I am not trying to single out this post, but half the thread seems to be assuming Fermi's paradox is about alien civilisations communicating with us over radio. This is 100% wrong. We are all actually talking about a paradox that was never postulated.
First, it has to be pointed out that the radio-wave idea has been discounted many times for a much more obvious reason. The period of time that any civilisation engages in communication by radio waves is likely to be a tiny fraction of a percentage of the total life of said civilisation. The idea of finding our alien friends through listening to radio waves was ridiculous when Carl Sagan was promoting it and remains so today.
Secondly, The Fermi Paradox is about alien civilisations *colonising* the Galaxy or "arriving here." It was originally phrased as the question "where are they?" (i.e. - they should be here by now given a finite universe and a certain amount of time.) As flawed as *that* idea also is, it's a completely different flawed idea than what most folks her are arguing about, which is the incredibly super-duper flawed idea of radio communication between advanced civilisations.
The thing I find interesting about the whole debate, is that for as long as I can remember scientists have been vilifying Velikovsky for his theories about exactly this kind of thing, and now all of a sudden (like over the last five years or so), this kind of "Planets in Collision" theory has become the standard view.
Sure Velikovsky was a bit of a crackpot and the specifics of his theories are pretty much made-up, but he was the first person to take a look at the same evidence quoted in this article and evolve some reasonable suppositions from it. At the time, his idea that planets could actually move around and change orbits, colide with others etc. and *especially* the idea that stars outside of the solar system or other objects could significantly affect our own planets, was roundly ridiculed.
He noted the same time period, the same planetary anomalies and supposed almost the exact same cause, yet for decades and decades he was made out to be absolutely crazy for saying these things. Now we talk about the "late-early bombardment" as if it has always been the standard line, when you would be chucked out of your academic job for believing in this stuff only a short time ago.
To the three comments about this fellow "lying" about the processor (because it came out in 2002)... please try thinking before you write.
1) "Lying" requires intent, which you have no way of discerning, he might have just mis-spoke.
2) If the processor came out even longer ago then that would make his point even *more* salient wouldn't it?
As a further point about this whole issue, I have installed Leopard on a six year old G4 with stock parts and it not only runs well, all the test indicate that it runs applications at approximately the same speed, and it (subjectively) feels faster than Tiger did on the very same hardware.
One thing I don't understand based on the description of the *use* of the Surface table at AT&T is exactly how it will help them show off cell phones.
The original demo showed it recognising (some) cell phones placed on the table and so forth, but those were real live cell phones out of someone's pocket. Every cell phone I have seen at a store, AT&T or otherwise, is either behind glass or a tethered "dead" model. It simply won't be as easy as the customer helping themselves to cell phones and placing them on the surface of the big ass table to get information on them displayed. Given the limitations of the retail environment, one could argue that the customers would be better served by a simple printed sheet of paper, or a giant printed poster, or the same poster projected on a wall, etc. etc.
If this mis-match of function is the only application they have come up with so far, then the whole project seems doomed. A far better first adopter to have would be a casino or a bar. Remember in the 80's when bars had video games embedded under plexi-glass in the table? The "surface" is hardly a step better than that, and that kind of usage makes more sense than cell-phone sales IMO.
I can see your point, but I disagree right back at you.
Many software platforms over the years, (including a lot of linux ones), have a Software Update type of tool as a part of the operating system that keeps the software up to date. It also works as an installer of new software and an uninstaller of older software. I still think it's appropriate to "suggest" new software if it's available, but the user must remain in control and be offered a clear choice.
That last part is where I think Apple has really dropped the ball in that the tool itself could be a lot clearer in it's intent. I would like to see them re-work the whole updater so that it clearly states what it's going to do and what it's purpose is as most Windows users seem to not see it in the same way. It's more an issue of clarity and informing the user than an outright nefarious act IMO.
You're obviously just trolling (and using a great deal of inexact, exaggerated language), but it has to be pointed out that almost none of the points you mention are actually true.
Only if you are the kind of fool that just clicks on every dialogue box that comes up, doesn't read anything, and goes with the default suggestion on every install would you even get close to the kind of behavior you describe.
IMO people are drawing the "line of inappropriateness" in the wrong place here and exaggerating rather strongly as well.
