need a huge rocket or spaceship. There was no searing flame, no earthshaking thunder or anything else that we have come to associate with space travel. His technology was even far beyond the imaginations of Star Trek.
Someday, those who trust and believe God, will be able to explore the ENTIRE universe God has created. Traveling to a planet 20 light years away will be easier for the resurrected, transcendent, eternal human beings, than it is today for a person to go from the kitchen to the living room.
...When I was a kid....
I was able to buy those things at the corner drugstore and use them to make gunpowder with those ingredients. My parents got me a Gilbert chemistry set, which would be required by the EPA to be disposed of by men in hazmat suits today. Any parents that did such a thing today (if they even could) would be hauled off to jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I had a glass bottle containing 5 pounds of mercury. Now and then I would enjoy the feel of it, pouring some of it from one hand to the other, before putting it back into the bottle one squiggly little silvery drop at a time.
It is my generation that survived going to the moon and other dangerous stuff. I feel sorry for the kids growing up nowadays. What can they do to learn by doing? Can they enjoy riding around town in the back of their dad's pickup truck on a warm summer day? Can they feel the warm breeze ruffling their hair as they ride a motorcycle or even their bicycle down the road without a suffocating helmet?
Highschoolers can do simulated chemistry and physics experiments on sophisticated computers, but they don't actually get to smell that hydrogen sulfide or burning sugar and jump out of the way as the heavy steel ball rolls down the inclined plane missing its container and falls to the floor.
Oh yes, they can now walk down the street yakking on their cell phones and play video games all night instead of reading a book. Fun!
---In November, many of those unemployed folks are going to be at the polls. We shall see
I hope that all incumbents will be thrown out of office and we get some new blood in there. In the long run, the new politicians may not be any better, but at least it will take them a while to reestablish all their bribery connections. If this happens, at least it will send a message that the people are fed up with business as usual and with the people of both parties currently in office. Maybe after that shakeup, politicians everywhere will listen just a little tiny bit better to those they are supposed to represent, the voters, not the corporate fat cats with their huge bankrolls.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood
