Sure, but seriously remember how expensive encyclopedias used to be? Really, times have changed immensely, I remember back when I was in school you had access to an edition of The World Book Encyclopedia or Encyclopaedia Britannica that was older than you, that never seemed to have the article you really needed. You had a library filled with old outdated books and no real easy way to search them (remember paper card catalogs?). And something like this for cheap would have been a godsend, far better than the old encylopedias and reference material.
That is where e-ink comes in. Seriously, the first time I tried a Kindle I thought there was a sticker on the screen, it looks that much like paper.
Yes, trying to read it on your iPad, laptop, etc. is going to be underwhelming, but the Kindle/Nook e-readers with e-ink is very easy on the eyes and just as good as paper.
Of course! Because we all know how well democracy works when people can't get facts. Facts are -essential- to any sort of democracy without facts democracy falls apart.
These things were all pre-Obama all quite old. It is -essential- that people get the facts without them being obscured. Without it, democracy can no longer work.
Without facts, explain to me how democracy can work?
I did find that a bit odd, but I think that a lot of that is because he doesn't want to leak very recent information because it could put lives in danger. But it will be interesting if he continues to post new information if not it could just be another bush-bashing article ignoring everything Obama has done much like the mainstream media (minus Fox)
A democratic elected government -cannot- be secret otherwise it fails to elect good leaders. If I'm paying for a war, I better know damn well where every chunk of lead paid for by me, the taxpayer, went. I better be able to know if it hit a civilian, a terrorist, one of our own soldiers, etc. I better know how much the war is costing, both in lives, loss of freedom, and in terms of dollars.
And before you say this guy doesn't leak anything of importance from other regimes, there has been many leaks of censorship lists and other nasty documents from China and other dictatorships, its just that things like that don't make headlines here in the west.
How do you expect us to elect good leaders if we don't know what they do? By the media which ignores facts? By some magical-ness that lets you look at a candidate and see if hes a good choice? By commercials which lie?
The knowledge of just about everything the government does is essential to maintaining a free country. Otherwise how the hell do I know who to vote for?
Yeah, because I really want a country based on democracy to hide all the essential facts from their citizens. Look without facts how is it possible to make an informed decision on election day? The mainstream media is terrible, and things like Wikileaks is the only possible way to get solid facts to base your decision on election day on.
Without solid facts like this we end up having the Afghan War debated on two sides, the leftist side of EVERY SOLDIER KILLS CHILDREN and the right-wing side of LETS NUKE ALL OF AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ, KOREA, AND CANADA!!! Rather than a sane cost-to-benefit ratio.
Why is it that the mainstream media doesn't use -facts- to prove their points. Things like "For every day of war we spend XXXXX dollars, we kill XX civilians, XX terrorists, and destroy XXXX worth of infrastructure" would be a great way for people to know if they want to continue this war. Without that though we have the two extremes, extreme pacifism and extreme militarism.
Organizations like Wikileaks are essential to having a democratic country. Such a thing like the Afghan War Diary is very much needed to evaluate which leaders to elect. Remember these are our tax dollars being used/wasted to fight this war. We have a right to know the body count and the details about past missions. Without that how am I supposed to know who to vote for? If I don't have the facts, how can I make an educated decision? My only choice is through the mainstream media which doesn't have the facts.
I need -facts- to back up my election choices. I need to know stuff like the Afghan War Diary, otherwise how will I know if its worth continuing the Afghan war? It seems my only two options in the mainstream media is either DESTROY ALL TERRORISTS WITH NUKES!!!!! and EVERY SOLDIER WHO GOES TO AFGHANISTAN KILLS 324234 CHILDREN!!!! and none of them deal with the facts.
The trackpad is only going to cost $70 according to TFA, so while it isn't as cheap as a bottom-barrel USB mouse you can buy at best buy, its certainly not a couple hundred dollars.
Exactly. With the exception of Verizon, the other 3 major carriers have done a pretty poor job of branding their Android phones. AT&T's branding is nearly non-existent (look at the commercials for the Backflip and the HTC Aria could be a Windows Mobile phone from the screenshots they show...)
But the entire point of buying something is to enjoy it for a pretty long time. I buy a movie to watch it a year, two years, 10 years, etc. from now. I buy a CD (or MP3) to listen to for a decade or two, or three, or four.
