You started your post by replying to "Where did I say that I want to create a great work?" with "Yeah, agreed. That Bach guy, such a hack. I coulda done that too. I just don't want to.", I'd say you're the one who's being "adversarial"...
You still have a CD/DVD-ROM drive in your computer? Well ok, my iMac still has a DVD-ROM burner but every other computer I've got doesn't (although I keep a couple of old spare CD-R/RW drives around in storage just in case).
That's mostly a bad fantasy. For a long, long time the most efficient way will be just to keep this planet fine; with space efforts useful, but in a different way - satellites for Earth science or to guard off against impactors.
Some of us like to dream of going somewhere else, exploring, not just sitting around waiting to get taken out by the first large asteroid or rogue black hole that wanders our way.
Also, I'd rather aim for the stars and end up on Mars than aim for LEO and end up in yet another political debate over the latest religious squabble...
Other than that - we've been in space for half a century and, essentially, none of the Space Age dreams have become a reality. With good reasons, we don't have the required technology, required energy.
Well, it would probably have been easier to get something done if NASA and ESA had proper funding, but they don't, really.
Now, if we would have them - we still wouldn't need to go into space in any large numbers. We would have everything on Earth, easier and more efficiently.
It would be nice if we actually had the capability to do today what we could do 40 years ago though, like manned crafts leaving LEO...
Yeah, agreed. That Bach guy, such a hack. I coulda done that too. I just don't want to.
Uh, what are you talking about? I pointed out that it was possible that I, like many others, simple didn't have the drive to create some kind of musical, artistic or $FOO masterpiece. Really, there are lots of people who are quite capable of understanding and appreciating art and culture without feeling the need to, oh, I just read the rest of your post as well and I think I see the problem. I think I may have poked a bit to hard at your musician's version of the self made man myth and you took offense to the notion that someone came before you, that you didn't single-handedly invent music, musical theory and the very concept of art. Terribly sorry about revealing that horrible truth to you.
Where did I say that I want to create a great work? And what makes you think I haven't already created things of value to others? and that I haven't shared those things with others freely?
The only way to do art for art's sake with no interest in money at all is to be getting your money from a non art related source(federal grants don't count as a non art source, if you stopped doing art you'd still starve).
What are you on about? It is possible to do art for the sake of art and still get paid for it, money simply shouldn't be why you create your art. It's about what your main motivation for creating is, if you create something and hope that someone else will like it so that you'll be able to put food on the table and you end up filthy rich, fine. However, if you begin creating something and you make changes based not on your artistic vision but on what you think the "average consumer" will want in order to "maximize profit" then you are not an artist IMO, you are not creating art, you are creating a product.
Because it's true? We all stand on the shoulders of giants and there are immense amounts of knowledge that every competent artist, musician, author, software developer and entrepreneur takes advantage of without ever having paid for it in any formal way (hell, you could probably learn enough about music theory, computer science and a number of other subjects to create your own magnum opus just by using library books and while technically you "pay" for those with your taxes, well the authors don't really get a lot of money if you read a library book).
Yes, this does seem like the kind of bug I'd expect halfway competent dev to take into consideration when building a site. A very simple fix is to translate all < and > characters to the & lt; and & gt; versions instead, AFAIK youtube doesn't even allow HTML in comments anyway...
That would require they move away from their current setup that shifts away from 'inflating' your signal and 'inflating' apples awesomeness...
Ah, but from what I've heard the last few days (and this is also mentioned in TFA) it was AT&T who told Apple "This is how we want you to report signal strength on the iPhone 4/in iOS 4" and while Apple isn't without blame (they were after all the ones who implemented this) it could just as well be AT&T trying to hide flaws in their network that resulted in the iPhone 4 reporting signal strength in a strange way.
That's a pretty bad idea, while using an unencrypted AP does expose you neighbors to possible sniffing by others in the general vicinity the use of Tor pretty much guarantees someone is sniffing their traffic.