It's entirely appropriate for a software updater to offer you new products because Software Update is a program intended to keep the software on your computer "up to date." It is quite proper that in addition to maintaining the software you already have installed, it might also notify you of new software that's available. Since it's whole purpose is to keep your computers software fresh and working properly, having Software Update suggest that you might want to swap out your clunky old browser for one that will take less space on your hard drive and make your computer work faster (which this one will), is indeed a valid suggestion.
The *only* issue here (and where the "inappropriate" part begins), is the installation of Safari being checked by default.
If a software updater is presenting you with a new program that you don't already have installed, then the checkbox should be of course be off because the user has not agreed to install the program (yet). If they unchecked that box Apple would be golden from the moral side of things and there would be no problem at all.
Overall, this is an intensely minor deal that doesn't deserve all the copy it's getting, but Apple is perhaps foolish for checking off that box and causing all the bad press.
"... Apple's continual foot-dragging over opening it up is getting increasingly old."
What's getting really old is this kind of hyperbolic comment. I am so tired of hearing about how Apple "wants to keep the iPhone closed" (when they have never actually said anything of the sort), and that it's "taking them forever" (or words to that effect), to open it up.
Fact 1 - they never explicitly ever said it would be closed Fact 2 - they opened it up to web apps quite quickly Fact 3 - it's LESS THAN A YEAR since the device has been in existence.
Any statement of the form described above is pure hyperbole plain and simple. Can't we just stick to the facts and leave the emotions at home?
I disagree. I understand the argument you are trying to make, but your "1 in a million" suggestions are really more akin to wild stabs at the biggest number you can think of, than they are reasonable guesses. 1:1000000 is really an unusually small ratio, and not as common as you intimate. It certainly has no actual relation to the situations that present themselves in the formula.
You can't simply spout a bunch of hyperbole and expect to be taken seriously. Especially in reply to an article that attempts to actually determine those numbers and percentages based on facts. This kind of talk is really no different from the comedy statement that "90% of people know that you can prove anything with statistics." It's meaningless.
While we will likely have to wait a whole lot longer for meaningful answers to the Drake equation, attempts at putting fact-based numbers on the variables should be applauded, and discounting them with what amounts to emotional hyperbole should be discouraged IMO.
I thought this sounded more like wishful thinking than research... then I had that thought confirmed by going to the site.
The very to of the page tells us:
- It's an article by "Psychology Today" of all things, (and we all know what great serious scientific credentials they have.) - The author is not a psychologist and not a doctor of any kind.
Reading the actual article we find the research is highly questionable as to what they are measuring and to how the experience might translate from a rat to a human subject.
Doing a little reading up on the background we find that:
- the theory has been put forward before (not new) - the consensus *already* exists that this is *one* of the functions of dreams (not exclusive explanation) - the theory cannot explain the structure of all dreams (not conclusive) - other theories abound, each with about as much experimental support as this one (not unique)
The only rational conclusion is that it's an interesting idea that has been thought of before but never proven. This latest experiment changes pretty much nothing about that, and not only doesn't rule out other theories, it fits rather well with the suggestion that dreams have many multiple uses/causes.
In short, there is absolutely nothing new at all here.
Way to waste half my lunch hour slash-dot! (shakes fist angrily in air)
It seems like Christmas is the perfect time to crash slashdot. Clearly there is no one "at the helm" today at all. I know it's Christmas Eve people, but how long would it take to put the retraction on the article header?
You can also tell how most of the "real" slashdotters are absent today in that only two posts lower (at this writing), there is some insane person ranting on and on about how Apple is the worst computer company in existence and he is modded up with a plus five? Yikes!
How about just shutting down slashdot over the holidays if there is no one home? Why pretend?
Should I start a thread about how baby-killing is a pleasant past-time to see if that stays up as well?
Your point about waiting a bit before getting into cheap-shot territory is well taken, but there is nothing about this announcement IMO that's worth getting excited about.
I don't see how anyone could have fixed all that bloated crap code so fast for starters.
At this point, with no real information forthcoming from MS and all the secrecy blinders closed down tight at MSIE headquarters, the safest assumption to make here is that MS is just using web-kit (or their own ripped-off proprietary version of web-kit) as an *alternative* rendering engine and swapping the rendering engines back and forth depending on the doc type in the header.
If it turns out that this is indeed the case, (or something like it), then this is nothing to praise MS for and in essence just another MS kludge as a sop to those who support standards.
I think you're missing the point a bit here. This is a high school class.
Pretty much every new feature you just touted is completely irrelevant in the context of what a high school student needs or is going to find useful.