Multiplayer-based games should be discounted when compared to single-player games if things like this continue to happen. If I'm paying $50-60 for a new game, I expect the thing to last, not to have a huge feature removed just 6-7 years down the road.
While its true that lots of things don't last, when I buy something I expect it to last as much as possible. I don't buy new cars for the same reason, when I spend my money on something, I want it to last for as long as possible.
There are some fundamental flaws in multiplayer games that can't be fixed with technology that make things non-fun.
A) Most random people on the internet who play games on Xbox live and the like are complete assholes. Consider the message I got last night while playing some TF2 "Why are you fucking hacking you fucking douchbag" and the reason that was given that I was "hacking" is because I managed to backstab him while he was sniping several times in the row when his back was turned... Enough people like that are out in the world to make playing online against random people a pain.
B) The difficulty. It takes a lot longer to learn how to efficiently play an online game than it is to learn to play a single player game. Even worse is if you are in a team-style game and have to endure abuse about how you aren't as great as they are despite the fact you bought the game yesterday... And difficulty can't be accurately chosen unlike a single player game, yes, there are systems like Halo's matchmaking, but even that doesn't always work.
C) Cheating/Lag, few things are more frustrating than trying to snipe on a laggy connection.
D) Badly managed servers. For example, on Team Fortress 2, you will have people who decide to make everyone be engineers, then suddenly allow for one spy, then make everyone be engineers once someone on their team is the spy...
The problem with multi-player is that it depends on an online server today which will shut down in time. Consider Super Mario Bros. a game made what? Nearly 30 years ago? It is still as playable today as is was in the 80s. Now consider Halo 2 made in 2004 which is now crippled in 2010 because Xbox live for the Xbox has been discontinued.
Sure, they won't "replace" them because when it comes to raw storage magnetic media is king, but things are going portable and reliable. No one wants to have moving parts in something like a phone. But really how many people actually fill up their current HDD? I know, theres some people out there with 1 TB worth of pictures, movies, music, etc. there are other people there who have the entire PS1 library on their HDD just to say they can, but on the whole how much HDD is actually -used-? On an 80 GB partition, Ubuntu plus all my music plus photos (I really don't keep much video on there, I just stream stuff) and all other files total only 40 GB, and that is just half my entire HDD (I just did a 50% Windows 50% Linux setup, my Windows partition is 80 GB and only has about 12 GB of actual stuff on there) and this all was on a $300 laptop bought 2 years ago!
When it comes down to it, speed it much more important than having 2 TB of stuff on there because the average person could use a speed/durability boost but doesn't need lots and lots of space.
But you buy the -hardware- unless you are overclocking the CPU or something, they should have to allow warranty claims for hardware issues. Just because I run Linux on my laptop, if the screen dies, I expect the hardware company to pay for it if it is under warranty. Granted, if I try to install RAM that isn't compatible with the system and I break the sockets, of course the hardware company shouldn't have to pay for it.
No matter what you do with the software, it shouldn't ever break hardware barring overclocking and the like and so they should still have to allow claims for hardware issues.
Sure, but no matter how much energy you are using you are paying the same rate. Its like getting an infinite amount of gas for $50 a month and deciding to drive a hybrid, if you don't have any cap, go all out and get the most power for your money.
Really, if they wanted a basic machine, as they indicated, they'd go with the cheapest processor, 128Mb RAM, etc, etc. You can set up most Linux distros to work in very tight constraints, and going with the slowest cheapest processor available new, and the smallest stick of ram available, may have come out cheaper.
Sure, but you can't -do- much with it. While its true you can go cheaper, you'd get a much crappier system. Do you really want a system that can't even reliably run Ubuntu? I could find a Pentium II, install elinks and browse the internet, but I couldn't -do- anything. Plus, $200 for a system is pretty much an impulse buy for the majority of people, its pretty cheap and it has enough power to work. Other than the board only supporting DDR3 RAM rather than being able to load it with 8 GB of DDR2, its probably the best cost to benefit system available.
Depends on where you live though and such. For a college student this is a pretty great deal because electricity is free, in many other places if you pay rent you get free electricity. For a lot of the unemployed, they can't afford to spend a bit more for less at the moment because they simply don't have the cash, on the other hand the electricity costs will come when they have a job to pay for it, etc.