We'll have to disagree here. I think you have led a sheltered life if you think Apple takes any kind of major heat like other vendors have to deal with.
I disagree with you on this point, there are plenty of people, both journalists and amateurs, who love to criticize Apple and people who buy Apple products.
OTOH, say anything against Apple and people like you come out and brand the source as fringe zealots.
I didn't "brand the source as fringe zealots" I simply pointed out that as far as I can tell pretty much anything related to Apple tends to get become very polarized. Nice job implying that I'm an Apple fanboy though.
I didn't say all Apple products are crap; I said sometimes they make crap and they absolutely will not admit to it. I think in this case, one of their design compromises has come back to bite in a way they did not expect. Their first reaction is to deny despite mounting evidence.
Most manufacturers respond to initial complaints about faulty products by being quiet, the difference is that the amount of press Apple gets is a lot more than the press other companies generally get which makes their silence seem worse since people are bombarded with "two days since flaw discovered, still no apology from the great satan, I mean Steve Jobs"
C'mon... this is a consumer product issue and Apple's record for admitting to problems is not good. The iphone is a great product but 4 has a real issue re: signal strength and shielding.
Did I say it wasn't a serious issue? No, I believe I actually stated "I have no doubt this is a real problem..." in my original post in this thread...
Oh, I kept reading and I agree that it's a major issue but I just thought it was a funny bit about how some people tend to treat defects in Apple products, if rumor got out that the new iPhone's screen was prone to cracking when bumped there would be a hundred youtube videos up the next day showing people who "gently" bumped it (yet the table they placed phone on would collapse from the "gentle" bump)...
And of course there would be fanboys going "I dropped my iPhone from the fifth floor and it's still working perfectly, not a scratch!".
Ah, but for every overly positive review of an Apple product you can bet there's a slew of comments and blog posts about how evil they are and how ever minor flaw makes the product at hand completely useless and worthless.
As for iTunes and Safari, yeah, iTunes is a bit bloated, even on OS X these days but I've never had any trouble with Safari, at least not on OS X when comparing to other browsers (like Firefox which is absolutely dog slow on OS X for some reason).
And on the hardware side I suppose I've been lucky so far but I also think part of the reason for that is that Apple's hardware issues tend to get blown way out of proportion by tech journalists looking for page views, they know if they make some minor flaw that affects one user in a hundred sound like the end of times they'll get lots of visitors, even if all the visitors just drop by to leave "works fine for me" comments.
Basically my impression of the coverage of Apple is a lot more black and white than the coverage of other products, while others a pretty balanced mix with everything from the rabid fanboys to the anti-$BRAND zealots with Apple a lot of times it seems there are a lot more fanboys and anti-Apple zealots who hate everything Apple does ("Free ice cream, world peace, a pony and all the pizza you can eat? Yeah, completely worthless if it doesn't include a complementary keychain!").
Ah yes, I found the Anandtech writeup pretty funny, at least the following part:
Cupping tightly - This is the absolute worst case and involves squeezing the phone very tightly, like people are doing online in videos demonstrating all the bars going away. I squeeze the phone hard and make sure my palms are sweaty as well. You'd never hold the phone this way because it's physically painful.
I have no doubt this is a real problem but it definitely seems to be affected by the usual "let's piss all over Apple" thing that always happens when a fault with one of Apple's products has been discovered...
I think the implication about the "Wannabe-Windows clones" was that there are a lot of "1337" Ubuntu users who go around preaching about how awesome Linux is even though they lack any in-depth knowledge of it, they just popped in a Live-CD and installed it using the GUI installer (which is pretty much just a matter of hitting Next until it's done).
Now, I'll admit that back in the 90s I was a bit of a Open Source evangelist but at least I had some basic knowledge of *nix, these days I keep ending up in conversations with friends of mine who have never used a terminal emulator where they try to convince me of how awesome Ubuntu is (because it's Linux!) and even when I point out that my day job involves keeping a load-balanced Linux cluster running and that I have no Windows machines at home they will keep badgering me with teh awezoomnes of Ubuntu and telling me how I should move from FreeBSD, OS X, Debian and other distros to Ubuntu. Without trying to brag about my own skills it does feel a bit like a random recently converted christian of the protestant kind trying to convert a catholic bishop to his brand of christianity even though he himself knows little of the bible beyond "jesus and god good, satan bad"...