I think the point being made is that except for a few high-end features and tweaks like you mention and the horrible, horrible, "integration" of the CS suite, Photoshop is virtually identical today to the product it was then.
IMO experience for users who are not professional photographers and not stuck in a production house CS suite integration and things like the "Bridge" are worse than useless. They actually cause severe problems in using the software and slow down your computer to a crawl.
Adobe CS 2 installed about 250 Megs of "support" files in my Library folder comprising about a quarter million separate files. At home I have CS 3 and it installed something like 1.8 Gigabytes of "support files." Almost all of these files are there for things like Bridge and VersionCue and Adobe's online picture marketing service that the average PhotoShop user (even the average *professional* user) has no use for at all.
I'm a professional user and I don't need help taking pictures or finding clipart for my projects. I also don't need help managing my file versions to the point that I need memory eating "helper" apps running in the background all the time or trying to connect me to the Adobe "marketplace."
CS suite is the kind of crass, overpriced bloatware of the kind that only a monopolist could get away with.
On the same topic... all these trips to the moon by other nations could settle the "UFO watched Apollo 11 Astronauts" theory once and for all.
There is a particularly nutty conspiracy theory that says there was a landed UFO parked off to one side of the Apollo 11 landing site, and that the astronauts were being "watched" the whole time.
Given that Luna has no air to speak of, the big round dent it presumably would have left in the moondust should still be visible if Japan/China/India wants to fly over that way and take some hi-res snaps.:-D
This all happened in the crap, commercialised, "only three or four paragraphs actually written by Asimov" part of the Foundation series though. The actual, original foundation series included nothing quite so ridiculous or illogical as this (well, except for the bit about "the Empire" itself).:-)
Here is your mistake right here:
Better featured phone (the N95) If you need to use 3G there is a reason to purchase the N95. Otherwise, if you look closely at the specs and actually compare the units in your hand, you will find the iPhone to be a much "better featured phone" than the N95.
The N95 is clunky and poorly assembled, it has less battery life, less storage, and the apps it has are hardly useable and poorly integrated. To really decide, try browsing the web on each phone. I will bet it will not be the N95 you choose.
But we all know that nothing from Amiga ever materializes. But... but... he say's that there's five guys that are working on it, and have been for two years!
Surely that beats out all those other people working on those other OS's.:-)
This is total BS, you are conflating things that should never be on the same page and discriminating between apples and oranges with the "security use" argument.
It's not my "opinion" that a picture of someone in a public place is not "personal information" in the sense the commissioner thinks it is. A hundred years or more of established law and custom in dozens of different countries tells me that a simple photograph taken in public is not the "personal information" of the subject. Anyone versed in these issues can tell you that the commissioner's interpretation is both "brand new" and not widely accepted (at best); and to even say that is a very generous assessment indeed.
Secondly, differentiating between "commercial use" and "security use" is old-fashioned apples and oranges comparison. It's like differentiating between black and red in a black and white movie, (one of the terms being irrelevant.) The act prohibits the collection of personal data without the consent of the individual, it goes further to define even more restrictions for "commercial" use. No where are there exclusions for this "security use" that I am aware of, making all of the things I mentioned entirely illegal based on this interpretation, despite being done by the police.
Even if by some fault of my own, I have missed an exclusionary clause for the police, or even if they hurriedly add one after the fact to save face, by your argument all store security cameras are illegal anyway. This is black and white "commercial use" or someone's personal information without their consent. Merely putting up a sign in a store saying they might be surveilled would not be sufficient "permission" to cover the use of the camera.
I have been reading this dirtbags comments about the "three things" they want Apple to work on all day in various forms and I have yet to hear any specifics. This one has gone around the web and spurred a ton of discussion, but the discussion is all about how we "feel" about our PC's or the Games we may run on them.
How about a few details? How about coming out and saying what it is that the Macs are missing?
- Is it "Direct X"? (cause that isn't going to happen) - Is it better graphics cards? (they are the same ones in a comparably priced Windows box)
I don't get why we are all bothering to take the criticism seriously, when it's so vague a complaint to begin with
Canada does indeed have pretty good privacy laws (when they are followed) but this isn't one of them.
Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart is just plain wrong on this. Laughably wrong. Obviously wrong. 100%, "no-doubt-about-it" wrong.
As a Canadian, I am *embarrassed* that a company like Google is going to be forced to blur over everyones face or possibly even not extend coverage to Canada because of the wrong opinion of one middle-aged woman.
