You just aren't thinking at the right level. Basic no longer means "good call quality" or "usable, featureful contact management". It means "can run apps and expose all data via an api". This is good and bad; you can get an app to do exactly what you want but you have to pay for it and you have to trust that the publisher isn't out to do nasty things to your phone. Take the Blackberry as the counterpoint... The RIM-sponsored app market is pitiful because, in part, the phones do almost everything the user could want. Apple couldn't boast about the 1,000,000 apps in it's app store if the phone did enough to not create the need for apps... And what do you think earns Apple more money, handset sales or app store sales?
Truly basic phones (large-face screens, number-only buttons, no features to do anything else) sell well with a certain group of people who no longer wish to learn the latest in technology on an annual basis, and they are fine at what they do. But of course that may be "too basic" for average tastes these days.
The problem is that they decidedly *aren't* fine at what they do considering the sliding scale of technology. Call quality has not gone up. Usable signal technology has not gone up. Battery life has only marginally gone up. Handset makers are focused on two thigns: 1) keeping up with the iphone, and 2) making a ton of money on super cheap dumbphone handsets. There exists no dumbphone handset that really excels from a perfection perspective, probably because the profit just isn't there.
Try selling "just raise taxes" as a way to solve the debt crisis of the federal government (or most of the states)... See how many Palin supporters you find agreeing with you.
She probably didn't. Oil prices went from ~$60/barrel to ~150/barrel, then down ~$60/barrel over the course of a year and a half. The prices climbed back up fairly quickly to the $80-$90/barrel range in late 2007. She might have trimmed a few programs here and there, but she likely didn't have to change much. The state probably didn't have enough time to really go crazy during the $150/barrel days, and the price recovered to a point higher than it was before the spike.
Beyond that, the state has 40 BILLION in cash on hand (the Permanent Fund) thanks to taxes on oil that they can't spend at anywhere near the rate they are collecting them. Try running a state with enough money rolling in to do WHATEVER you want PLUS a fund on hand to PAY people to stick around and keep their mouths shut about ecological problems. You will likely spend a lot of time watching TV and hunting moose...
The post I responded to claimed that she had nothing to do with Alaska's windfall. That seems factually incorrect, she may have negotiated new fees/taxes/payments and thereby increased that windfall.
Actually if you want to be perversely pedantic, the initial claim was that her work *as governor* had nothing to do with the state's budget being "balanced" by taxing the oil companies faster than they can actually spend the money, and in fact need to give it away just to not have too much cash on hand. In light of that you are indeed incorrect.
It's easy for us to dismiss them but that only adds to their persecution complex. I don't know what the answer is but I prefer to listen to them and then try to reason with them instead of writing them off. There's bigger numbers in different parts of the country and I'm not a fan of watching Glenn Beck prey on people who are suffering right now. It downright sickens me.
You know who ELSE preyed on the fears and angers of a hurting people? Hey, take a look at what I wrote on this chalkboard! It kind of, you know, spells it out for you...
He's anti-war. Anti-global US empire. Anti-US acting as world's policeman. And pro-balance the budget and pay off the enormous debt.
I'd like to clone him about 435 times and let them run the Congress.
Lots of people are those things. That doesn't make them electable. Being able to appeal to a majority of Americans, and follow through on promises with actions is what appeals to (or appalls, depending on the headwinds) the electorate. Ron Paul, a smart, selfless man may he be, is simply un-electable.
Palin just lost my vote. I liked her because she managed to balance the budget in Alaska and is supposedly a supporter of the Constitution.
You get that Alaska's budget is balanced thanks to huge oil revenues and a small population and given that the state needs to GIVE the money away just to not appear too self-interested that her "work" as governor has NOTHING to do with it, right? Her constitutional rhetoric is similarly disappointing.
She is unelectable, why the hell does the media pay so much attention to her? She has to be the most hated political figure in the US for the left/left leaning middle. The dumbest thing the republicans could possibly do is run her in 2012.
