Black hole swallows earth

[spongebathe83]

Yeah, i saw something mentioned about the particle accellerator/black hole on the Daily Show. The scientist say a black hole is 'improbable'... meaning there is still a finite chance.
However, no risk no gain.

[Prof_Sai]

it's hardly as if smartphones were either languishing in the doldroms beforehand or waiting for the iPhone to break into the popular market

You are taking a much too machine-centric view of things. It is not what the machine can do, but what YOU can do with the machine. For example, the phone I have now can surf the net. But I never use it that way because it takes about half an hour to type in a URL with the number keys, and then the pages come out all weird on the tiny screen.

So check this out:

http://mmetrics.com/press/PressRelea...318-iphonehype

iPhone owners are far more likely to USE their phone's features then owners of other smart phones.

all Apple products are over-priced.

Only if your time and sanity are worth nothing.

And despite your attempts to downplay it they were very forward thinking in much of their technology.

I was arguing against thejakeman's claim that there were no new ideas, so I was looking for things that Sci Fi DIDN'T predict. There is plenty of real foresight in Star Trek, but it is possible to give them too much credit.

[TrumanGrace]

Originally Posted by Prof_Sai

You are taking a much too machine-centric view of things. It is not what the machine can do, but what YOU can do with the machine. For example, the phone I have now can surf the net. But I never use it that way because it takes about half an hour to type in a URL with the number keys, and then the pages come out all weird on the tiny screen.

So check this out:

http://mmetrics.com/press/PressRelea...318-iphonehype

iPhone owners are far more likely to USE their phone's features then owners of other smart phones.

Only if your time and sanity are worth nothing.

There were phones out with full keyboards (not the predictive thing the iPhone uses) before the iPhone, that did more than the iPhone, and were less expensive than the iPhone, with the same browsing ability, the ability to change batteries, and do other several common features that the iPhone lacked.

And they cost must less. They just lack the pretentious lowercase "i" in front of their names, which is why they weren't as popular, and didn't have all the apple fanboys standing inline to spend roughly 3 times the amount they needed to for an inferior product that couldn't do half of what normal phones can do. That's how Jobs gets you, he sticks a sleekly designed product that isn't as good as what's on the market, and people buy it under the promise that future generations of the product will be better (and even then only after massive complaints from consumers). It's exactly what happened with the iPod, and it's happening against with the iPhone.

And if you want foresight in science fiction, when H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds, the laser hadn't been invented, or even really theorized by scientists (Albert Einstein didn't lay the foundations until about 1920, the book was published in 1898). He described one of the Martian's weapons to be rather close to how we'd describe it now.

[Prof_Sai]

If those smart phones are so great, then why don't the people who own them USE them? THAT is what that report is saying. People buy a smart phone because it is cheap, and then they play with the features a bit and then forget about them because the device is too awkward and impractical.

iPhones are a fraction of the market, but Google sees the vast majority of phone search requests coming from iPhones. Who cares what the phone can do if the user thinks it's too much trouble to make it work?

[TrumanGrace]

I didn't say all of them were better, I said that there were better out there, which there are. A lot of them aren't as good, some are better, just not as well marketed. That poll is comparing one of a product type to EVERY product in that type, which includes the good and the bad smart phones. Most of the people I know that have them DO use them. If you actually used some of the phones out there, you can see that they're not bad to use. Some of them do absolutely suck, some don't, like any product that has ever existed.

The iPhone is better marketed then all of them combined, which is where Jobs shines. The Ipod wasn't the best MP3 player out on the market when he introduced it. You couldn't even change the battery on it without a soldering kit. But Jobs marketed it in such a way that made it sell well. The iPhone is no different. He markets to that segment of the audience that are gullible enough to think it's a huge feat that a phone can play mp3's and have a browser, despite the fact that all of those features were around more than a year before the iPhone came along.

For the iPhone to be revolutionary, it would have to be doing something that no other phone can do. It can't. It's not new technology, it's just the same technology that's designed differently and marketed better.

[TrunKated]

Yeah... mp3 players. Don't get me started.

Check these name brands (and remember ebay generics are probably even less):

OH, and remember the Sansa doesn't need itunes.

[Always the Quiet One]

I think we're all overlooking the really obvious reason that some other alien race hasn't already colonized the universe already, they actually did.

1) We are a lost colony of the colonizing species. Perhaps there was a great galactic empire that has since broken down, maybe our ancestors were exiled and given one use ships that dissolved and seeped into the earth as crude oil.

2) This ancient species that colonized the universe isn't one we recognize as alive. Maybe they're pure energy (as has been postulated by someone else on this thread), maybe their inorganic, maybe they simply move too fast to be seen by us, maybe they're called stars. (This is the view I hold, BTW.)

