If that's all you want a phone for, then the iPhone is seriously overkill for you. There are a lot of attractive, simple phones that make much better ACTUAL PHONES than the iPhone (actual phone quality and reliability being, in my experience with mine, probably the thing the iPhone is worst at).
The thing is, the iPhone is trying to be that kind of fancy do-it-all phone with everything but the kitchen sink. And compared to markets in other countries, it just comes up short. To put it another way, if all you want is a phone, you don't have to spend several hundred dollars on an iPhone to get an attractive one that works well. If you want something with all the bells and whistles that justifies that kind of price, the iPhone is not and never was state of the art.
iPhone was the first to offer a touch screen based UI (etc...)
More accurate to say it was the first phone to receive any major marketing in the United States that does all that. It is most assuredly not the first cell phone to do all that, which I think is kinda the point of this article.
A fundamentalist theocracy that has as much popular support as most secular governments. An important distinction, I think. (And to be fully technically correct, they're an elected fundamentalist theocracy)
which is building nuclear bombs
You mean, just like every country crying foul about them building nuclear bombs is also building nuclear bombs?
and enforces an ultrastrict fundamentalist religious pov
Because, and correct me if I'm wrong, the citizens of Iran generally support fundamentalist religion.
especially on its women
That there is no excuse for. Certain basic rights should never be subsumed even if the country at large subscribes to a worldview that demands it. I'll agree there.
grow a brain. blind america bashing is tired and dull
Matthew 7:2-5
I agree with you to a point. But we've got some serious beams in our own eyes to deal with, and that's more important. They're not perfect, and neither are we, but we have no right to complain about the things WE are also guilty of.
It may be interesting, but just moving the map around a little bit, there are grid-like anomalies like this all over the place. (Can I even call them anomalies when there's so many?) Also, try zooming out and looking at the size of the thing; it's a third the size of Portugal. What sort of man-made grid like that from the ancient world could possibly be so large?
Whatever this is, I think it's probably safe to say it's not atlantis.
I have to admit, my one complaint with it was the construction, contrary to your experience. For example, on mine, after a bit of use the screen started looking slightly crooked with respect to the keyboard when it was extended; having the slider secured only on one corner in the way it is... it does feel a little flimsy. Also that little trackball just doesn't feel like it will stay in ideal working condition for very long.
They're not selling audio, they're selling text. There is no audio component AT ALL to the data they transmit to you after you buy an e-book. They're also selling a device capable of turning text into audio, but is absolutely NOT inherently the same thing as just selling the audio, and the Author's Guild is going to have an interesting time proving that it is.
That makes no sense, and has nothing to do with the matter at hand. This has nothing to do with "public performances," and is actually about "derivative works." Two TOTALLY different things. Did you even read the article? Because it's quite clear that the argument is about audio derivatives, not public performances, and your claim doesn't even really make much sense if you consider the legal definition of "public performance."
To clarify and educate; the Author's Guild is claiming that the Kindle's text-to-speech feature effectively is creating audio "derivative works," whenever it's employed, and copyright law reserves the right to audio derivatives for the author. This has nothing to do with public performances, and I don't know where you got that idea.
I love this argument. It's really the most wonderful nonsense dressed up in respectable clothes.
No skeleton of a half of this and a half of that.
Nor would there be. I hate to break it to you, but that's, uh, not really how this is all supposed to work. This is the wonderful gap argument, where every intermediate evolution stage that's discovered is another blow to the theory of evolution. Why? Because now that we've found an intermediate stage there are TWO new gaps! How cute...
There is no proof of one type of animal turning into another.
The only reason anybody can ever claim this is that they've defined "proof" and "kind" in such a way as to eliminate all the evidence by definition. A great deal of science consists of things which cannot be directly observed. Particle physics is an example, and long term evolution is another.
So let's define "new kind" in a reasonable way--speciation. Because, honestly, that's the only definition that makes any sense. And guess what? SPECIATION HAS ACTUALLY BEEN OBSERVED. Last time I checked, actually observing something happening counts as proof.
This seems to amount to nothing more than "they can take your shit and look at it, and your defense lawyer will probably suck." I think it's fair to say that people who make claims about open access points and whatnot aren't stupid enough not to realize that, and are really just taking that bit for granted (as really anybody with a brain should).
I'm really left wondering what his point is. Does he really think people are assuming their shit won't even be searched? Well, thanks for that tip for all of the idiots out there I guess...
I'm going to have to completely disagree with you. KDE 4 and 4.1 were definitely steps down from 3.5. 4.2, however, I've found to be just as responsive and much "cleaner" feeling than 3.5. I guess the way to put it best is that all the little pieces of the whole desktop finally feel well integrated, which was not the case in 3.5, at least in my opinion.
