Science Fiction constantly imagines scenarios where a character time-travels on earth using a time machine. In most cases, the concept seems simple–a character uses a time machine and ends up in the same place on earth at a different time. The difficulty of time travel aside, how difficult would it be to end up at the same location on earth at a different time? And I’m even ignoring geological changes to the earth’s surface.
Let’s say you have a 3D coordinate system for the entire universe, and have compensated for universal expansion. At a given moment, you are on the surface of earth at a specific coordinate. But the earth is rotating every 24 hours. Its axis wobbles. It orbits the sun once a year. The sun is orbiting the center of the milky way galaxy. And our galaxy is hurtling through space at 630 km per second. Because of this, the earth travels 51.84 million km per day. (And we’re worried about an asteroid hitting *us*?)
Just by staying completely still on the surface of earth, you are traveling in a squiggly, rotating, wobbling, looping, swirling path hurtling through space generally pointed away from the center of the universe at a tremendous speed. Just once I would like to see a character finally invent a time machine, use it to go back just an hour, and end up thousands of miles from earth in space because they didn’t bother to compensate for that. As for people who accidentally time travel or cannot control the amount of time they travel…God help ‘em.

That sucks. The 3.0 SDK is still too restrictive. Imagine the amazing 3.0 apps that would come out if you could manipulate the output of your library. A real scratch interface for DJs. A live BPM counter. Reaktor-like stutter and loop apps. A pedometer that syncs music to your step. All of these ideas are things I wanted to try with the 3.0 SDK, and none of them are possible.

Likewise, accessories that come out are more or less going to be limited to one application. You could make a MIDI interface but it’s only going to work with your app. You could make a keyboard accessory, but it’s only going to work with your application. You’d have to copy and paste what you typed from your application to other apps. Even if you allowed other developers to use your keyboard framework to allow it to work in their applications, the keyboard still wouldn’t work in native apps like Safari, Mail, SMS, etc.

Apple, the iPhone is an amazing device, and you’re still being far too restrictive with it! Opening up the library to at least read access, allowing device makers to write drivers for their accessories, and giving users and developers at least limited shared file system access would do wonders for the potential for the iPhone.

The best part was the footer on the bottom of the back of the box:

“¹Based upon independent clinical research, kids who ate Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal for breakfast had up to 18% better attentiveness three hours after breakfast than kids who ate no breakfast.”

No breakfast?? Lol. 18% is not a staggering statistic for starving children trying to focus. In a related study, 15% of the children could focus better when they weren’t being stabbed in the face.

Come on people. We’re still ok with stuff like this?

Does it really take that much effort to realize what seemed like a good idea at the time will actually silently kill you in a bloody clown suit?