Ok, so you can read the reviews of the iPhone but you can't read the reviews of an individual phone? Its just as easy as figuring out reviews for the iPhone. You figure out which phone you want in the same way you'd figure out any other piece of technology. Want to take pictures? Find a phone with a good camera. Want to have a really fast phone? Find a phone with a fast CPU. Want a cheap phone? Find one that is free or really cheap on contract. Want a phone with no contract? You can have that also. Want an unlocked phone? You can buy one too.
I'm a bit confused to why someone can read the reviews for an iPhone and prove its better than all of the Android phones but can't choose an Android phone once you've established that Android is better than iOS, WinMo and the like.
When the OS is as versatile as Android is, yes. There really isn't a single thing that Android can't do because it doesn't have some sort of BS ideology behind it. There is no Steve Jobs saying you can't have multitasking, there is no Steve Jobs saying you can't run emulators on it, etc.
About the only thing Android is pretty bad at would be running on -very- low powered device, but considering that the trend is generally to make more powerful hardware and not downgrade hardware, this is pretty much a null point.
Verizon actually has cheaper data plans for phones when compared to AT&T. Verizon's is $30 unlimited, AT&T is $25 with a tiny 2 GB cap. While 2GB -might- be enough for current usage, I can't see bandwidth needs dropping but rather increasing with more and more ways to get high-quality movies streamed to your phone.
No because one phone can't possible fit the niche of everyone, mix that with the app fiascos and over-reliance on iTunes and I can't see the iPhone really gaining too much ground. Physical keyboards are nice, even the best touch-screen keyboard can't match the feedback of a physical keyboard, and a physical keyboard is something that the iPhone will never have. Same thing with the apps, there are no real limits to what you can do with Android, no stupid limits of not "competing with apple" or running other code.
One phone can never fit exactly what you want, the iPhone might be good at giving a few people what they want, but with Android phones there can be the possibility of giving close to 100% of people 100% of what they want, such things are impossible for a single-device line like the iPhone.
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Sure, but seriously remember how expensive encyclopedias used to be? Really, times have changed immensely, I remember back when I was in school you had access to an edition of The World Book Encyclopedia or Encyclopaedia Britannica that was older than you, that never seemed to have the article you really needed. You had a library filled with old outdated books and no real easy way to search them (remember paper card catalogs?). And something like this for cheap would have been a godsend, far better than the old encylopedias and reference material.
That is where e-ink comes in. Seriously, the first time I tried a Kindle I thought there was a sticker on the screen, it looks that much like paper.
Yes, trying to read it on your iPad, laptop, etc. is going to be underwhelming, but the Kindle/Nook e-readers with e-ink is very easy on the eyes and just as good as paper.
Look at Atari vs JS&A, where a court ruled that even though you were able to get backups making them themselves are illegal.
Even the best software can go completely wrong with the wrong person operating it.
Of course! Because we all know how well democracy works when people can't get facts. Facts are -essential- to any sort of democracy without facts democracy falls apart.
These things were all pre-Obama all quite old. It is -essential- that people get the facts without them being obscured. Without it, democracy can no longer work.
Without facts, explain to me how democracy can work?
I did find that a bit odd, but I think that a lot of that is because he doesn't want to leak very recent information because it could put lives in danger. But it will be interesting if he continues to post new information if not it could just be another bush-bashing article ignoring everything Obama has done much like the mainstream media (minus Fox)
Well of course, but I imagine that Wikileak's agenda is based on facts much more than CNN, Fox, MSNBC, BBC, etc. agendas are.
A democratic elected government -cannot- be secret otherwise it fails to elect good leaders. If I'm paying for a war, I better know damn well where every chunk of lead paid for by me, the taxpayer, went. I better be able to know if it hit a civilian, a terrorist, one of our own soldiers, etc. I better know how much the war is costing, both in lives, loss of freedom, and in terms of dollars.
And before you say this guy doesn't leak anything of importance from other regimes, there has been many leaks of censorship lists and other nasty documents from China and other dictatorships, its just that things like that don't make headlines here in the west.
How do you expect us to elect good leaders if we don't know what they do? By the media which ignores facts? By some magical-ness that lets you look at a candidate and see if hes a good choice? By commercials which lie?
The knowledge of just about everything the government does is essential to maintaining a free country. Otherwise how the hell do I know who to vote for?