The operative part is this:
"Canada's privacy law prohibits the commercial use of personal data without permission from the individual... even if an individual gives consent, businesses must limit the collection, use and disclosure of personal data for uses that a reasonable person would consider appropriate under the circumstances..."
All perfectly reasonable right? Of course, but only when it comes to "personal information." The act envisions protecting things such as your bank accounts, your school and work records, and all those other things that any normal person refers to as "personal information." That's the intention of the law as written.
and here is Jennifer's mistake:
Stoddart says her office "... considers images of individuals that are sufficiently clear to allow an individual to be identified to be personal information within the meaning of [the act]."
This is exactly the same, as the whining we heard from nervous "sensitive" people in the US when street view was introduced there. Many intelligent people pointed out that there was no reason to obscure faces, license plates etc., because they weren't "your" information or "personal information." They were merely the result of what any public person standing on that spot could see at any given time and in fact, just the same as any holiday snap taken by any citizen.
Jennifer Stoddart is one of those "nervous" types of people with a strange idea of what "personal information" is. The intent of the privacy law in Canada was never that a shot of someone standing on a street corner is their "personal information" that's just Jennifer's interpretation, and that is the flaw in the argument. She is just wrong on her opinion that this is personal information.
For instance, if such images *were* personal information, then all street surveillance cameras would be illegal or unconstitutional by the same act (they are not in fact they are all over up here). One could argue that cameras in banks are illegal by the same measure. Certainly the cameras mounted in police cars, and the (very common up here) use of hand held cameras by police to monitor crowds also illegal.
There is nothing wrong with our privacy laws, it's just one person's mistaken interpretation of what constitutes "personal information" that is at fault here. Unfortunately, a lot of people will have to go through a lot of grief because of one STUPID person's "interpretation" of the law.
Why doesn't Coca-Cola release their secret recipe? Is it because it's bad? Coca-Cola's "secret recipe" is basically just to add massive amounts of sugar. McDonalds "secret sauce" amount to mixing ketchup with mayonaise.
So, Yes. Part of the reason for these kinds of secrets is that they are "bad" in a sense. At the very least, it would be embarrassing to the companies in question to have stuff like this spelled out.:-)
Almost everything you say here is completely unfounded BS and I can't believe you are moderated "insightful." Your analogy with the car is way off base and the rest rather rambling, but just to take apart your main point...
With the very first sentence you attribute a sort of "nefarious intent" on Apple's part with nothing to back this up at all. You're basically saying that Apple has intentionally bricked these iPhones, presumably out of sheer spite, based on... what exactly? There is absolutely no evidence that Apple is "checking for tampered phones" and then bricking them on purpose. The update merely runs assuming the parts of the phone inaccessible to the user are in the state that the last update left it. This is a perfectly valid way for an installer to act.
While you attribute the intention to do harm here to Apple, in fact it is the user that is intentionally damaging the machine. It is the user that changed parts of the phone specifically not intended to be changed and the user that clicks on the upgrade button after being warned in advance (at least twice that I know of), not to do this if you have hacked the phone.
Both the "check" (to see if the iPhone has been hacked), and the decision to go ahead and possibly brick the iPhone anyway are made by the you, not Apple.
Honestly, I don't know why there's so much fuss about this. Hacking the firmware is very much an "at your own risk" procedure, and anyone who pretends not to know that is being deliberately stupid. It's all part of the rabid popularity of the iPhone and the commercialisation of the unlocking procedure. It's a very unusual and new situation. Unlike true "old-school" hackers, these guys are selling the hacks, and selling them into a market that wants an iPhone so badly they just can't wait.
Traditionally, the hacker takes his chances and doesn't cry foul when the firmware is revised, or he/she slips with his soldering iron and ruins the product. If he/she passes on the hack to his friends or publishes it on a newsgroup, this same "traditional" hacker doesn't invest anything into it other than personal pride and a hope that it proves useful to someone else. Here, on the other hand we have "monetized hacks" and the hackers have a vested interest in making Apple look as bad as possible.
The main problem here however, is that we also have a frenzied army of consumers with absolutely no idea about hacking, computer firmware, or the history of hacking practices. We have "mom and pop" iPhone users that bought a bill of goods from some hacker on eBay and do not understand why Apple is "abandoning" them. On top of that, we have an associated group of juvenile idiots spreading rumors everyday on Digg about Apple's monopolistic and "evil" intentions (as if they actually know anything about this).