Finally, one thought on the black hole thing. Given the odds of one forming, some bright guy (and I assure you it will be a guy) will develop the coveted BE Ray long before we have to worry about the earth getting smaller instead of bigger.

[Prof_Sai]

Nice job shopping. Apple sells that iPod for $49.

http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/

My first MP3 player was an Archios. I specifically rejected the ipod because I wanted to be able to use it as a USB drive. (iPods were firewire then.) But I found that the Archios was too much of a pain to use, and the USB funtion wasn't as useful as I thought it would be. I was perpetually mucking around with it as I walked to places, and it became annoying, so I returned it and didn't get an iPod until years later. I like the shuffle because you can use it without looking at it, or even taking it out of your pocket. You won't realize how nice this is until you've used one for a while.

[TrunKated]

Hey, whatever makes you happy. I like being able to see what's playing.

Yes, they've just dropped the price there. I saw that, actually, but my local store still has it at 80$ and the Sansa with twice the memory and a video player for the same price.

The point remains:
Apple = overpriced


PS: Amazon has lotsa mp3s. No need for itunes.

[Prof_Sai]

Who needs iTunes? It's nice for impulse buys, but mostly I rip CDs, and iPods play anything anyone else can.

Grace, not everyone who has a different opinion is "gullible". I've used a ton of techie gadgets, and while some are fun, many let you down when you need them. You have to build your whole life around these things if you want to get any real use out of them.

My mom's doctor gave her a Samsung smart phone to use as a smart monitor, and the thing is terrible. All it is ever supposed to do is transmit data from one gadget to the cell network. (All the other functions are locked out by software.) But I have to muck with the thing three times a day to keep it working. It has this big color screen with fancy graphics, but when things go wrong, it never gives you a coherent message explaining what the problem is! I waste so much time trying to fix it. If this is just for one function, I can't image what kind of nightmare it would be if all it's features were available.

By comparison, I can just walk into an Apple store, pick up the iPhone, and use Maps, YouTube, and even read "the process".

If anyone is interested in learning more about the Particle Accelerator

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/20...henbach-text/1

They are trying to learn more about dark matter and dark energy as well as the Big bang. Jakeman might be right about the extinction of valuable ideas and inventions in the present day but the human race might be on the cusp of a boom time for inventions if the scientists learn how to discern, view, and interact, with dark matter and dark energy. everything that we can interact with and persive is made of matter but matter only makes up a small minority of the universe. The vast majority is dark matter and energy. who knows what things we could accomplish if we could harness that stuff.

Only problem is dark matter does not interact with matter at all except through gravity. Dark matter can go through a star unscathed and unbothered. Since we are made of matter and everything we use to observe things is made of matter its currently impossible to do anything with dark matter. Dark Energy acts alot like gravity except in reverse, its the observation that empty space repels empty space. Thats why our universe is expanding exponentionally. We know gravity is a law of physics and is present we just cant see it Dark matter and Energy are the same way. I think there is more than a couple ground breaking inventions waiting to be made with this kind of stuff hanging around. Another way to be able to see the big bang from the beginning and before the big bang would be to create a observational tool that would use gravity waves, or dark energy to view the universe. Cosmologists hypothesize that there might have been a universe preexisting the one of matter we consider to be the universe. or if we could amplify and concentrate dark energy in one direction we could negate the effect of gravity on bodies of mass. We could have anti-gravity boots and hover boards like from Back to the Future!

As far as ground breaking ideas go, scientists are still searching for a unifying theory of matter. There are situations where quantum physics can explain something that another theory, like string theory, can't. But there are also situations where string theory can explain things that quantum theory can't. That means their must be a unifying theory of everything that we still haven't rationalized yet. A theory that connects the physics of the universe with the physics of the atom. That would be something, although the argument could be made that this idea would just build off of old ideas, but the sum would defiantly be greater than the parts.

So the particle accelerator could help us discover some new things about these mysterious objects. Or we get sucked into a black hole.

BTW as far as the sci-fi influencing real science has anyone played/heard of Mass Effect? I'm not much of a gamer but I bought that game because of who big of a sci-fi guy I am. It's a game for the 360 about humans becoming able to use dark energy, called mass effect in the game, to make force fields and repel things. It hasn't happened yet but maybe we will look back on it 50 years from know and say that that game inspired the scientists.

[vid]

I read this in the New York Times. Honestly, I don't think the risk, no matter how improbable, of humanity and our entire world imploding is worth ANY new discovery. I mean, it would kinda be taking a step backwards: a really, really, really, REALLY big step.