Arbitrary coordinates. Right now Maps is useless for returning to locations that were arrived at by manually scrolling around. Not being able to create arbitrary placemarks is a real forehead-slapper of an omission, since not every location on Earth has a street address.
I wonder what Apple's opinions on the matter were during device design?
"Hmm. This phone is already getting a bit porky. If we use a large, replaceable battery with plastic cladding and external contacts, it will harm the overall design aesthetic. Many users will consider it too big and heavy for their pocket/purse. Let's go with the internal battery."
If you really think people at Apple sit around in meetings cackling over ways to screw the consumer, you need pharmaceutical help.
That's not just my opinion, that's what the Supreme Court and lower courts have consistently interpreted the Constitution to mean.
So I'm sure you'll be willing to revise your opinion when the conservative-packed Supreme Court grants cert to this case and hands down the inevitable 5-4 finding in favor of the plaintiffs?
Precedents such as Miller are just goofy, and really do need to be overturned or at least clarified. They don't even pretend to take into account the founders' other writings or the legal climate that prevailed at the time the Constitution was written.
The ACLU has no problem disagreeing with case law all the way up to and including rulings from the Supreme Court, when it suits their purposes. Miller is just a convenient exception for them.
The NRA doesn't actively undermine any other amendments, though. They don't use absurd analogies and poorly-reasoned court decisions to claim that the First Amendment was a "collective" right reserved only to incorporated publishers, or that the Fourth Amendment was a "collective" right intended only to protect corporate documents.
Someday, I'd like the chance to ask an ACLU member a simple question. "What, exactly, is so special about the government that entitles them to bear arms that I'm not allowed to own as a citizen? Is it the government's evident skill in installing illegal wiretaps? Their ability to round up and imprison people, including American citizens, with little or no judicial oversight? Their record of safely transporting dangerous terrorist suspects for torture in foreign countries? Do you honestly feel that nukes and bazookas are that much more dangerous in my hands than they are in George Bush's?"
They indicate that their refusal to support individual firearms-ownership rights is based on an utterly-insane premise ("We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one.")
I wish I could justify joining the ACLU, but that paper makes them look like just another herd of statist sheep. When they drop that bit of barking idiocy from their platform, I'll be first in line to sign up for a membership.
The quality of the engineering is of minor importance
Unless you have actually used an iPhone yourself, you're talking out of your ass. It is one nicely-packaged bit of technology. It makes every other phone, even those with superior features, feel like a collection of random parts from Radio Shack running some recycled UI code from the Motorola Star-Tac.
(Oh, yeah, I must be an Apple fanboy cultist. In fact, I'm such a fanboy that my most-recent purchase from Apple, prior to the iPhone, was an Imagewriter dot-matrix printer in 1984.)
While that was quite funny, I live in town and work at the University. To outsiders, it can be hard to differentiate, but it has been said that Lawrence, Kansas, is 27 square miles of open and progressive thinking surrounded by Kansas.
Well, yeah, you can't just go around changing the planet's albedo by spreading solar cells everywhere and expect to get away with it! What would Al Gore say?
True; I'm probably answering an argument not made by the actual political backers of the system. That said, the Iranian mullahs can rent a Cessna just as easily as Al Qaeda henchmen can. Show your driver's license, load the nuke in the back, and borrow a callsign from Virgin Airways.
(One admitted flaw with the aspirin analogy is that the headache won't deliberately choose to morph into cancer once it sees that you have aspirin.)
Right; that's the reason why the Maginot Line analogy is a better one. If you are about to spend $10 billion on a proposed security measure that has any number of trivial workarounds from the enemy's point of view, that's the very definition of an asymmetric threat. (It's also the very definition of stupidity.)
There is no reason to suspect that terrorists will ever gain the infrastructure needed to launch intermediate-range missiles. If they do, they aren't terrorists any more, but hostile nation-states in their own right. Playing the "terrorism" card to justify pork-barrel handouts to defense contractors may be the trendy thing to do in Washington, but there is no reason why the rest of us should sit still for it. It's our money, after all.
I'm afraid that's not correct. Believe me, nobody was contemplating GPUs at the consumer level in the 1993-1994 timeframe. The initial target for NSP was audio-rate processing such as modems and MIDI synthesis.
Further, it's absurd to say that "a number of game developers were excited about (NSP) because it would have allowed them to more easily bypass parts of Windows that got in their way." Nobody was seriously interested in doing game development for Windows at this time. The first Game SDK (pre-DirectX) hadn't even shipped when Intel began evangelizing NSP.
The whole idea behind NSP was to add a layer of ring-zero crapware that nobody, not even Windows itself, could avoid dealing with.
Don Lancaster has been preaching this for ages
on
Patents Don't Pay
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· Score: 2, Insightful
He's always considered patents to be a gigantic ripoff for everyone but patent attorneys. A lot of people dismissed his anti-patent rantings in the early 90s as net.kookery, but it appears he was ahead of his time.