The net result is that these assholes (the iPhone "hackers"), are making a bundle, all the teenagers get to cry foul on Digg, and Apple has to clean up the mess and take the heat for being "evil."
Slashdot Mirror
I am not trying to single out this post, but half the thread seems to be assuming Fermi's paradox is about alien civilisations communicating with us over radio. This is 100% wrong. We are all actually talking about a paradox that was never postulated.
First, it has to be pointed out that the radio-wave idea has been discounted many times for a much more obvious reason. The period of time that any civilisation engages in communication by radio waves is likely to be a tiny fraction of a percentage of the total life of said civilisation. The idea of finding our alien friends through listening to radio waves was ridiculous when Carl Sagan was promoting it and remains so today.
Secondly, The Fermi Paradox is about alien civilisations *colonising* the Galaxy or "arriving here." It was originally phrased as the question "where are they?" (i.e. - they should be here by now given a finite universe and a certain amount of time.) As flawed as *that* idea also is, it's a completely different flawed idea than what most folks her are arguing about, which is the incredibly super-duper flawed idea of radio communication between advanced civilisations.
The thing I find interesting about the whole debate, is that for as long as I can remember scientists have been vilifying Velikovsky for his theories about exactly this kind of thing, and now all of a sudden (like over the last five years or so), this kind of "Planets in Collision" theory has become the standard view.
Sure Velikovsky was a bit of a crackpot and the specifics of his theories are pretty much made-up, but he was the first person to take a look at the same evidence quoted in this article and evolve some reasonable suppositions from it. At the time, his idea that planets could actually move around and change orbits, colide with others etc. and *especially* the idea that stars outside of the solar system or other objects could significantly affect our own planets, was roundly ridiculed.
He noted the same time period, the same planetary anomalies and supposed almost the exact same cause, yet for decades and decades he was made out to be absolutely crazy for saying these things. Now we talk about the "late-early bombardment" as if it has always been the standard line, when you would be chucked out of your academic job for believing in this stuff only a short time ago.
So, they found out that:
- search engines work well when searching for suicide methods.
- wikipedia is one of the best sources of information on the internet.
brilliant
1) "Lying" requires intent, which you have no way of discerning, he might have just mis-spoke.
2) If the processor came out even longer ago then that would make his point even *more* salient wouldn't it?
As a further point about this whole issue, I have installed Leopard on a six year old G4 with stock parts and it not only runs well, all the test indicate that it runs applications at approximately the same speed, and it (subjectively) feels faster than Tiger did on the very same hardware.
Windows XP can't do that, let alone Vista.
One thing I don't understand based on the description of the *use* of the Surface table at AT&T is exactly how it will help them show off cell phones.
The original demo showed it recognising (some) cell phones placed on the table and so forth, but those were real live cell phones out of someone's pocket. Every cell phone I have seen at a store, AT&T or otherwise, is either behind glass or a tethered "dead" model. It simply won't be as easy as the customer helping themselves to cell phones and placing them on the surface of the big ass table to get information on them displayed. Given the limitations of the retail environment, one could argue that the customers would be better served by a simple printed sheet of paper, or a giant printed poster, or the same poster projected on a wall, etc. etc.
If this mis-match of function is the only application they have come up with so far, then the whole project seems doomed. A far better first adopter to have would be a casino or a bar. Remember in the 80's when bars had video games embedded under plexi-glass in the table? The "surface" is hardly a step better than that, and that kind of usage makes more sense than cell-phone sales IMO.
I can see your point, but I disagree right back at you.
Many software platforms over the years, (including a lot of linux ones), have a Software Update type of tool as a part of the operating system that keeps the software up to date. It also works as an installer of new software and an uninstaller of older software. I still think it's appropriate to "suggest" new software if it's available, but the user must remain in control and be offered a clear choice.
That last part is where I think Apple has really dropped the ball in that the tool itself could be a lot clearer in it's intent. I would like to see them re-work the whole updater so that it clearly states what it's going to do and what it's purpose is as most Windows users seem to not see it in the same way. It's more an issue of clarity and informing the user than an outright nefarious act IMO.
You're obviously just trolling (and using a great deal of inexact, exaggerated language), but it has to be pointed out that almost none of the points you mention are actually true.
Only if you are the kind of fool that just clicks on every dialogue box that comes up, doesn't read anything, and goes with the default suggestion on every install would you even get close to the kind of behavior you describe.
