But I really don't see why anyone would choose a kindle or similar device over an iPad. Am I missing something?
E-ink. Really, its a lot nicer on the eyes than an LCD, yeah, some people can stare at text on an LCD with no problem, but for me, I tend to get headaches staring at an LCD for too long. I can handle short articles, videos, etc. just fine but when I read a large wall of text that takes more than 15 minutes to read, I tend to get a headache.
Plus, iPads are completely overpriced, you can get a cheap E-reader for $130 and a great one for $250, a cheap laptop for $350 and a great one for $500. With an iPad you have none of the benefits of E-ink nor the benefits of a real laptop.
The coup attempt is remarkable in its choice of modern communications and political lobbying, rather than the traditional resort to violence
How is this unique? History has been dotted with bloodless revolutions, The Glorious Revolution in England, the mostly-peaceful resistance to the 1991 soviet coup attempt, resistance to the salt laws in India, etc.
Heck, the majority of successful revolutions have been bloodless. Those that involve wars and the such usually have to fight another war or conflict to solidify the victory. Had the American Revolution been bloodless chances are the War of 1812 wouldn't have happened, etc.
Such a thing might be nice if we had a sane foreign policy or sustainable economic policy but they don't. "Our" country thinks nothing of financially supporting an unpopular dictator (because heaven forbid we have a "communist" third world country!), bombing third world nations into submission, destroying economies because they produce "drugs", and giving aid to corrupt regimes.
Until we fix this situation and focus on having a limited, sustainable and sane government, I don't blame foreign countries from trying to appease us.
If you are old enough to attend college/university you are old enough to do whatever you want. Stop "babysitting" and let students do whatever they please. Universities and colleges exist to educate people and hand them a piece of paper letting them get a job. Thats all they should do. Let students think for themselves, give them facts and have them make their own opinion and do what they want with them.
If they are forced to pay $50 billion, they got screwed by the government.
You can't change the rules while the game is in progress. No matter how much we like to hate BP, you have to realize they were just playing the game as it was presented by the US government. I think we can all agree that the liability caps were a stupid, stupid idea by now and if we retroactively enforce them, we essentially give the government to take down whatever business they don't really like.
Should BP pay for the spill? Absolutely, but we missed our chance in 1990, it is simply unfair to change the rules of a game in progress.
No, the root cause was that the government decided to put liability caps in the 1990s on oil drilling thus allowing BP to take a gamble and not have to worry about any real liability. There are safe ways to drill, the other oil platforms that aren't gushing barrels of oil left and right into the ocean are proof of that.
We can place the root of the blame on our congress for failing to allow for the free market to have prevented this.
It doesn't really matter. BP is protected by law that their liability is capped at I believe $75 million (though that might not be right, its hard to find an actual copy of the bill), yeah, they are thinking about retroactively eliminating it, but really, other than PR blows, BP can easily pay for that $75 million out of their $16 billion of profits last year.
all of our politicians are corporate owned. Its just a few of them -cough- democrats -cough- are owned by "green" businesses who want BP, a competitor, out of business and so they are raising more of a panic than others.
And why does it surprise you that cops are working for corporations? The majority of them are uneducated, ignorant, abusive thugs. They want their tax increases to get more money and higher pay increases. If they can get some corporations behind the tax increases, they have a higher chance of passing.
But how would it be worth $130+? Having an Amiga is all good an well but its a very dead platform. If this was freeware or better yet F/OSS it would be great. But for $130 I can buy a second hand x86 desktop, buy a used Amiga or just upgrade OS X/the hardware to Leopard.
If I really wanted a weekend project, why would I pay $130 for it? Amiga or MorphOS will never reach the same level of usability as Linux or OS X so why pay tons for an OS that is worthless?
The thing is, why would you really need to run Amiga OS? Other than admiring the simplicity and the architecture and all that fun stuff, theres no real reason to run Amiga OS for day-to-day work that can't be done with a decent Linux distro.
For $150-ish dollars the same price as the OS, you could easily buy a cheap, second-hand x86 computer and do more. Or heck, why not just get PPC versions of Linux?
Unless MorphOS has some killer feature like the ability to emulate Windows perfectly, or something that Linux doesn't have, I'm not seeing the point in wasting hundreds of dollars on software that nothing really runs on.