Yeah, because I really want a country based on democracy to hide all the essential facts from their citizens. Look without facts how is it possible to make an informed decision on election day? The mainstream media is terrible, and things like Wikileaks is the only possible way to get solid facts to base your decision on election day on.
Without solid facts like this we end up having the Afghan War debated on two sides, the leftist side of EVERY SOLDIER KILLS CHILDREN and the right-wing side of LETS NUKE ALL OF AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ, KOREA, AND CANADA!!! Rather than a sane cost-to-benefit ratio.
Why is it that the mainstream media doesn't use -facts- to prove their points. Things like "For every day of war we spend XXXXX dollars, we kill XX civilians, XX terrorists, and destroy XXXX worth of infrastructure" would be a great way for people to know if they want to continue this war. Without that though we have the two extremes, extreme pacifism and extreme militarism.
Organizations like Wikileaks are essential to having a democratic country. Such a thing like the Afghan War Diary is very much needed to evaluate which leaders to elect. Remember these are our tax dollars being used/wasted to fight this war. We have a right to know the body count and the details about past missions. Without that how am I supposed to know who to vote for? If I don't have the facts, how can I make an educated decision? My only choice is through the mainstream media which doesn't have the facts.
I need -facts- to back up my election choices. I need to know stuff like the Afghan War Diary, otherwise how will I know if its worth continuing the Afghan war? It seems my only two options in the mainstream media is either DESTROY ALL TERRORISTS WITH NUKES!!!!! and EVERY SOLDIER WHO GOES TO AFGHANISTAN KILLS 324234 CHILDREN!!!! and none of them deal with the facts.
just several hundred to Apple?
The trackpad is only going to cost $70 according to TFA, so while it isn't as cheap as a bottom-barrel USB mouse you can buy at best buy, its certainly not a couple hundred dollars.
Exactly. With the exception of Verizon, the other 3 major carriers have done a pretty poor job of branding their Android phones. AT&T's branding is nearly non-existent (look at the commercials for the Backflip and the HTC Aria could be a Windows Mobile phone from the screenshots they show...)
Clearly they infiltrate them by sapping their sentries.
But the entire point of buying something is to enjoy it for a pretty long time. I buy a movie to watch it a year, two years, 10 years, etc. from now. I buy a CD (or MP3) to listen to for a decade or two, or three, or four.
Multiplayer-based games should be discounted when compared to single-player games if things like this continue to happen. If I'm paying $50-60 for a new game, I expect the thing to last, not to have a huge feature removed just 6-7 years down the road.
While its true that lots of things don't last, when I buy something I expect it to last as much as possible. I don't buy new cars for the same reason, when I spend my money on something, I want it to last for as long as possible.
There are some fundamental flaws in multiplayer games that can't be fixed with technology that make things non-fun.
A) Most random people on the internet who play games on Xbox live and the like are complete assholes. Consider the message I got last night while playing some TF2 "Why are you fucking hacking you fucking douchbag" and the reason that was given that I was "hacking" is because I managed to backstab him while he was sniping several times in the row when his back was turned... Enough people like that are out in the world to make playing online against random people a pain.
B) The difficulty. It takes a lot longer to learn how to efficiently play an online game than it is to learn to play a single player game. Even worse is if you are in a team-style game and have to endure abuse about how you aren't as great as they are despite the fact you bought the game yesterday... And difficulty can't be accurately chosen unlike a single player game, yes, there are systems like Halo's matchmaking, but even that doesn't always work.
C) Cheating/Lag, few things are more frustrating than trying to snipe on a laggy connection.
D) Badly managed servers. For example, on Team Fortress 2, you will have people who decide to make everyone be engineers, then suddenly allow for one spy, then make everyone be engineers once someone on their team is the spy...
The problem with multi-player is that it depends on an online server today which will shut down in time. Consider Super Mario Bros. a game made what? Nearly 30 years ago? It is still as playable today as is was in the 80s. Now consider Halo 2 made in 2004 which is now crippled in 2010 because Xbox live for the Xbox has been discontinued.