As for running 3D applications, I'm not really sure what you're referring to. Even a couple years ago I was able to run WoW under Wine while using Compiz (either fullscreen or windowed), and I certainly am not aware of any regression since then... (and I've found KWin's compositing to be MUCH faster and more stable than Compiz's--for example, I can finally smoothly resize windows that are set to update their contents while resizing)
I would really recommend giving a KDE 4.2 desktop a try. It's almost a completely new desktop compared to the sorry state of 4.1 and 4.0, and of course Opera is native to QT (or you could use the Konqueror Webkit part, which has great rendering; I really have no idea what bugs in Firefox bother you so much).
I will say, it's definitely not X that's slow, it's GNOME. Every 6 months or so I give Ubuntu another try and it's like browsing through molasses compared to my main KDE desktop.
Anyway, give KDE a try, I know I was very pleasantly surprised by the last release, and personally rate it above either GNOME or Win7. Just make sure you have the latest NVIDIA drivers.
But burn those goddamn pictures. All they will do is piss people off, no matter how hard you try to make things right.
I'm sorry, but to me that smacks of abject cowardice: "We're very sorry for all the bad things we've done, but no, we won't actually show you how horrible we really were, because we're afraid it'll make you (rightfully) even more outraged, which would ruin all the hard work our PR people have been putting in trying to sweep all this business under the rug."
No, if anything the right thing to do is to release every horrid detail, because that public outrage you're afraid of is really the only deterrent from this sort of thing happening again.
This just depends so much on what you're doing and how you're doing it that it's a pointless argument to even bother talking about either way. Yeah, sometimes mouse is faster. Yeah, especially for several repetitive tasks strung together, the mouse can be substantially slower if there's a keyboard combo available.
But this does highlight one of the big flaws in the "Apple way." They get it in their heads that their millions of dollars in studies are somehow Universally Right, and will apply those results even to those few applications which are different enough that those results just aren't appropriate. I'm not even going to go into what a clusterfuck iTunes' UI is...
It's a great usability theory I'm sure, but one of the main reasons I, for one, just don't use GNOME is that all its UI is filled with unreasonably massive buttons and controls. As far as I'm concerned it really just makes things ugly and hurts the functionality of the interface.
Or to put it another way, my desktop UI isn't a damned video game. If I'm doing something where the.3 seconds saved by hugely padded buttons matters, I'll use the keyboard. But then again, I guess that just makes me one of the sort that KDE was made for.
Keep in mind, porn is generally a subset of nude, and I haven't seen any reporting on what sort of nude exactly these pictures actually are. The fact that they were taken by teenage girls to show to their boyfriends, though, leads me to think it might not be as absurd as you think...
Or, to qualify that, it's certainly absurd because of the notion that you can be guilty of autopornographical crimes. The next logical extension--and this is absolutely the logical corollary of this current farce--would be to accuse teens who masturbate of child molestation. In fact, that would be a good reductio argument against the current charges if our legal system gave any thought to actual logic (it doesn't).
We are, presumably, talking about monetary value. Your time's monetary value is only equal to what somebody is willing to pay for it. If nobody is paying anything for your time (or the product of your investing that time), then it has no monetary value.
This is to say, going from not selling some of your time to selling it for less than you sell the rest of your time can hardly be called selling it "at a loss," when it's clearly going from no monetary value to some monetary value.
(P.S. Occam's razor is a rule that instructs not to add anything to an explanation unless it's necessary. This is not the same as the common inaccurate paraphrase "the simplest explanation is best.")
Your time is worth nothing, monetarily, unless there is somebody willing to buy it. If you start selling more of your time that had previously not been sold, then there is no conceivable way it could be selling at a loss, because its worth prior to being sold had been exactly zero. What you describe would be selling your time at a less-than-desirable profit, which is a very different thing (and the difference is very important).
Um, I hate to contradict you here, but you don't have to get more than 3 pages into the bible before you come to a pretty major contradiction. Go ahead and read Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 (the first two chapters of the bible; a short read)--the discrepancy is pretty easy to spot and generally well recognized.
(Cliffs Notes Version: The bible lists the order of creation of life twice in a row, in totally different orders.)
In short, it's perfectly fair to accuse the bible of contradiction. This is only the first example you'll run across. The thing is, there's nothing wrong with contradiction as long as you don't go around insisting that this book is the absolute infallible direct word of God and the Source of All Human Knowledge. Taoists, for example, don't seem to have any problem with their primary text being somewhat contradictory.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, I would certainly not call Visio a "drawing" application, unless you're willing to call PowerPoint, Word, etc. drawing applications too.