To put it in more accurate terms, this would be like those self-check outs saying that a $100 item was $1 and paying for it without tampering/stealing and then the store trying to retroactively get out of the agreement. Just because your employee put in the wrong price doesn't mean I shouldn't pay that lower price.
These days playing a slot machine is like playing with a random number generator. If your generator is broken and gives the winning amount, pay it. You should have made a better RNG.
They might value them but what companies need great engineers even with no social skills. Imagine a company filled with people exactly like Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer, nothing would get done. On the other hand, a group of code monkeys would make great products that might not be what people want. Thats why in most tech companies there are few manager-type social-engineers like Jobs and Ballmer and many, many code monkeys. Because there are fewer of the manager-type social-engineers, they need to get better ones so they get paid more and more "valued".
I can't see this being of any benefit in the long term. The problem is, even if they -have- autism or other defects, labeling them will do nothing to have them overcome it and will lead the majority of them to make excuses to why they aren't productive members of society.
I really don't understand the western mentality of labeling everyone to try to "help". Which is going to make people want to get ahead in life? Being told "hey you have -insert mental disability here-" or "hey, your not doing to great in -insert school subject here-". One has people making excuses and the other just has them either not focus on that and focus on what they are good at or try harder.
Sure but at least when I was taking my courses, any of my classes that really relied on diagrams would either have them printed in the book for you or the lecturer would put them on CD (or floppy!) for any student who wanted it.
I think though university has changed a lot since the days of floppy disks and handwritten notes. Most people who I've talked to in university say that nearly every single professor has their notes up on their site, most textbooks have electronic versions (though its questionable if you can use it if you buy a used textbooks) and even the local college is advertising free laptops with tuition!
When I went, technology was just budding in education and was more just added in addition to traditional courses. The way it is now, the entire university system is based on technology, especially when it comes to taking notes.
When was the last time I -wanted- to scribble notes on my laptop screen. I can type much, much, much, much, much faster than I can write and they are much readable than my handwriting. I had a tablet in college, one of those old things running Windows CE with a keyboard bottom and a touch screen pivoting top. I used the note taking app exactly twice before I realized I should have just shelled out for a fast laptop.
As much as everyone thinks that they would get a lot of use of a tablet in university. They won't. Get a fast laptop, its much better in the long run unless
A) You have the weird ability to write at superhuman speeds that is still legible
B) You have superhuman drawing abilities and enjoy drawing diagrams for everything
As for running "Linux" you have a locked down obscure distribution. Yeah, if it gets popular you might have a community developing things for it, but you aren't going to be able to apt-get everything like Debian and Ubuntu.
So why not just get a laptop? For $400 you can get a 14 inch screen, full keyboard, a real OS, can do tons of other things, etc.
If its not e-ink to reduce strain on eyes, not running a real OS (as in full Windows, Linux or OS X), no full keyboard, etc. Why buy it? Under $1,000 means nothing, if its $200, yeah, I can think about getting one. For $250, I can buy a dedicated e-ink e-reader, for $350, I can buy a low end laptop or decent network, for $500 I can buy a great laptop or an iPad and anything more than $500 would just be pointless.
Really, why would I want a giant, heavy, LCD tablet not running a real OS?
"errors" have changed throughout history. Chances are in every single post on/. , there is some thing that might have been considered an "error" a few hundred years ago. What was an "error" 50 or 100 years ago might be considered to be proper today. English is an evolving language.
No, it's not. It's a kludge borne of inadequate input devices.
But it is still part of the language. One could argue that all written language is a kludge borne of inadequate machinery. Letter writing is a kludge borne out of the lack of telephones, the Latin alphabet is a kludge because they didn't have the IPA back then, etc.
Yes. "Your" is a posessive, while "you're" is a contraction of "You are". They mean completely and fundamentally different things. The statement is equally valid with either spelling - but it could mean completely different things.
Such as? If I say "you're correct" it doesn't make any sense to make it be "your correct". Are there even any cases where it would -really- matter between your and you're? And even then, would it be any different than the multitudes of homophones and such that English already has?
