http://www.zagg.com/us/en_us/keyboards/slim-book-ipad-mini-4
And if you're convinced, as I am, that Scrivener is dead, take a look at Ulysses, which works well and syncs between the Mac and iPad (and, soon, iPhone):
]]>Satellites are a luxury, not a necessity, for the general public. They're vital for militaries and for some space science (e.g., solar stuff).
]]>Most people will take their BSG or their Star Wars or whatever and be quite satisfied, no reality required. Especially as the reality of space travel is dangerous, uncomfortable, non-scalable, irregular, fragile, and expensive.
]]>I notice no substantial difference in weather forecasting accuracy over the last 50 years, in all the countries in which I've lived and worked. It was decent 50 years ago, and decent now.
What has changed is readily-available metrics reporting and real-time detection of localized weather phenomena like rainfronts and tornadoes. But those aren't predictions, they're observations.
So, my view is that weather observation has increased tremendously; prediction, not so much.
]]>The cool kids are IM fanatics, and want video and audio streamed quickly. Latency makes textual IM annoying, multimedia IM awful, and streaming/downloading horrible due to RTTs.
]]>'Climatologists' have nothing to do with meteorology, which is an actually useful applied art. Economics used to be 'the dismal science' until 'climatology' came along.
]]>That doesn't correlate with what the cool kids think of as 'Internet access'. Faking it locally doesn't work for their needs, which are high-interactivity.
]]>It's very high-latency, even LEO stuff adds painful latency. And the available bandwidth is a trickle, and super-expensive.
]]>I agree that lack of satellite comms doesn't lead to societies stagnating.
As for the biology stuff - inside every chemist is a failed physicist, and inside every biologist is a failed chemist.
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]]>Even an LEO Iridium re-run suffers from enough latency to make the most mundane Internet activities unpleasant.
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