These are the kind of users who almost exclusively run "Wannabe-Windows clones" and apply cargo-cult solutions to any problem they may have. I can understand the frustration with them.
Ah, but apart from acting skills it's not so much intelligence that's required in the movie/theatre world, it's social skills. And I'm not talking about solid regular social skills but the ability to stab your competitors in the back while they do the same to you and still come out of it smiling and acting like friends. Brown-nosing is a big part of it as well. Really, it's not intelligence, you need to have strong social skills coupled with "management personality" (meaning: willing to climb to the top by using the bodies of your foes as a staircase).
And no, I don't consider social skills to be "intelligence", mainly because I have several friends who are extremely good at all the little "tricks" that come with being good at social skills yet they will readily admit that they're far from intelligent both when it comes to "hard science" stuff and things like spelling and rote memorization, they're just good at being social.
Possible problem identified: V doesn't know about X since his/her organization is highly compartmentalized and V only knows about his/her little part of the organization.
Second possible problem: Torture has been anticipated and V has a "cover story" for such an occasion (perhaps a clever lie about X which makes sense and which when investigated by T will seem like it's true).
Third possible problem: Torture has been anticipated and V has been trained not to give up information.
Fourth possible problem: Torture and murder of operatives by T's organization is well-known by V's organization and every operative in V's organization has been trained to commit suicide to avoid capture.
But hey, "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" is a lot more fun, right?
OS-X, in particular the early dock, is just a POS. Completely about the shiny tech demo, not about usability. Frankly if you want to see a dock like interface done right, look at Windows 7. The OS-X dock was made to look cool, not to be clear and easy to use. It was far inferior to the interfaces it replaced in Classic. However people liked it, because it looked cool in the store and on video. They were attracted to the shiny, they didn't consider usability.
I guess I and lots of people I know (yay, anecdote!) are exceptions to this then. The OS X dock was dead simple to grasp, just looking at it made sense quickly ("Apps without a marker under aren't running, those with a marker under are running, apps not already in the dock get added to the far-right of the dock while running", that's about it) but the win7 taskbar/dock just seems like an over-engineered mess to me (this has also been the most common complaint about win7 from friends of mine who have upgraded to win7 with several of them asking me if I knew the easiest way to make it "behave like windows 2000" and another question being "how do I know if a program is running or not?").
It sounds to me like you cherry-picked the puck mouse example (also, this is a product from 1998 you're talking about).
As for OS X, all my experience with it, previous versions of Mac OS, practically every desktop Windows version since 3.x and a boatload of X11 window managers (including but not limited to: PWM, FVWM1/2, Openstep, Enlightenment, Metacity, IceWM, 4DWM, Blackbox, Fluxbox...) tells me that it's better than most if not all of the competitors in many ways (although if you have a very specialized workflow then you may benefit from another UI but as a general desktop OS it's definitely one of the better and sure beats previous incarnations of Mac OS).
Can't speak for the Time Capsule as I have never even seen one of those IRL but it does sound like you're confusing "shiny" with "easy to handle", the average user (the kind of person who would buy a turnkey backup unit like the Time Capsule) doesn't want extra cables and power bricks, they want something dead simple.