IMO people are drawing the "line of inappropriateness" in the wrong place here and exaggerating rather strongly as well.
It's entirely appropriate for a software updater to offer you new products because Software Update is a program intended to keep the software on your computer "up to date." It is quite proper that in addition to maintaining the software you already have installed, it might also notify you of new software that's available. Since it's whole purpose is to keep your computers software fresh and working properly, having Software Update suggest that you might want to swap out your clunky old browser for one that will take less space on your hard drive and make your computer work faster (which this one will), is indeed a valid suggestion.
The *only* issue here (and where the "inappropriate" part begins), is the installation of Safari being checked by default.
If a software updater is presenting you with a new program that you don't already have installed, then the checkbox should be of course be off because the user has not agreed to install the program (yet). If they unchecked that box Apple would be golden from the moral side of things and there would be no problem at all.
Overall, this is an intensely minor deal that doesn't deserve all the copy it's getting, but Apple is perhaps foolish for checking off that box and causing all the bad press.
"... Apple's continual foot-dragging over opening it up is getting increasingly old."
What's getting really old is this kind of hyperbolic comment. I am so tired of hearing about how Apple "wants to keep the iPhone closed" (when they have never actually said anything of the sort), and that it's "taking them forever" (or words to that effect), to open it up.
Fact 1 - they never explicitly ever said it would be closed
Fact 2 - they opened it up to web apps quite quickly
Fact 3 - it's LESS THAN A YEAR since the device has been in existence.
Any statement of the form described above is pure hyperbole plain and simple.
Can't we just stick to the facts and leave the emotions at home?
I disagree. I understand the argument you are trying to make, but your "1 in a million" suggestions are really more akin to wild stabs at the biggest number you can think of, than they are reasonable guesses. 1:1000000 is really an unusually small ratio, and not as common as you intimate. It certainly has no actual relation to the situations that present themselves in the formula.
You can't simply spout a bunch of hyperbole and expect to be taken seriously. Especially in reply to an article that attempts to actually determine those numbers and percentages based on facts. This kind of talk is really no different from the comedy statement that "90% of people know that you can prove anything with statistics." It's meaningless.
While we will likely have to wait a whole lot longer for meaningful answers to the Drake equation, attempts at putting fact-based numbers on the variables should be applauded, and discounting them with what amounts to emotional hyperbole should be discouraged IMO.
I thought this sounded more like wishful thinking than research ... then I had that thought confirmed by going to the site.
The very to of the page tells us:
- It's an article by "Psychology Today" of all things, (and we all know what great serious scientific credentials they have.)
- The author is not a psychologist and not a doctor of any kind.
Reading the actual article we find the research is highly questionable as to what they are measuring and to how the experience might translate from a rat to a human subject.
Doing a little reading up on the background we find that:
- the theory has been put forward before (not new)
- the consensus *already* exists that this is *one* of the functions of dreams (not exclusive explanation)
- the theory cannot explain the structure of all dreams (not conclusive)
- other theories abound, each with about as much experimental support as this one (not unique)
The only rational conclusion is that it's an interesting idea that has been thought of before but never proven. This latest experiment changes pretty much nothing about that, and not only doesn't rule out other theories, it fits rather well with the suggestion that dreams have many multiple uses/causes.
In short, there is absolutely nothing new at all here.
Way to waste half my lunch hour slash-dot! (shakes fist angrily in air)
Agreed.
It seems like Christmas is the perfect time to crash slashdot. Clearly there is no one "at the helm" today at all.
I know it's Christmas Eve people, but how long would it take to put the retraction on the article header?
You can also tell how most of the "real" slashdotters are absent today in that only two posts lower (at this writing), there is some insane person ranting on and on about how Apple is the worst computer company in existence and he is modded up with a plus five?
Yikes!
How about just shutting down slashdot over the holidays if there is no one home?
Why pretend?
Should I start a thread about how baby-killing is a pleasant past-time to see if that stays up as well?
Your point about waiting a bit before getting into cheap-shot territory is well taken, but there is nothing about this announcement IMO that's worth getting excited about.
I don't see how anyone could have fixed all that bloated crap code so fast for starters.
At this point, with no real information forthcoming from MS and all the secrecy blinders closed down tight at MSIE headquarters, the safest assumption to make here is that MS is just using web-kit (or their own ripped-off proprietary version of web-kit) as an *alternative* rendering engine and swapping the rendering engines back and forth depending on the doc type in the header.