You made your own point. Almost everyone from the right and left agrees she is un-electable. However there is still a bitter minority clinging to her as the next great hope for a "tea-party takeover" of government's highest office. In essence, she is the new Ron Paul. He got a lot of worthless attention, why shouldn't she?
Specification... My car's tires are specified to 147mph. *Can* they go that fast?
Wake me up when there is an actual 2TB, 500MB/sec compact flash card out there. I will promptly curse you for requiring me to buy YET ANOTHER compact flash reader.
It's not new that our immune system has to be trained to work well. And only some kind of idiot doesn't make the link that keeping the kids away from every source of infection must result in an inferior immune system. Where's the news here?
What's new, it seems (even by reading the summary and not venturing near TFA) is that the story has NOTHING to do with "training" the immune system. Instead the study was on how endocrine inhibitors influenced immune system effectiveness. Strangely, they made no mention of the "kids who played with dirt vs. kids who were kept in a hermetic bubble" research that so many on slashdot are fond of reciting.
Except instead of your "hey wouldn't it be totally ironic if anti-bacterial soap made people SICKER!!??" observation, they have identified Triclosan and Bisphenol A as an endocrine disruptor with the specific function of inhibiting the immune system not by protecting it from exposure or selectively breeding resistant germs (the two popular "well duh" observations here) but by actually inhibiting the effectiveness of the immune system. Knowing this, as opposed to say "knowing that for sure, antibacterial soaps are totally bad because they don't let your body *learn* about bad germs!!!" is what leads to advances in medicine and pathogen control.
But that was a *bona-fide* act of terrorism thanks to the limp wristed liberal government! Surely we need more protectors to save us from exploding undies. To say otherwise would be unpatriotic!
I learned of all this by watching Fox news; didn't you?
So, when can I come by your house to print some documents on your printer? I'm sure you wouldn't mind, as refusing to let me use your resources to distribute my content would be "censorship" after all...
So, when I show up for the free printing party, hosted at a place that makes it's living off of printing, and they let all the white people in and I get turned away for being an anthropomorphic green robot, they were just making a "business" decision, right? Seems to me that plenty of "business decisions" were made in the run up to 1968 that later turned out to be generally accepted as *terrible* ones.
Yes, I get that this is headed for a Godwin. The owners of said "massive content distribution system" need to be publicly humiliated for such a blatantly anti-competitive move considering that the App Store isn't by ANY stretch *just* about Apple products; it's apparently about as much as they can get it to be about, except for their competition. The notion of "openness" is hereby worthless when advocated by Apple.
iFans would shit a golden brick if Microsoft banned iTunes from Windows 7, yet they apparently have no problem rationalizing the wielding of the mighty App Store banhammer against information about (not even an ad for) someone elses platform.
telling. very telling. Looks like I have one less reason to buy an iWhatever any time soon.
I was instantly reminded of the Graphene patent story of just a few weeks ago...
The guy told me, "We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it's really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us." That's a direct quote.'
How true it is. It's hard enough fighting this inside the US where the courts just might listen to you and your prior art. Try being a foreign national and saying some work you did but didn't bother promoting or protecting is now patented by a US company. They will laugh your limey ass all the way back across the pond. Not that I am saying it's right, but it's true.
I mean you got to take this in context, it's not like a hurricane hit them and flooded them with water. If only there could have been a lesson learned from 'Katrina'.
They did learn a lesson: make any problems sound like they were caused by the federal government! They put that expertise to use in the recent oil spill crisis, it worked GREAT.
That's all well and good, *if* you're married to your iPad. There are plenty of users (hundreds of millions in fact) that either lack the desire or the means to become attached to a large, non-pocketable gadget for the purposes of in-car entertainment. For them, clearly, a different solution is needed.
According to Wikipedia, 57 giant container ships (rated from 9,200 to 15,200 twenty-foot equivalent units) are plying the world's oceans.
If you are referring to the list of ships at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ships, I count 93 boats above the 9200 mark, and 238 above the 8000 mark. Also, the list only includes a handful of launches in 2010 so it is likely to be a lot longer at this point since larger ships are being produced as we speak (not to mention the list is in no way exhaustive as some sources of information can elude the maintainer of the list).