Finally, the iPhone 4. Yeah, this does seem like a bit of an issue but for all we know they did usability research and found that only 0.003% of all users they tested it on actually held the phone in a way that shorted out the antenna. Still, does seem like a bad bug to let out in the open (but I'm not yet convinced they won't be able to fix it in software, there were a few other glitches with the iPhone 3G that had the anti-Apple crowd screaming "DEFECTIVE HARDWARE UNPOSSIBLE TO FIX IRREPARABLY BORKEN BUY A BLACKBERRY AND ZUNE INSTAED!!1" yet they were fixed in the 3.0.1 release of the OS).
unions keep down superior workers - Not from what I've noticed, mostly they just demand minimum pay raises (as in, "you can give raises as big as you want but they must be at least n%").
prohibit going above the call of duty - Not really, around here you can be exempt from the maximum number of overtime hours rules but this does require changing your employment contract and the union tends to get involved to make sure the employer doesn't try to take advantage of the employee.
leech your hard earned money - I pay around SEK 450 (~$58) per month for union membership + employment insurance which means if I get laid off I can still get 80% of my pay for a while after my employment ends.
send managers death threats - Never heard of this happening (although I'm sure you can find some local rep of some trucker union in some country somewhere doing this twenty years ago).
and are run by the mob - Only in the US and I'm pretty sure you guys can thank the 18th amendment for part of that...
But most of the big-name "Sci-fi" these days is just "blockbuster action movie, IN SPACE! (Also, we threw in some comic relief for the kids and some romance for the ladies, enjoy!)", there is little sci-fi to sci-fi in hollywood these days.
Or how about "Knowing", a friend of mine called it the best new sci-fi movie in ages, I watched it and concluded they went with the much-overused "Alien horror" genre which then turned into some sort of "Jesus as an alien (who just seemed bad because we're idiots who wanted to make a cool trailer) saves the innocent and righteous and brings them all to a new garden of eden while everyone else dies horribly".
I'd love to watch them legally but to my knowledge no swedish network has even mentioned airing the new Futurama eps (which most likely means they don't care or they're waiting to see how well it is received in the US + how much demand there is for it in Sweden before deciding whether or not to license it, I'm sure those three swedes who don't pirate TV shows to avoid all this bullshit will be happy to watch it in 2014 though).
The worst part about VLB was that the cards had a nasty tendency to get dislodged just a little forcing you to open up the case and reseat the card. Not that opening up the case was all that unusual back in those days, messing around with the hardware inside your computer was a lot more common back then, even for regular users...
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You started your post by replying to "Where did I say that I want to create a great work?" with "Yeah, agreed. That Bach guy, such a hack. I coulda done that too. I just don't want to.", I'd say you're the one who's being "adversarial"...
You still have a CD/DVD-ROM drive in your computer? Well ok, my iMac still has a DVD-ROM burner but every other computer I've got doesn't (although I keep a couple of old spare CD-R/RW drives around in storage just in case).
That's mostly a bad fantasy. For a long, long time the most efficient way will be just to keep this planet fine; with space efforts useful, but in a different way - satellites for Earth science or to guard off against impactors.
Some of us like to dream of going somewhere else, exploring, not just sitting around waiting to get taken out by the first large asteroid or rogue black hole that wanders our way.
Also, I'd rather aim for the stars and end up on Mars than aim for LEO and end up in yet another political debate over the latest religious squabble...
Other than that - we've been in space for half a century and, essentially, none of the Space Age dreams have become a reality. With good reasons, we don't have the required technology, required energy.
Well, it would probably have been easier to get something done if NASA and ESA had proper funding, but they don't, really.
Now, if we would have them - we still wouldn't need to go into space in any large numbers. We would have everything on Earth, easier and more efficiently.
It would be nice if we actually had the capability to do today what we could do 40 years ago though, like manned crafts leaving LEO...
Yeah, agreed. That Bach guy, such a hack. I coulda done that too. I just don't want to.
Uh, what are you talking about? I pointed out that it was possible that I, like many others, simple didn't have the drive to create some kind of musical, artistic or $FOO masterpiece. Really, there are lots of people who are quite capable of understanding and appreciating art and culture without feeling the need to, oh, I just read the rest of your post as well and I think I see the problem. I think I may have poked a bit to hard at your musician's version of the self made man myth and you took offense to the notion that someone came before you, that you didn't single-handedly invent music, musical theory and the very concept of art. Terribly sorry about revealing that horrible truth to you.