NSP was a terrible idea, in pretty much any respect you care to consider. If you think Winmodems suck now, take one with you on your next trip back to 1994 and see how you like it.
NSP would have kneecapped the entire PC games industry, and it would have strangled the emerging multiplayer genres in the crib. It was a craven attempt by Intel to market general-purpose CPUs against dedicated audio and communications hardware. You can get away with that now that everybody has more CPU cores than they know what to do with, but dedicated hardware was actually needed back then. No sane developer who wasn't on Intel's payroll would have welcomed any artificial market forces that threatened to marginalize it in favor of host-based signal processing.
Intel backed down because a lot of people, not just Microsoft, screamed bloody murder.
Not so much. It turns out that kids get paid $50 to mow a damned lawn nowadays. I know, I was surprised, too. Couple of months worth of weekend mowing, and that PS3 is in the bag.
A better question is: Is there any actual evidence that any form of media triggers violent behavior?
About the only solid argument in favor of this is the existence of "copycat" crimes.
People like Ted Bundy don't count; serial killers are so screwed up in the head that almost anything might influence them. You really can't argue that pornography influenced Bundy one way or the other, regardless of what he says. We only have one Ted Bundy, and we can't go back in time to test his claim.
But the rash of school shootings that usually follows the reporting of a spectacular Columbine-like event in the news is pretty hard to argue against. There's either a causal link, or the coincidence factor is staggering.
Clearly, the only solution is to ban the one form of media known to prompt criminal behavior: the evening news.
I'd like to start a lawsuit against the highway patrol for not enforcing the speed limit - my guess is you'd save probably a million gallons of gasoline a day (if not more) just by enforcing speed limits.
How about just letting me pay something closer to the actual cost of the fuel I use, and staying the hell out of my way? Would that work for you?
Slashdot Mirror
Arbitrary coordinates. Right now Maps is useless for returning to locations that were arrived at by manually scrolling around. Not being able to create arbitrary placemarks is a real forehead-slapper of an omission, since not every location on Earth has a street address.
it would let me bookmark a Google Maps location.
What's the opposite of a fanboy? Just as rabid and uninformed and loud, just a detractor? We need a word...
"GuywhoreallywantsaniPhonebutdoesnthave$600."
I wonder what Apple's opinions on the matter were during device design?
"Hmm. This phone is already getting a bit porky. If we use a large, replaceable battery with plastic cladding and external contacts, it will harm the overall design aesthetic. Many users will consider it too big and heavy for their pocket/purse. Let's go with the internal battery."
If you really think people at Apple sit around in meetings cackling over ways to screw the consumer, you need pharmaceutical help.
If those things are overwhelming concerns for you, the iPhone isn't for you. Buy a different phone. There are others available.
Why is that so hard to understand?
It deserves every bit of anti-hype it gets: it was the Paris Hilton of the tech world.
Have you used one?
"No." (I'll save you the trouble.)
Gee, I thought so.
That's not just my opinion, that's what the Supreme Court and lower courts have consistently interpreted the Constitution to mean.
So I'm sure you'll be willing to revise your opinion when the conservative-packed Supreme Court grants cert to this case and hands down the inevitable 5-4 finding in favor of the plaintiffs?
Precedents such as Miller are just goofy, and really do need to be overturned or at least clarified. They don't even pretend to take into account the founders' other writings or the legal climate that prevailed at the time the Constitution was written.
The ACLU has no problem disagreeing with case law all the way up to and including rulings from the Supreme Court, when it suits their purposes. Miller is just a convenient exception for them.
The NRA doesn't actively undermine any other amendments, though. They don't use absurd analogies and poorly-reasoned court decisions to claim that the First Amendment was a "collective" right reserved only to incorporated publishers, or that the Fourth Amendment was a "collective" right intended only to protect corporate documents.
Someday, I'd like the chance to ask an ACLU member a simple question. "What, exactly, is so special about the government that entitles them to bear arms that I'm not allowed to own as a citizen? Is it the government's evident skill in installing illegal wiretaps? Their ability to round up and imprison people, including American citizens, with little or no judicial oversight? Their record of safely transporting dangerous terrorist suspects for torture in foreign countries? Do you honestly feel that nukes and bazookas are that much more dangerous in my hands than they are in George Bush's?"
They indicate that their refusal to support individual firearms-ownership rights is based on an utterly-insane premise ("We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one.")
I wish I could justify joining the ACLU, but that paper makes them look like just another herd of statist sheep. When they drop that bit of barking idiocy from their platform, I'll be first in line to sign up for a membership.
The quality of the engineering is of minor importance
Unless you have actually used an iPhone yourself, you're talking out of your ass. It is one nicely-packaged bit of technology. It makes every other phone, even those with superior features, feel like a collection of random parts from Radio Shack running some recycled UI code from the Motorola Star-Tac.