Visio is very specifically a diagramming program, and you'd want something like Umbrello to duplicate that functionality on Linux.
And pretty much every other cell phone in existence. By those qualifications a $50 phone from Radio Shack should be great.
Japan INVENTED the reality distortion field.
If that's all you want a phone for, then the iPhone is seriously overkill for you. There are a lot of attractive, simple phones that make much better ACTUAL PHONES than the iPhone (actual phone quality and reliability being, in my experience with mine, probably the thing the iPhone is worst at).
The thing is, the iPhone is trying to be that kind of fancy do-it-all phone with everything but the kitchen sink. And compared to markets in other countries, it just comes up short. To put it another way, if all you want is a phone, you don't have to spend several hundred dollars on an iPhone to get an attractive one that works well. If you want something with all the bells and whistles that justifies that kind of price, the iPhone is not and never was state of the art.
Relative to me of course.
A sort of "prime mover" of good taste if you will.
More accurate to say it was the first phone to receive any major marketing in the United States that does all that. It is most assuredly not the first cell phone to do all that, which I think is kinda the point of this article.
In my experience with mine, "phone" is one of the things it is definitively NOT good at.
A fundamentalist theocracy that has as much popular support as most secular governments. An important distinction, I think. (And to be fully technically correct, they're an elected fundamentalist theocracy)
You mean, just like every country crying foul about them building nuclear bombs is also building nuclear bombs?
Because, and correct me if I'm wrong, the citizens of Iran generally support fundamentalist religion.
That there is no excuse for. Certain basic rights should never be subsumed even if the country at large subscribes to a worldview that demands it. I'll agree there.
Matthew 7:2-5
I agree with you to a point. But we've got some serious beams in our own eyes to deal with, and that's more important. They're not perfect, and neither are we, but we have no right to complain about the things WE are also guilty of.
+1 Insightful
If anything ever deserved to be thrown into the pits of Mount Doom...
Here's Another One
It may be interesting, but just moving the map around a little bit, there are grid-like anomalies like this all over the place. (Can I even call them anomalies when there's so many?) Also, try zooming out and looking at the size of the thing; it's a third the size of Portugal. What sort of man-made grid like that from the ancient world could possibly be so large?
Whatever this is, I think it's probably safe to say it's not atlantis.
I have to admit, my one complaint with it was the construction, contrary to your experience. For example, on mine, after a bit of use the screen started looking slightly crooked with respect to the keyboard when it was extended; having the slider secured only on one corner in the way it is... it does feel a little flimsy. Also that little trackball just doesn't feel like it will stay in ideal working condition for very long.
They're not selling audio, they're selling text. There is no audio component AT ALL to the data they transmit to you after you buy an e-book. They're also selling a device capable of turning text into audio, but is absolutely NOT inherently the same thing as just selling the audio, and the Author's Guild is going to have an interesting time proving that it is.
That makes no sense, and has nothing to do with the matter at hand. This has nothing to do with "public performances," and is actually about "derivative works." Two TOTALLY different things. Did you even read the article? Because it's quite clear that the argument is about audio derivatives, not public performances, and your claim doesn't even really make much sense if you consider the legal definition of "public performance."
To clarify and educate; the Author's Guild is claiming that the Kindle's text-to-speech feature effectively is creating audio "derivative works," whenever it's employed, and copyright law reserves the right to audio derivatives for the author. This has nothing to do with public performances, and I don't know where you got that idea.
Nor would there be. I hate to break it to you, but that's, uh, not really how this is all supposed to work. This is the wonderful gap argument, where every intermediate evolution stage that's discovered is another blow to the theory of evolution. Why? Because now that we've found an intermediate stage there are TWO new gaps! How cute...
The only reason anybody can ever claim this is that they've defined "proof" and "kind" in such a way as to eliminate all the evidence by definition. A great deal of science consists of things which cannot be directly observed. Particle physics is an example, and long term evolution is another.
So let's define "new kind" in a reasonable way--speciation. Because, honestly, that's the only definition that makes any sense. And guess what? SPECIATION HAS ACTUALLY BEEN OBSERVED. Last time I checked, actually observing something happening counts as proof.
This seems to amount to nothing more than "they can take your shit and look at it, and your defense lawyer will probably suck." I think it's fair to say that people who make claims about open access points and whatnot aren't stupid enough not to realize that, and are really just taking that bit for granted (as really anybody with a brain should).
I'm really left wondering what his point is. Does he really think people are assuming their shit won't even be searched? Well, thanks for that tip for all of the idiots out there I guess...