Where did I say that I want to create a great work? And what makes you think I haven't already created things of value to others? and that I haven't shared those things with others freely?
The only way to do art for art's sake with no interest in money at all is to be getting your money from a non art related source(federal grants don't count as a non art source, if you stopped doing art you'd still starve).
What are you on about? It is possible to do art for the sake of art and still get paid for it, money simply shouldn't be why you create your art. It's about what your main motivation for creating is, if you create something and hope that someone else will like it so that you'll be able to put food on the table and you end up filthy rich, fine. However, if you begin creating something and you make changes based not on your artistic vision but on what you think the "average consumer" will want in order to "maximize profit" then you are not an artist IMO, you are not creating art, you are creating a product.
Because it's true? We all stand on the shoulders of giants and there are immense amounts of knowledge that every competent artist, musician, author, software developer and entrepreneur takes advantage of without ever having paid for it in any formal way (hell, you could probably learn enough about music theory, computer science and a number of other subjects to create your own magnum opus just by using library books and while technically you "pay" for those with your taxes, well the authors don't really get a lot of money if you read a library book).
Yes, this does seem like the kind of bug I'd expect halfway competent dev to take into consideration when building a site. A very simple fix is to translate all < and > characters to the & lt; and & gt; versions instead, AFAIK youtube doesn't even allow HTML in comments anyway...
That would require they move away from their current setup that shifts away from 'inflating' your signal and 'inflating' apples awesomeness...
Ah, but from what I've heard the last few days (and this is also mentioned in TFA) it was AT&T who told Apple "This is how we want you to report signal strength on the iPhone 4/in iOS 4" and while Apple isn't without blame (they were after all the ones who implemented this) it could just as well be AT&T trying to hide flaws in their network that resulted in the iPhone 4 reporting signal strength in a strange way.
That's a pretty bad idea, while using an unencrypted AP does expose you neighbors to possible sniffing by others in the general vicinity the use of Tor pretty much guarantees someone is sniffing their traffic.
We'll have to disagree here. I think you have led a sheltered life if you think Apple takes any kind of major heat like other vendors have to deal with.
I disagree with you on this point, there are plenty of people, both journalists and amateurs, who love to criticize Apple and people who buy Apple products.
OTOH, say anything against Apple and people like you come out and brand the source as fringe zealots.
I didn't "brand the source as fringe zealots" I simply pointed out that as far as I can tell pretty much anything related to Apple tends to get become very polarized. Nice job implying that I'm an Apple fanboy though.
I didn't say all Apple products are crap; I said sometimes they make crap and they absolutely will not admit to it. I think in this case, one of their design compromises has come back to bite in a way they did not expect. Their first reaction is to deny despite mounting evidence.
Most manufacturers respond to initial complaints about faulty products by being quiet, the difference is that the amount of press Apple gets is a lot more than the press other companies generally get which makes their silence seem worse since people are bombarded with "two days since flaw discovered, still no apology from the great satan, I mean Steve Jobs"
C'mon... this is a consumer product issue and Apple's record for admitting to problems is not good. The iphone is a great product but 4 has a real issue re: signal strength and shielding.
Did I say it wasn't a serious issue? No, I believe I actually stated "I have no doubt this is a real problem..." in my original post in this thread...
Oh, I kept reading and I agree that it's a major issue but I just thought it was a funny bit about how some people tend to treat defects in Apple products, if rumor got out that the new iPhone's screen was prone to cracking when bumped there would be a hundred youtube videos up the next day showing people who "gently" bumped it (yet the table they placed phone on would collapse from the "gentle" bump)...
And of course there would be fanboys going "I dropped my iPhone from the fifth floor and it's still working perfectly, not a scratch!".
Ah, but for every overly positive review of an Apple product you can bet there's a slew of comments and blog posts about how evil they are and how ever minor flaw makes the product at hand completely useless and worthless.