Sure, I can probably guess what you meant, rather than what you said, but that simply highlights how poorly you're communicating - you're shifting the responsibility on to me to interpret what you mean (and therefore, the blame if I am incorrect), rather than just writing in a clean and unambiguous fashion.
But all living languages -have- connotation. If you want a strictly denotative language go to a dead language or 1984-esque NewSpeak.
On the one hand, Apple is trying to regulate its 'image' and reputation when it allows apps to be sold on their store.
And their image has come down to a fundamentally broken OS and related technologies which claim "revolutionary" new features which are really things that people said that iPhone OS needed from day one.
Even the non-geeks are starting to realize it, when they can get the full web experience from Android and not from Apple, cheaper, more available devices from Android, they are switching to Android.
Apple has had several chances to have redeemed itself and each time has thrown away their chances. From not allowing multiple carriers in the US, not allowing various apps, refusing to allow Flash, being so slow to implement things that every other smartphone OS has like copy and paste along with multitasking, etc.
Really, how many times have you thought "I'd really like to get this smartphone platform, but there are a few apps in here that I don't agree with and it drags down the entire platform" . My guess is never.
But when they are unelected, have nearly unlimited power, consistently go after victimless crimes and now want to have the right to not be recorded we should always be skeptical of every action they do.
If a politician messes up, we vote them out of office (or impeach them if it is bad enough). If a corporation messes up we don't buy from them and the company goes bankrupt. If we mess up we get sued and pay for damages. If a police officer messes up... They/sometimes/ get suspended but its purely dependent on unelected police officers.
No unelected officer with the ability to kill without reason should be trusted. The American public should be very skeptical of all police officers and not think of them as "heroes" who have a need to break the law to catch "criminals".
Yes, there are some decent police officers, but every decent police officer should be A) elected and B) recorded and reported to every citizen.
If a cop is good, he will survive scrutiny and be elected. If a cop is bad, he loses his job and gets sued by the victims.
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But I really don't see why anyone would choose a kindle or similar device over an iPad. Am I missing something?
E-ink. Really, its a lot nicer on the eyes than an LCD, yeah, some people can stare at text on an LCD with no problem, but for me, I tend to get headaches staring at an LCD for too long. I can handle short articles, videos, etc. just fine but when I read a large wall of text that takes more than 15 minutes to read, I tend to get a headache.
Plus, iPads are completely overpriced, you can get a cheap E-reader for $130 and a great one for $250, a cheap laptop for $350 and a great one for $500. With an iPad you have none of the benefits of E-ink nor the benefits of a real laptop.
The coup attempt is remarkable in its choice of modern communications and political lobbying, rather than the traditional resort to violence
How is this unique? History has been dotted with bloodless revolutions, The Glorious Revolution in England, the mostly-peaceful resistance to the 1991 soviet coup attempt, resistance to the salt laws in India, etc.
Heck, the majority of successful revolutions have been bloodless. Those that involve wars and the such usually have to fight another war or conflict to solidify the victory. Had the American Revolution been bloodless chances are the War of 1812 wouldn't have happened, etc.
Such a thing might be nice if we had a sane foreign policy or sustainable economic policy but they don't. "Our" country thinks nothing of financially supporting an unpopular dictator (because heaven forbid we have a "communist" third world country!), bombing third world nations into submission, destroying economies because they produce "drugs", and giving aid to corrupt regimes.
Until we fix this situation and focus on having a limited, sustainable and sane government, I don't blame foreign countries from trying to appease us.
If you are old enough to attend college/university you are old enough to do whatever you want. Stop "babysitting" and let students do whatever they please. Universities and colleges exist to educate people and hand them a piece of paper letting them get a job. Thats all they should do. Let students think for themselves, give them facts and have them make their own opinion and do what they want with them.
If they are forced to pay $50 billion, they got screwed by the government.
You can't change the rules while the game is in progress. No matter how much we like to hate BP, you have to realize they were just playing the game as it was presented by the US government. I think we can all agree that the liability caps were a stupid, stupid idea by now and if we retroactively enforce them, we essentially give the government to take down whatever business they don't really like.
Should BP pay for the spill? Absolutely, but we missed our chance in 1990, it is simply unfair to change the rules of a game in progress.