I'm going to have to completely disagree with you. KDE 4 and 4.1 were definitely steps down from 3.5. 4.2, however, I've found to be just as responsive and much "cleaner" feeling than 3.5. I guess the way to put it best is that all the little pieces of the whole desktop finally feel well integrated, which was not the case in 3.5, at least in my opinion.
As for running 3D applications, I'm not really sure what you're referring to. Even a couple years ago I was able to run WoW under Wine while using Compiz (either fullscreen or windowed), and I certainly am not aware of any regression since then... (and I've found KWin's compositing to be MUCH faster and more stable than Compiz's--for example, I can finally smoothly resize windows that are set to update their contents while resizing)
I would really recommend giving a KDE 4.2 desktop a try. It's almost a completely new desktop compared to the sorry state of 4.1 and 4.0, and of course Opera is native to QT (or you could use the Konqueror Webkit part, which has great rendering; I really have no idea what bugs in Firefox bother you so much).
I will say, it's definitely not X that's slow, it's GNOME. Every 6 months or so I give Ubuntu another try and it's like browsing through molasses compared to my main KDE desktop.
Anyway, give KDE a try, I know I was very pleasantly surprised by the last release, and personally rate it above either GNOME or Win7. Just make sure you have the latest NVIDIA drivers.
Definitely not the impression I get even rereading it, but there you go. If that's the case I'll chalk it up to too-subtle sarcasm.
I'm sorry, but to me that smacks of abject cowardice: "We're very sorry for all the bad things we've done, but no, we won't actually show you how horrible we really were, because we're afraid it'll make you (rightfully) even more outraged, which would ruin all the hard work our PR people have been putting in trying to sweep all this business under the rug."
No, if anything the right thing to do is to release every horrid detail, because that public outrage you're afraid of is really the only deterrent from this sort of thing happening again.
This just depends so much on what you're doing and how you're doing it that it's a pointless argument to even bother talking about either way. Yeah, sometimes mouse is faster. Yeah, especially for several repetitive tasks strung together, the mouse can be substantially slower if there's a keyboard combo available.
But this does highlight one of the big flaws in the "Apple way." They get it in their heads that their millions of dollars in studies are somehow Universally Right, and will apply those results even to those few applications which are different enough that those results just aren't appropriate. I'm not even going to go into what a clusterfuck iTunes' UI is...
It's a great usability theory I'm sure, but one of the main reasons I, for one, just don't use GNOME is that all its UI is filled with unreasonably massive buttons and controls. As far as I'm concerned it really just makes things ugly and hurts the functionality of the interface.
Or to put it another way, my desktop UI isn't a damned video game. If I'm doing something where the .3 seconds saved by hugely padded buttons matters, I'll use the keyboard. But then again, I guess that just makes me one of the sort that KDE was made for.
Keep in mind, porn is generally a subset of nude, and I haven't seen any reporting on what sort of nude exactly these pictures actually are. The fact that they were taken by teenage girls to show to their boyfriends, though, leads me to think it might not be as absurd as you think...
Or, to qualify that, it's certainly absurd because of the notion that you can be guilty of autopornographical crimes. The next logical extension--and this is absolutely the logical corollary of this current farce--would be to accuse teens who masturbate of child molestation. In fact, that would be a good reductio argument against the current charges if our legal system gave any thought to actual logic (it doesn't).
We are, presumably, talking about monetary value. Your time's monetary value is only equal to what somebody is willing to pay for it. If nobody is paying anything for your time (or the product of your investing that time), then it has no monetary value.
This is to say, going from not selling some of your time to selling it for less than you sell the rest of your time can hardly be called selling it "at a loss," when it's clearly going from no monetary value to some monetary value.
(P.S. Occam's razor is a rule that instructs not to add anything to an explanation unless it's necessary. This is not the same as the common inaccurate paraphrase "the simplest explanation is best.")
Your time is worth nothing, monetarily, unless there is somebody willing to buy it. If you start selling more of your time that had previously not been sold, then there is no conceivable way it could be selling at a loss, because its worth prior to being sold had been exactly zero. What you describe would be selling your time at a less-than-desirable profit, which is a very different thing (and the difference is very important).
Um, I hate to contradict you here, but you don't have to get more than 3 pages into the bible before you come to a pretty major contradiction. Go ahead and read Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 (the first two chapters of the bible; a short read)--the discrepancy is pretty easy to spot and generally well recognized.
(Cliffs Notes Version: The bible lists the order of creation of life twice in a row, in totally different orders.)
In short, it's perfectly fair to accuse the bible of contradiction. This is only the first example you'll run across. The thing is, there's nothing wrong with contradiction as long as you don't go around insisting that this book is the absolute infallible direct word of God and the Source of All Human Knowledge. Taoists, for example, don't seem to have any problem with their primary text being somewhat contradictory.