As for iTunes and Safari, yeah, iTunes is a bit bloated, even on OS X these days but I've never had any trouble with Safari, at least not on OS X when comparing to other browsers (like Firefox which is absolutely dog slow on OS X for some reason).
And on the hardware side I suppose I've been lucky so far but I also think part of the reason for that is that Apple's hardware issues tend to get blown way out of proportion by tech journalists looking for page views, they know if they make some minor flaw that affects one user in a hundred sound like the end of times they'll get lots of visitors, even if all the visitors just drop by to leave "works fine for me" comments.
Basically my impression of the coverage of Apple is a lot more black and white than the coverage of other products, while others a pretty balanced mix with everything from the rabid fanboys to the anti-$BRAND zealots with Apple a lot of times it seems there are a lot more fanboys and anti-Apple zealots who hate everything Apple does ("Free ice cream, world peace, a pony and all the pizza you can eat? Yeah, completely worthless if it doesn't include a complementary keychain!").
Ah yes, I found the Anandtech writeup pretty funny, at least the following part:
Cupping tightly - This is the absolute worst case and involves squeezing the phone very tightly, like people are doing online in videos demonstrating all the bars going away. I squeeze the phone hard and make sure my palms are sweaty as well. You'd never hold the phone this way because it's physically painful.
I have no doubt this is a real problem but it definitely seems to be affected by the usual "let's piss all over Apple" thing that always happens when a fault with one of Apple's products has been discovered...
I think the implication about the "Wannabe-Windows clones" was that there are a lot of "1337" Ubuntu users who go around preaching about how awesome Linux is even though they lack any in-depth knowledge of it, they just popped in a Live-CD and installed it using the GUI installer (which is pretty much just a matter of hitting Next until it's done).
Now, I'll admit that back in the 90s I was a bit of a Open Source evangelist but at least I had some basic knowledge of *nix, these days I keep ending up in conversations with friends of mine who have never used a terminal emulator where they try to convince me of how awesome Ubuntu is (because it's Linux!) and even when I point out that my day job involves keeping a load-balanced Linux cluster running and that I have no Windows machines at home they will keep badgering me with teh awezoomnes of Ubuntu and telling me how I should move from FreeBSD, OS X, Debian and other distros to Ubuntu. Without trying to brag about my own skills it does feel a bit like a random recently converted christian of the protestant kind trying to convert a catholic bishop to his brand of christianity even though he himself knows little of the bible beyond "jesus and god good, satan bad"...
These are the kind of users who almost exclusively run "Wannabe-Windows clones" and apply cargo-cult solutions to any problem they may have. I can understand the frustration with them.
I didn't say it was, I just said that it wasn't exactly "intelligence" in the way that most people would use the word.
Ah, but apart from acting skills it's not so much intelligence that's required in the movie/theatre world, it's social skills. And I'm not talking about solid regular social skills but the ability to stab your competitors in the back while they do the same to you and still come out of it smiling and acting like friends. Brown-nosing is a big part of it as well. Really, it's not intelligence, you need to have strong social skills coupled with "management personality" (meaning: willing to climb to the top by using the bodies of your foes as a staircase).
And no, I don't consider social skills to be "intelligence", mainly because I have several friends who are extremely good at all the little "tricks" that come with being good at social skills yet they will readily admit that they're far from intelligent both when it comes to "hard science" stuff and things like spelling and rote memorization, they're just good at being social.
Possible problem identified: V doesn't know about X since his/her organization is highly compartmentalized and V only knows about his/her little part of the organization.
Second possible problem: Torture has been anticipated and V has a "cover story" for such an occasion (perhaps a clever lie about X which makes sense and which when investigated by T will seem like it's true).
Third possible problem: Torture has been anticipated and V has been trained not to give up information.
Fourth possible problem: Torture and murder of operatives by T's organization is well-known by V's organization and every operative in V's organization has been trained to commit suicide to avoid capture.
But hey, "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" is a lot more fun, right?