(Oh, yeah, I must be an Apple fanboy cultist. In fact, I'm such a fanboy that my most-recent purchase from Apple, prior to the iPhone, was an Imagewriter dot-matrix printer in 1984.)
But eBay is a Goliath, so taking them on would be nigh impossible.
Ridiculous. How many megabuck patent suits has Microsoft lost?
While that was quite funny, I live in town and work at the University. To outsiders, it can be hard to differentiate, but it has been said that Lawrence, Kansas, is 27 square miles of open and progressive thinking surrounded by Kansas.
Also a good description of Austin.
Say what you will about the tenets of Libertarianism, at least it's an ethos.
Well, yeah, you can't just go around changing the planet's albedo by spreading solar cells everywhere and expect to get away with it! What would Al Gore say?
References
True; I'm probably answering an argument not made by the actual political backers of the system. That said, the Iranian mullahs can rent a Cessna just as easily as Al Qaeda henchmen can. Show your driver's license, load the nuke in the back, and borrow a callsign from Virgin Airways.
(One admitted flaw with the aspirin analogy is that the headache won't deliberately choose to morph into cancer once it sees that you have aspirin.)
Right; that's the reason why the Maginot Line analogy is a better one. If you are about to spend $10 billion on a proposed security measure that has any number of trivial workarounds from the enemy's point of view, that's the very definition of an asymmetric threat. (It's also the very definition of stupidity.)
There is no reason to suspect that terrorists will ever gain the infrastructure needed to launch intermediate-range missiles. If they do, they aren't terrorists any more, but hostile nation-states in their own right. Playing the "terrorism" card to justify pork-barrel handouts to defense contractors may be the trendy thing to do in Washington, but there is no reason why the rest of us should sit still for it. It's our money, after all.
OTOH, playing devil's advocate, a missile shield would (theoretically) stop missiles coming from a terrorist group were they to acquire one.
Cool. Does it work on Cessnas?
No?
Then the whole idea is kind of ridiculous, isn't it? (How'd that whole Maginot Line thing work out for the French?)
I'm afraid that's not correct. Believe me, nobody was contemplating GPUs at the consumer level in the 1993-1994 timeframe. The initial target for NSP was audio-rate processing such as modems and MIDI synthesis.
Further, it's absurd to say that "a number of game developers were excited about (NSP) because it would have allowed them to more easily bypass parts of Windows that got in their way." Nobody was seriously interested in doing game development for Windows at this time. The first Game SDK (pre-DirectX) hadn't even shipped when Intel began evangelizing NSP.
The whole idea behind NSP was to add a layer of ring-zero crapware that nobody, not even Windows itself, could avoid dealing with.
He's always considered patents to be a gigantic ripoff for everyone but patent attorneys. A lot of people dismissed his anti-patent rantings in the early 90s as net.kookery, but it appears he was ahead of his time.
NSP was a terrible idea, in pretty much any respect you care to consider. If you think Winmodems suck now, take one with you on your next trip back to 1994 and see how you like it.
NSP would have kneecapped the entire PC games industry, and it would have strangled the emerging multiplayer genres in the crib. It was a craven attempt by Intel to market general-purpose CPUs against dedicated audio and communications hardware. You can get away with that now that everybody has more CPU cores than they know what to do with, but dedicated hardware was actually needed back then. No sane developer who wasn't on Intel's payroll would have welcomed any artificial market forces that threatened to marginalize it in favor of host-based signal processing.
Intel backed down because a lot of people, not just Microsoft, screamed bloody murder.
Not so much. It turns out that kids get paid $50 to mow a damned lawn nowadays. I know, I was surprised, too. Couple of months worth of weekend mowing, and that PS3 is in the bag.
A better question is: Is there any actual evidence that any form of media triggers violent behavior?
About the only solid argument in favor of this is the existence of "copycat" crimes.
People like Ted Bundy don't count; serial killers are so screwed up in the head that almost anything might influence them. You really can't argue that pornography influenced Bundy one way or the other, regardless of what he says. We only have one Ted Bundy, and we can't go back in time to test his claim.
But the rash of school shootings that usually follows the reporting of a spectacular Columbine-like event in the news is pretty hard to argue against. There's either a causal link, or the coincidence factor is staggering.
Clearly, the only solution is to ban the one form of media known to prompt criminal behavior: the evening news.
I'd like to start a lawsuit against the highway patrol for not enforcing the speed limit - my guess is you'd save probably a million gallons of gasoline a day (if not more) just by enforcing speed limits.
How about just letting me pay something closer to the actual cost of the fuel I use, and staying the hell out of my way? Would that work for you?
(Oh, and thanks for voting for Nader.)
They're not trivial, no, but then they have nothing to do with the subject at hand.
Your understanding is limited.
Try publishing your own Mickey Mouse cartoons and you'll learn a lot about government-sanctioned takings from (what should be) the public domain.
Try accessing a work protected by a DMCA-sanctioned cipher in the year 2412, and you'll learn a lot about de-facto perpetual copyright terms.