Can it play regular CDs or DVDs? Can you easily plug a thumb drive into it or otherwise upload additional information without needing a fast network connection or another computer running inside the car? There are lots of things tablets *don't* do well yet. Cellphone docks for cars have been around a long time, they probably do everything you want (except having an extra large screen) and have the added benefit of being more portable (trust me you really don't want to leave your ipad inside your car unless your car never leaves your garage)...
So not surprisingly, the iPad/Galaxy Tab are nice (as are car computers, and traditional stereos) but it's all up to the user to say what's important and what's not.
Guess I'll just use my old fashioned SLR and scan the developed photos. SLR is superior anyways, but that's another story
Good luck with that. You know it's a totalitarian state rivaling anything else you have heard of like Iran, cuba, north korea, etc. The difference is they have the money to take care of problems created by totalitarianism...
Kuwaiti police: I see you have a large professional camera, surely you know that those are prohibited unless you have a clearly displayed journalist ID badge
Photographer: Ah ha, but this is a regular film SLR camera and not a digital one like the ban said!
Kuwaiti police: (points automatic rifle) Hand over your camera and get in the back of the van
Only if by "very similar" you mean "entirely lacking the single defining characteristic".
Kuwaiti military guy with automatic rifle: I see you have a large camera, surely you know those are prohibited unless you have a journalist badge issued by the state
Amateur photographer: No sir, you see this isn't a DSLR this is a micro four thirds camera! The ban said D-S-L-R and this camera lacks a reflexive mirror! I am free to go, right?
Slashdot Mirror
You just aren't thinking at the right level. Basic no longer means "good call quality" or "usable, featureful contact management". It means "can run apps and expose all data via an api". This is good and bad; you can get an app to do exactly what you want but you have to pay for it and you have to trust that the publisher isn't out to do nasty things to your phone. Take the Blackberry as the counterpoint... The RIM-sponsored app market is pitiful because, in part, the phones do almost everything the user could want. Apple couldn't boast about the 1,000,000 apps in it's app store if the phone did enough to not create the need for apps... And what do you think earns Apple more money, handset sales or app store sales?
Truly basic phones (large-face screens, number-only buttons, no features to do anything else) sell well with a certain group of people who no longer wish to learn the latest in technology on an annual basis, and they are fine at what they do. But of course that may be "too basic" for average tastes these days.
The problem is that they decidedly *aren't* fine at what they do considering the sliding scale of technology. Call quality has not gone up. Usable signal technology has not gone up. Battery life has only marginally gone up. Handset makers are focused on two thigns: 1) keeping up with the iphone, and 2) making a ton of money on super cheap dumbphone handsets. There exists no dumbphone handset that really excels from a perfection perspective, probably because the profit just isn't there.
Change the topic? What a joke, read the first post that started this (entirely too large) thread. Come back when you get over yourself.
Try selling "just raise taxes" as a way to solve the debt crisis of the federal government (or most of the states)... See how many Palin supporters you find agreeing with you.
She probably didn't. Oil prices went from ~$60/barrel to ~150/barrel, then down ~$60/barrel over the course of a year and a half. The prices climbed back up fairly quickly to the $80-$90/barrel range in late 2007. She might have trimmed a few programs here and there, but she likely didn't have to change much. The state probably didn't have enough time to really go crazy during the $150/barrel days, and the price recovered to a point higher than it was before the spike.
Beyond that, the state has 40 BILLION in cash on hand (the Permanent Fund) thanks to taxes on oil that they can't spend at anywhere near the rate they are collecting them. Try running a state with enough money rolling in to do WHATEVER you want PLUS a fund on hand to PAY people to stick around and keep their mouths shut about ecological problems. You will likely spend a lot of time watching TV and hunting moose...
The post I responded to claimed that she had nothing to do with Alaska's windfall. That seems factually incorrect, she may have negotiated new fees/taxes/payments and thereby increased that windfall.