OS-X, in particular the early dock, is just a POS. Completely about the shiny tech demo, not about usability. Frankly if you want to see a dock like interface done right, look at Windows 7. The OS-X dock was made to look cool, not to be clear and easy to use. It was far inferior to the interfaces it replaced in Classic. However people liked it, because it looked cool in the store and on video. They were attracted to the shiny, they didn't consider usability.
I guess I and lots of people I know (yay, anecdote!) are exceptions to this then. The OS X dock was dead simple to grasp, just looking at it made sense quickly ("Apps without a marker under aren't running, those with a marker under are running, apps not already in the dock get added to the far-right of the dock while running", that's about it) but the win7 taskbar/dock just seems like an over-engineered mess to me (this has also been the most common complaint about win7 from friends of mine who have upgraded to win7 with several of them asking me if I knew the easiest way to make it "behave like windows 2000" and another question being "how do I know if a program is running or not?").
It sounds to me like you cherry-picked the puck mouse example (also, this is a product from 1998 you're talking about).
As for OS X, all my experience with it, previous versions of Mac OS, practically every desktop Windows version since 3.x and a boatload of X11 window managers (including but not limited to: PWM, FVWM1/2, Openstep, Enlightenment, Metacity, IceWM, 4DWM, Blackbox, Fluxbox...) tells me that it's better than most if not all of the competitors in many ways (although if you have a very specialized workflow then you may benefit from another UI but as a general desktop OS it's definitely one of the better and sure beats previous incarnations of Mac OS).
Can't speak for the Time Capsule as I have never even seen one of those IRL but it does sound like you're confusing "shiny" with "easy to handle", the average user (the kind of person who would buy a turnkey backup unit like the Time Capsule) doesn't want extra cables and power bricks, they want something dead simple.
Finally, the iPhone 4. Yeah, this does seem like a bit of an issue but for all we know they did usability research and found that only 0.003% of all users they tested it on actually held the phone in a way that shorted out the antenna. Still, does seem like a bad bug to let out in the open (but I'm not yet convinced they won't be able to fix it in software, there were a few other glitches with the iPhone 3G that had the anti-Apple crowd screaming "DEFECTIVE HARDWARE UNPOSSIBLE TO FIX IRREPARABLY BORKEN BUY A BLACKBERRY AND ZUNE INSTAED!!1" yet they were fixed in the 3.0.1 release of the OS).
Wow, those are some serious assumptions there...
I'm not so sure of the 6 bits for every character on the keyboard part.
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzåäöABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÅÄÖ1234567890!"#€%&/()=?+,.-;:_^'*~©@£$|[]±÷ç‘’æøßé®ü
There, those are the characters I can easily type on my keyboard, unless I counted wrong that's 205 characters which requires 8 bits per character.
But perhaps you meant only alphanumerics?
But most of the big-name "Sci-fi" these days is just "blockbuster action movie, IN SPACE! (Also, we threw in some comic relief for the kids and some romance for the ladies, enjoy!)", there is little sci-fi to sci-fi in hollywood these days.
Or how about "Knowing", a friend of mine called it the best new sci-fi movie in ages, I watched it and concluded they went with the much-overused "Alien horror" genre which then turned into some sort of "Jesus as an alien (who just seemed bad because we're idiots who wanted to make a cool trailer) saves the innocent and righteous and brings them all to a new garden of eden while everyone else dies horribly".
I'd love to watch them legally but to my knowledge no swedish network has even mentioned airing the new Futurama eps (which most likely means they don't care or they're waiting to see how well it is received in the US + how much demand there is for it in Sweden before deciding whether or not to license it, I'm sure those three swedes who don't pirate TV shows to avoid all this bullshit will be happy to watch it in 2014 though).
The worst part about VLB was that the cards had a nasty tendency to get dislodged just a little forcing you to open up the case and reseat the card. Not that opening up the case was all that unusual back in those days, messing around with the hardware inside your computer was a lot more common back then, even for regular users...