If it turns out that this is indeed the case, (or something like it), then this is nothing to praise MS for and in essence just another MS kludge as a sop to those who support standards.
I think you're missing the point a bit here.
This is a high school class.
Pretty much every new feature you just touted is completely irrelevant in the context of what a high school student needs or is going to find useful.
I think the point being made is that except for a few high-end features and tweaks like you mention and the horrible, horrible, "integration" of the CS suite, Photoshop is virtually identical today to the product it was then.
IMO experience for users who are not professional photographers and not stuck in a production house CS suite integration and things like the "Bridge" are worse than useless. They actually cause severe problems in using the software and slow down your computer to a crawl.
Adobe CS 2 installed about 250 Megs of "support" files in my Library folder comprising about a quarter million separate files. At home I have CS 3 and it installed something like 1.8 Gigabytes of "support files." Almost all of these files are there for things like Bridge and VersionCue and Adobe's online picture marketing service that the average PhotoShop user (even the average *professional* user) has no use for at all.
I'm a professional user and I don't need help taking pictures or finding clipart for my projects. I also don't need help managing my file versions to the point that I need memory eating "helper" apps running in the background all the time or trying to connect me to the Adobe "marketplace."
CS suite is the kind of crass, overpriced bloatware of the kind that only a monopolist could get away with.
On the same topic ... all these trips to the moon by other nations could settle the "UFO watched Apollo 11 Astronauts" theory once and for all.
:-D
There is a particularly nutty conspiracy theory that says there was a landed UFO parked off to one side of the Apollo 11 landing site, and that the astronauts were being "watched" the whole time.
Given that Luna has no air to speak of, the big round dent it presumably would have left in the moondust should still be visible if Japan/China/India wants to fly over that way and take some hi-res snaps.
This all happened in the crap, commercialised, "only three or four paragraphs actually written by Asimov" part of the Foundation series though. The actual, original foundation series included nothing quite so ridiculous or illogical as this (well, except for the bit about "the Empire" itself). :-)
I vote for the shallow sea in between India and Asia (now the Himalayas). It might also explain why India was traveling so fast when it hit Asia.
Otherwise, if you look closely at the specs and actually compare the units in your hand, you will find the iPhone to be a much "better featured phone" than the N95.
The N95 is clunky and poorly assembled, it has less battery life, less storage, and the apps it has are hardly useable and poorly integrated.
To really decide, try browsing the web on each phone. I will bet it will not be the N95 you choose.
he say's that there's five guys that are working on it, and have been for two years!
Surely that beats out all those other people working on those other OS's.
This is total BS, you are conflating things that should never be on the same page and discriminating between apples and oranges with the "security use" argument.
It's not my "opinion" that a picture of someone in a public place is not "personal information" in the sense the commissioner thinks it is. A hundred years or more of established law and custom in dozens of different countries tells me that a simple photograph taken in public is not the "personal information" of the subject. Anyone versed in these issues can tell you that the commissioner's interpretation is both "brand new" and not widely accepted (at best); and to even say that is a very generous assessment indeed.
Secondly, differentiating between "commercial use" and "security use" is old-fashioned apples and oranges comparison. It's like differentiating between black and red in a black and white movie, (one of the terms being irrelevant.) The act prohibits the collection of personal data without the consent of the individual, it goes further to define even more restrictions for "commercial" use. No where are there exclusions for this "security use" that I am aware of, making all of the things I mentioned entirely illegal based on this interpretation, despite being done by the police.
Even if by some fault of my own, I have missed an exclusionary clause for the police, or even if they hurriedly add one after the fact to save face, by your argument all store security cameras are illegal anyway. This is black and white "commercial use" or someone's personal information without their consent. Merely putting up a sign in a store saying they might be surveilled would not be sufficient "permission" to cover the use of the camera.
I have been reading this dirtbags comments about the "three things" they want Apple to work on all day in various forms and I have yet to hear any specifics. This one has gone around the web and spurred a ton of discussion, but the discussion is all about how we "feel" about our PC's or the Games we may run on them.
How about a few details? How about coming out and saying what it is that the Macs are missing?
- Is it "Direct X"? (cause that isn't going to happen)
- Is it better graphics cards? (they are the same ones in a comparably priced Windows box)
I don't get why we are all bothering to take the criticism seriously, when it's so vague a complaint to begin with
Canada does indeed have pretty good privacy laws (when they are followed) but this isn't one of them.