No, the root cause was that the government decided to put liability caps in the 1990s on oil drilling thus allowing BP to take a gamble and not have to worry about any real liability. There are safe ways to drill, the other oil platforms that aren't gushing barrels of oil left and right into the ocean are proof of that.
We can place the root of the blame on our congress for failing to allow for the free market to have prevented this.
It doesn't really matter. BP is protected by law that their liability is capped at I believe $75 million (though that might not be right, its hard to find an actual copy of the bill), yeah, they are thinking about retroactively eliminating it, but really, other than PR blows, BP can easily pay for that $75 million out of their $16 billion of profits last year.
all of our politicians are corporate owned. Its just a few of them -cough- democrats -cough- are owned by "green" businesses who want BP, a competitor, out of business and so they are raising more of a panic than others.
And why does it surprise you that cops are working for corporations? The majority of them are uneducated, ignorant, abusive thugs. They want their tax increases to get more money and higher pay increases. If they can get some corporations behind the tax increases, they have a higher chance of passing.
But the Valdez was carrying very heavy oil. The gulf oil spill now is lighter oil.
But how would it be worth $130+? Having an Amiga is all good an well but its a very dead platform. If this was freeware or better yet F/OSS it would be great. But for $130 I can buy a second hand x86 desktop, buy a used Amiga or just upgrade OS X/the hardware to Leopard.
If I really wanted a weekend project, why would I pay $130 for it? Amiga or MorphOS will never reach the same level of usability as Linux or OS X so why pay tons for an OS that is worthless?
The thing is, why would you really need to run Amiga OS? Other than admiring the simplicity and the architecture and all that fun stuff, theres no real reason to run Amiga OS for day-to-day work that can't be done with a decent Linux distro.
For $150-ish dollars the same price as the OS, you could easily buy a cheap, second-hand x86 computer and do more. Or heck, why not just get PPC versions of Linux?
Unless MorphOS has some killer feature like the ability to emulate Windows perfectly, or something that Linux doesn't have, I'm not seeing the point in wasting hundreds of dollars on software that nothing really runs on.
To put it in more accurate terms, this would be like those self-check outs saying that a $100 item was $1 and paying for it without tampering/stealing and then the store trying to retroactively get out of the agreement. Just because your employee put in the wrong price doesn't mean I shouldn't pay that lower price.
These days playing a slot machine is like playing with a random number generator. If your generator is broken and gives the winning amount, pay it. You should have made a better RNG.
They might value them but what companies need great engineers even with no social skills. Imagine a company filled with people exactly like Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer, nothing would get done. On the other hand, a group of code monkeys would make great products that might not be what people want. Thats why in most tech companies there are few manager-type social-engineers like Jobs and Ballmer and many, many code monkeys. Because there are fewer of the manager-type social-engineers, they need to get better ones so they get paid more and more "valued".
I can't see this being of any benefit in the long term. The problem is, even if they -have- autism or other defects, labeling them will do nothing to have them overcome it and will lead the majority of them to make excuses to why they aren't productive members of society.
I really don't understand the western mentality of labeling everyone to try to "help". Which is going to make people want to get ahead in life? Being told "hey you have -insert mental disability here-" or "hey, your not doing to great in -insert school subject here-". One has people making excuses and the other just has them either not focus on that and focus on what they are good at or try harder.
Oh Apple is still different just different as in "we're not going to give you what you want unless its what we want".
Not if you use an iPod or iPhone.
Sure but at least when I was taking my courses, any of my classes that really relied on diagrams would either have them printed in the book for you or the lecturer would put them on CD (or floppy!) for any student who wanted it.
I think though university has changed a lot since the days of floppy disks and handwritten notes. Most people who I've talked to in university say that nearly every single professor has their notes up on their site, most textbooks have electronic versions (though its questionable if you can use it if you buy a used textbooks) and even the local college is advertising free laptops with tuition!
When I went, technology was just budding in education and was more just added in addition to traditional courses. The way it is now, the entire university system is based on technology, especially when it comes to taking notes.
When was the last time I -wanted- to scribble notes on my laptop screen. I can type much, much, much, much, much faster than I can write and they are much readable than my handwriting. I had a tablet in college, one of those old things running Windows CE with a keyboard bottom and a touch screen pivoting top. I used the note taking app exactly twice before I realized I should have just shelled out for a fast laptop.