Actually if you want to be perversely pedantic, the initial claim was that her work *as governor* had nothing to do with the state's budget being "balanced" by taxing the oil companies faster than they can actually spend the money, and in fact need to give it away just to not have too much cash on hand. In light of that you are indeed incorrect.
But never mind, I love pedantry. Carry on.
It's easy for us to dismiss them but that only adds to their persecution complex. I don't know what the answer is but I prefer to listen to them and then try to reason with them instead of writing them off. There's bigger numbers in different parts of the country and I'm not a fan of watching Glenn Beck prey on people who are suffering right now. It downright sickens me.
You know who ELSE preyed on the fears and angers of a hurting people? Hey, take a look at what I wrote on this chalkboard! It kind of, you know, spells it out for you...
Ron Paul is worthless?
He's anti-war.
Anti-global US empire.
Anti-US acting as world's policeman.
And pro-balance the budget and pay off the enormous debt.
I'd like to clone him about 435 times and let them run the Congress.
Lots of people are those things. That doesn't make them electable. Being able to appeal to a majority of Americans, and follow through on promises with actions is what appeals to (or appalls, depending on the headwinds) the electorate. Ron Paul, a smart, selfless man may he be, is simply un-electable.
Palin just lost my vote. I liked her because she managed to balance the budget in Alaska and is supposedly a supporter of the Constitution.
You get that Alaska's budget is balanced thanks to huge oil revenues and a small population and given that the state needs to GIVE the money away just to not appear too self-interested that her "work" as governor has NOTHING to do with it, right? Her constitutional rhetoric is similarly disappointing.
She is unelectable, why the hell does the media pay so much attention to her? She has to be the most hated political figure in the US for the left/left leaning middle. The dumbest thing the republicans could possibly do is run her in 2012.
You made your own point. Almost everyone from the right and left agrees she is un-electable. However there is still a bitter minority clinging to her as the next great hope for a "tea-party takeover" of government's highest office. In essence, she is the new Ron Paul. He got a lot of worthless attention, why shouldn't she?
Specification... My car's tires are specified to 147mph. *Can* they go that fast?
Wake me up when there is an actual 2TB, 500MB/sec compact flash card out there. I will promptly curse you for requiring me to buy YET ANOTHER compact flash reader.
OMFG I don't think I want to wait till Thursday
"...if it wasn't for disappointment,
I wouldn't have any appointments!"
It's not new that our immune system has to be trained to work well. And only some kind of idiot doesn't make the link that keeping the kids away from every source of infection must result in an inferior immune system. Where's the news here?
What's new, it seems (even by reading the summary and not venturing near TFA) is that the story has NOTHING to do with "training" the immune system. Instead the study was on how endocrine inhibitors influenced immune system effectiveness. Strangely, they made no mention of the "kids who played with dirt vs. kids who were kept in a hermetic bubble" research that so many on slashdot are fond of reciting.
Except instead of your "hey wouldn't it be totally ironic if anti-bacterial soap made people SICKER!!??" observation, they have identified Triclosan and Bisphenol A as an endocrine disruptor with the specific function of inhibiting the immune system not by protecting it from exposure or selectively breeding resistant germs (the two popular "well duh" observations here) but by actually inhibiting the effectiveness of the immune system. Knowing this, as opposed to say "knowing that for sure, antibacterial soaps are totally bad because they don't let your body *learn* about bad germs!!!" is what leads to advances in medicine and pathogen control.
I'm not a doctor but I appreciate what they do.
American and Non-American? Why word it like that? I interpet that as "with us, or against us."
Oh, sorry, the confusion is terribly embarrassing; you must have missed it when we *actually* said that... http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/
But that was a *bona-fide* act of terrorism thanks to the limp wristed liberal government! Surely we need more protectors to save us from exploding undies. To say otherwise would be unpatriotic!
I learned of all this by watching Fox news; didn't you?
So, when can I come by your house to print some documents on your printer? I'm sure you wouldn't mind, as refusing to let me use your resources to distribute my content would be "censorship" after all...