... even if an individual gives consent, businesses must limit the collection, use and disclosure of personal data for uses that a reasonable person would consider appropriate under the circumstances ..."
Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart is just plain wrong on this. Laughably wrong. Obviously wrong. 100%, "no-doubt-about-it" wrong.
As a Canadian, I am *embarrassed* that a company like Google is going to be forced to blur over everyones face or possibly even not extend coverage to Canada because of the wrong opinion of one middle-aged woman.
The operative part is this:
"Canada's privacy law prohibits the commercial use of personal data without permission from the individual
All perfectly reasonable right? Of course, but only when it comes to "personal information." The act envisions protecting things such as your bank accounts, your school and work records, and all those other things that any normal person refers to as "personal information." That's the intention of the law as written.
and here is Jennifer's mistake:
Stoddart says her office "... considers images of individuals that are sufficiently clear to allow an individual to be identified to be personal information within the meaning of [the act]."
This is exactly the same, as the whining we heard from nervous "sensitive" people in the US when street view was introduced there. Many intelligent people pointed out that there was no reason to obscure faces, license plates etc., because they weren't "your" information or "personal information." They were merely the result of what any public person standing on that spot could see at any given time and in fact, just the same as any holiday snap taken by any citizen.
Jennifer Stoddart is one of those "nervous" types of people with a strange idea of what "personal information" is. The intent of the privacy law in Canada was never that a shot of someone standing on a street corner is their "personal information" that's just Jennifer's interpretation, and that is the flaw in the argument. She is just wrong on her opinion that this is personal information.
For instance, if such images *were* personal information, then all street surveillance cameras would be illegal or unconstitutional by the same act (they are not in fact they are all over up here). One could argue that cameras in banks are illegal by the same measure. Certainly the cameras mounted in police cars, and the (very common up here) use of hand held cameras by police to monitor crowds also illegal.
There is nothing wrong with our privacy laws, it's just one person's mistaken interpretation of what constitutes "personal information" that is at fault here. Unfortunately, a lot of people will have to go through a lot of grief because of one STUPID person's "interpretation" of the law.
McDonalds "secret sauce" amount to mixing ketchup with mayonaise.
So, Yes. Part of the reason for these kinds of secrets is that they are "bad" in a sense.
At the very least, it would be embarrassing to the companies in question to have stuff like this spelled out.
Almost everything you say here is completely unfounded BS and I can't believe you are moderated "insightful." Your analogy with the car is way off base and the rest rather rambling, but just to take apart your main point...
... what exactly? There is absolutely no evidence that Apple is "checking for tampered phones" and then bricking them on purpose. The update merely runs assuming the parts of the phone inaccessible to the user are in the state that the last update left it. This is a perfectly valid way for an installer to act.
With the very first sentence you attribute a sort of "nefarious intent" on Apple's part with nothing to back this up at all. You're basically saying that Apple has intentionally bricked these iPhones, presumably out of sheer spite, based on
While you attribute the intention to do harm here to Apple, in fact it is the user that is intentionally damaging the machine. It is the user that changed parts of the phone specifically not intended to be changed and the user that clicks on the upgrade button after being warned in advance (at least twice that I know of), not to do this if you have hacked the phone.
Both the "check" (to see if the iPhone has been hacked), and the decision to go ahead and possibly brick the iPhone anyway are made by the you, not Apple.
Traditionally, the hacker takes his chances and doesn't cry foul when the firmware is revised, or he/she slips with his soldering iron and ruins the product. If he/she passes on the hack to his friends or publishes it on a newsgroup, this same "traditional" hacker doesn't invest anything into it other than personal pride and a hope that it proves useful to someone else. Here, on the other hand we have "monetized hacks" and the hackers have a vested interest in making Apple look as bad as possible.
The main problem here however, is that we also have a frenzied army of consumers with absolutely no idea about hacking, computer firmware, or the history of hacking practices. We have "mom and pop" iPhone users that bought a bill of goods from some hacker on eBay and do not understand why Apple is "abandoning" them. On top of that, we have an associated group of juvenile idiots spreading rumors everyday on Digg about Apple's monopolistic and "evil" intentions (as if they actually know anything about this).
The net result is that these assholes (the iPhone "hackers"), are making a bundle, all the teenagers get to cry foul on Digg, and Apple has to clean up the mess and take the heat for being "evil."