Sure, they won't "replace" them because when it comes to raw storage magnetic media is king, but things are going portable and reliable. No one wants to have moving parts in something like a phone. But really how many people actually fill up their current HDD? I know, theres some people out there with 1 TB worth of pictures, movies, music, etc. there are other people there who have the entire PS1 library on their HDD just to say they can, but on the whole how much HDD is actually -used-? On an 80 GB partition, Ubuntu plus all my music plus photos (I really don't keep much video on there, I just stream stuff) and all other files total only 40 GB, and that is just half my entire HDD (I just did a 50% Windows 50% Linux setup, my Windows partition is 80 GB and only has about 12 GB of actual stuff on there) and this all was on a $300 laptop bought 2 years ago!
When it comes down to it, speed it much more important than having 2 TB of stuff on there because the average person could use a speed/durability boost but doesn't need lots and lots of space.
But you buy the -hardware- unless you are overclocking the CPU or something, they should have to allow warranty claims for hardware issues. Just because I run Linux on my laptop, if the screen dies, I expect the hardware company to pay for it if it is under warranty. Granted, if I try to install RAM that isn't compatible with the system and I break the sockets, of course the hardware company shouldn't have to pay for it.
No matter what you do with the software, it shouldn't ever break hardware barring overclocking and the like and so they should still have to allow claims for hardware issues.
Sure, but no matter how much energy you are using you are paying the same rate. Its like getting an infinite amount of gas for $50 a month and deciding to drive a hybrid, if you don't have any cap, go all out and get the most power for your money.
Really, if they wanted a basic machine, as they indicated, they'd go with the cheapest processor, 128Mb RAM, etc, etc. You can set up most Linux distros to work in very tight constraints, and going with the slowest cheapest processor available new, and the smallest stick of ram available, may have come out cheaper.
Sure, but you can't -do- much with it. While its true you can go cheaper, you'd get a much crappier system. Do you really want a system that can't even reliably run Ubuntu? I could find a Pentium II, install elinks and browse the internet, but I couldn't -do- anything. Plus, $200 for a system is pretty much an impulse buy for the majority of people, its pretty cheap and it has enough power to work. Other than the board only supporting DDR3 RAM rather than being able to load it with 8 GB of DDR2, its probably the best cost to benefit system available.
Depends on where you live though and such. For a college student this is a pretty great deal because electricity is free, in many other places if you pay rent you get free electricity. For a lot of the unemployed, they can't afford to spend a bit more for less at the moment because they simply don't have the cash, on the other hand the electricity costs will come when they have a job to pay for it, etc.
Ok, so you can read the reviews of the iPhone but you can't read the reviews of an individual phone? Its just as easy as figuring out reviews for the iPhone. You figure out which phone you want in the same way you'd figure out any other piece of technology. Want to take pictures? Find a phone with a good camera. Want to have a really fast phone? Find a phone with a fast CPU. Want a cheap phone? Find one that is free or really cheap on contract. Want a phone with no contract? You can have that also. Want an unlocked phone? You can buy one too.
I'm a bit confused to why someone can read the reviews for an iPhone and prove its better than all of the Android phones but can't choose an Android phone once you've established that Android is better than iOS, WinMo and the like.
When the OS is as versatile as Android is, yes. There really isn't a single thing that Android can't do because it doesn't have some sort of BS ideology behind it. There is no Steve Jobs saying you can't have multitasking, there is no Steve Jobs saying you can't run emulators on it, etc.
About the only thing Android is pretty bad at would be running on -very- low powered device, but considering that the trend is generally to make more powerful hardware and not downgrade hardware, this is pretty much a null point.
Verizon actually has cheaper data plans for phones when compared to AT&T. Verizon's is $30 unlimited, AT&T is $25 with a tiny 2 GB cap. While 2GB -might- be enough for current usage, I can't see bandwidth needs dropping but rather increasing with more and more ways to get high-quality movies streamed to your phone.
No because one phone can't possible fit the niche of everyone, mix that with the app fiascos and over-reliance on iTunes and I can't see the iPhone really gaining too much ground. Physical keyboards are nice, even the best touch-screen keyboard can't match the feedback of a physical keyboard, and a physical keyboard is something that the iPhone will never have. Same thing with the apps, there are no real limits to what you can do with Android, no stupid limits of not "competing with apple" or running other code.
One phone can never fit exactly what you want, the iPhone might be good at giving a few people what they want, but with Android phones there can be the possibility of giving close to 100% of people 100% of what they want, such things are impossible for a single-device line like the iPhone.