As much as everyone thinks that they would get a lot of use of a tablet in university. They won't. Get a fast laptop, its much better in the long run unless
A) You have the weird ability to write at superhuman speeds that is still legible
B) You have superhuman drawing abilities and enjoy drawing diagrams for everything
As for running "Linux" you have a locked down obscure distribution. Yeah, if it gets popular you might have a community developing things for it, but you aren't going to be able to apt-get everything like Debian and Ubuntu.
*network should read as netbook.
So why not just get a laptop? For $400 you can get a 14 inch screen, full keyboard, a real OS, can do tons of other things, etc.
If its not e-ink to reduce strain on eyes, not running a real OS (as in full Windows, Linux or OS X), no full keyboard, etc. Why buy it? Under $1,000 means nothing, if its $200, yeah, I can think about getting one. For $250, I can buy a dedicated e-ink e-reader, for $350, I can buy a low end laptop or decent network, for $500 I can buy a great laptop or an iPad and anything more than $500 would just be pointless.
Really, why would I want a giant, heavy, LCD tablet not running a real OS?
It's not about "evolution", it's about errors.
"errors" have changed throughout history. Chances are in every single post on /. , there is some thing that might have been considered an "error" a few hundred years ago. What was an "error" 50 or 100 years ago might be considered to be proper today. English is an evolving language.
No, it's not. It's a kludge borne of inadequate input devices.
But it is still part of the language. One could argue that all written language is a kludge borne of inadequate machinery. Letter writing is a kludge borne out of the lack of telephones, the Latin alphabet is a kludge because they didn't have the IPA back then, etc.
Yes. "Your" is a posessive, while "you're" is a contraction of "You are". They mean completely and fundamentally different things. The statement is equally valid with either spelling - but it could mean completely different things.
Such as? If I say "you're correct" it doesn't make any sense to make it be "your correct". Are there even any cases where it would -really- matter between your and you're? And even then, would it be any different than the multitudes of homophones and such that English already has?
Sure, I can probably guess what you meant, rather than what you said, but that simply highlights how poorly you're communicating - you're shifting the responsibility on to me to interpret what you mean (and therefore, the blame if I am incorrect), rather than just writing in a clean and unambiguous fashion.
But all living languages -have- connotation. If you want a strictly denotative language go to a dead language or 1984-esque NewSpeak.
On the one hand, Apple is trying to regulate its 'image' and reputation when it allows apps to be sold on their store.
And their image has come down to a fundamentally broken OS and related technologies which claim "revolutionary" new features which are really things that people said that iPhone OS needed from day one.
Even the non-geeks are starting to realize it, when they can get the full web experience from Android and not from Apple, cheaper, more available devices from Android, they are switching to Android.
Apple has had several chances to have redeemed itself and each time has thrown away their chances. From not allowing multiple carriers in the US, not allowing various apps, refusing to allow Flash, being so slow to implement things that every other smartphone OS has like copy and paste along with multitasking, etc.
Really, how many times have you thought "I'd really like to get this smartphone platform, but there are a few apps in here that I don't agree with and it drags down the entire platform" . My guess is never.
But what are they watching? Yeah, people might use YouTube but if they only watch Failblog and Lady Gaga on it, it doesn't really help them.
I've found it pretty rare if anyone has watched the US killings of civilians in Iraq that Wikileaks did a report on.
But when they are unelected, have nearly unlimited power, consistently go after victimless crimes and now want to have the right to not be recorded we should always be skeptical of every action they do.
/sometimes/ get suspended but its purely dependent on unelected police officers.
If a politician messes up, we vote them out of office (or impeach them if it is bad enough). If a corporation messes up we don't buy from them and the company goes bankrupt. If we mess up we get sued and pay for damages. If a police officer messes up... They
No unelected officer with the ability to kill without reason should be trusted. The American public should be very skeptical of all police officers and not think of them as "heroes" who have a need to break the law to catch "criminals".
Yes, there are some decent police officers, but every decent police officer should be A) elected and B) recorded and reported to every citizen.
If a cop is good, he will survive scrutiny and be elected. If a cop is bad, he loses his job and gets sued by the victims.