So, when I show up for the free printing party, hosted at a place that makes it's living off of printing, and they let all the white people in and I get turned away for being an anthropomorphic green robot, they were just making a "business" decision, right? Seems to me that plenty of "business decisions" were made in the run up to 1968 that later turned out to be generally accepted as *terrible* ones.
Yes, I get that this is headed for a Godwin. The owners of said "massive content distribution system" need to be publicly humiliated for such a blatantly anti-competitive move considering that the App Store isn't by ANY stretch *just* about Apple products; it's apparently about as much as they can get it to be about, except for their competition. The notion of "openness" is hereby worthless when advocated by Apple.
Or Microsoft denying itunes or safari on Windows
THIS-Y THIS THIS.
iFans would shit a golden brick if Microsoft banned iTunes from Windows 7, yet they apparently have no problem rationalizing the wielding of the mighty App Store banhammer against information about (not even an ad for) someone elses platform.
telling. very telling. Looks like I have one less reason to buy an iWhatever any time soon.
I was instantly reminded of the Graphene patent story of just a few weeks ago...
The guy told me, "We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it's really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us." That's a direct quote.'
How true it is. It's hard enough fighting this inside the US where the courts just might listen to you and your prior art. Try being a foreign national and saying some work you did but didn't bother promoting or protecting is now patented by a US company. They will laugh your limey ass all the way back across the pond. Not that I am saying it's right, but it's true.
I mean you got to take this in context, it's not like a hurricane hit them and flooded them with water. If only there could have been a lesson learned from 'Katrina'.
They did learn a lesson: make any problems sound like they were caused by the federal government! They put that expertise to use in the recent oil spill crisis, it worked GREAT.
That's all well and good, *if* you're married to your iPad. There are plenty of users (hundreds of millions in fact) that either lack the desire or the means to become attached to a large, non-pocketable gadget for the purposes of in-car entertainment. For them, clearly, a different solution is needed.
According to Wikipedia, 57 giant container ships (rated from 9,200 to 15,200 twenty-foot equivalent units) are plying the world's oceans.
If you are referring to the list of ships at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ships, I count 93 boats above the 9200 mark, and 238 above the 8000 mark. Also, the list only includes a handful of launches in 2010 so it is likely to be a lot longer at this point since larger ships are being produced as we speak (not to mention the list is in no way exhaustive as some sources of information can elude the maintainer of the list).
Can it play regular CDs or DVDs? Can you easily plug a thumb drive into it or otherwise upload additional information without needing a fast network connection or another computer running inside the car? There are lots of things tablets *don't* do well yet. Cellphone docks for cars have been around a long time, they probably do everything you want (except having an extra large screen) and have the added benefit of being more portable (trust me you really don't want to leave your ipad inside your car unless your car never leaves your garage)...
So not surprisingly, the iPad/Galaxy Tab are nice (as are car computers, and traditional stereos) but it's all up to the user to say what's important and what's not.
Guess I'll just use my old fashioned SLR and scan the developed photos. SLR is superior anyways, but that's another story
Good luck with that. You know it's a totalitarian state rivaling anything else you have heard of like Iran, cuba, north korea, etc. The difference is they have the money to take care of problems created by totalitarianism...
Kuwaiti police: I see you have a large professional camera, surely you know that those are prohibited unless you have a clearly displayed journalist ID badge
Photographer: Ah ha, but this is a regular film SLR camera and not a digital one like the ban said!
Kuwaiti police: (points automatic rifle) Hand over your camera and get in the back of the van
Only if by "very similar" you mean "entirely lacking the single defining characteristic".
Kuwaiti military guy with automatic rifle: I see you have a large camera, surely you know those are prohibited unless you have a journalist badge issued by the state
Amateur photographer: No sir, you see this isn't a DSLR this is a micro four thirds camera! The ban said D-S-L-R and this camera lacks a reflexive mirror! I am free to go, right?
Kuwaiti military guy: right this way sir...