Do you really think the annoying, flashing, pop-up, not relevant to your interests, ads are coming from the companies that are tracking you? Personally, I think the companies that are willing to throw that kind of garbage into our faces are not the ones that spend money to try and figure out what interests us.
What it seems to me that we have here is a huge tempest over a badly worded statement from one of Apple's PR flacks.
The statement in question says that if content for an iOS app is available for purchase outside of the app that it must also be available for purchase inside of the app and through Apple's in-app purchasing framework. What I think it was meant to say is that if content is available for purchase via in-app purchase it must go through Apple's framework, and possibly also that if there is an in-app purchase mechanism that all content that is available for purchase outside of the app must also be available through the in-app mechanism.
I'll tell you why I think the above, it's because of the actions that Apple has taken more than the words they have spoken.
This was all set off by Sony reporting that their app was rejected because of offering an in-app purchase mechanism that did not use Apple's framework. This was a clear violation of the developer guidelines and also clearly done at least in part to bypass Apple's fees. An additional data point is that Apple has approved Amazon's Kindle app and that at the time it was approved much press was made over the fact that Amazon had to redirect people outside of the app to make new purchases (to the Amazon website through Safari), rather than host the Amazon web pages in an in-app browser (which many apps have), in order to comply with Apple's rules and be able to both avoid Apple's fees and avoid Apple's need to approve every individual thing that might be sold for the Kindle (app).
Appleinsider reported that Apple has said that the Kindle app is not in danger. They don't seem to have attributed this headline to a quote that specifically backs it up, so it may just be an overly zealous apple-friendly interpretation of the part of the PR statement that says they (Apple) have not changed any rules. It's hard, therefore, to let this lend too much credence to the argument one way or the other, but is nonetheless part of what went into my thinking.
In the absence of further clarifications from Apple, either in statements about the policy or in rejecting the existing Kindle app, I'm going to go with Apple's (lawyer vetted) written app guidelines and actions over the possibly-off-the-cuff comment of one of their PR minions.
There's nothing to see here, nothing has changed. Sony is whining. Apple is still a little evil, but still makes incredible consumer products.
There's a reason that news is on 24/7, because the entire world is now used to "instant" news, and if you're not fresh as of 24 seconds ago, you are an aging dinosaur.
As a "consumer" of news, I can't keep up with my news provider's constant feed; I actually appreciate the services of an editor that will cull through yesterdays events and let me know what were the most important stories. That way I don't have to read everything and then have to read it again as they update and correct all the shoddy reporting that the "instant" news cycle has made the norm.
Instant news is the informational equivalent of thinking that quantity is a substitute for quality.
FOSS has not built any desktop systems as useful as OS/X. Android vs iPhone is still an on going battle but I would put them as equally as useful of not as polished.
And therein lies one of the big failures of FOSS, failure to recognize that if something is more "polished" then it is more useful.
The top 1% pays less than 42% of the taxes. They can afford to pay for tax experst to find tax havens and find ways to get through the loopholes that save them from paying some of the taxes.
It's why any talk of a flat tax is violently fought against. it would require the rich to actually pay their taxes, and that just wont do.
Ah, you've fallen into their trap of conflating the flatness of the tax rate chart with the presence or absence of loopholes. I assure you, the goal of the rich is to flatten the tax (ideally to a single rate) but to still keep all their cherished deductions and loopholes.
Never forget that we really are engaged in class warfare in the U.S. and that ever since Reagan was in office the rich have been winning.
For the vast majority of (not-professional) shooting, the sensors in DSLRs these days are overkill.
Wrong. A bigger better sensor is never overkill. Every geek has lusted over the scene in Blade Runner where Deckhart sticks a photo in a scanner and "enhances" his way into revealing plot clues. Or countless movies where the orbital spy camera zooms in to read a license plate. When it comes time to crop or zoom, there is no amount of detail that is too much.
Beta is supposed to mean feature-complete (for the version that it represents) but probably still buggy or lacking in performance. Alpha is supposed to mean not yet feature complete, which is what I interpret "something is missing" to mean.
Of course I know that language evolves but we still need terms for what Beta and Alpha originally meant and since I've seen nothing to take their place I'm going to continue to be one of those old curmudgeons that insists on them having their old meanings. This is one area in which Google is screwing things up and I'd really appreciate it if they'd stop.
As someone who does not believe in the magic bearded man in the sky and has been pestered for years by those who do, I say to them: please stop. It got old a long time ago, and nothing you say will make me worry about being punished by a supernatural booger man for my failure to adhere to modern human interpretations of ancient human originated scripts.
Don't tell the people here on Slashdot, tell the people who are pestering you. If they're friends or family of yours, they should be willing to let the matter be in order to keep the relationship. That doesn't mean that they'll never mention God in your presence, since God (whether God exists or not) is an important part of their lives, but pestering and pressuring you to convert or believe or what have you should stop (or at the very least become very intermittent). The key, though, is to actually confront them with the issue instead of sitting there looking uncomfortable or peeved. Tell them that you are not interested in God or their religion, you do not believe, you will never believe, and if they cannot respect that and stop trying to get you to believe then you will spend your time with other people who will.
Well if the poster complaining about being bothered is anything like me, it's not his friends or family that is the problem, so not "hanging out" with them won't solve the problem. The problem is that the pestering comes in the form of legislation (like California's Proposition 8) and in school board rulings and in countless other little ways that we have to waste our time, money and energy fighting against.
Agreed, I could've fallen for this myself. I got a ticket about a year ago in a city I didn't live in, and lo and behold, it had a website on it for paying online. Ticket looked official, but on second thought, I couldn't be sure, having never seen one from that city before. I blindly typed in the URL... I'd like to believe I would have picked off a phishing scam, but still, I took the first step.
Which suggests the best way to distribute these might be to go near some touristy place and put these on cars with out of state plates.
It'd be nice if one could upgrade their existing purchased DRM'd songs for the non-DRM.
According to the keynote, this will be easily done. When they went DRM-free for the EMI catalog, iTunes offered an option to pay the (then) 30 cent price difference per track and upgrade all songs that you had previously bought.
I guess I'm screwed if I want to write an application just for my own use? The choice seems to be: write it and distribute it to everyone, or get stuffed.
Actually the choice would seem to be to register as a developer (for free) and then use the SDK to write your app. It's a little unclear from the coverage that I've read if you might only be able to use your in-development app while the phone is tethered to a Mac running XCode, but that seems an unlikely scenario.
Re:please stop with the Ocean Uranium Crap
on
Google Goes Green
·
· Score: 1
How many parts per million of uranium is there in sea water, eh? Now, take the number of parts of Uranium you will need to run a reactor. Multiple those two numbers, and you will get the volume of water you will need to boil off to get the uranium you need for ONE reactor. Now, take that number and multiply it by the thousands and you will see that the the "Uranium from the Ocean" meme is just a load of impractical bullshit that just makes the pronuclear side come off like a bunch of stupid moonbats. You'd have to process the volume of water the Rhine dumps in a year to get the Uranium for one reactor. Where will all that water vapour go? In the air?
I have no idea of the numbers that you're asking for and therefore have no idea of the practicality of what I'm suggesting here, but, hey, I'm just throwing out a big picture idea here and will leave it up to people with more specialized knowledge to poke holes in it...
One of the big challenges for the near-to-midterm future is getting enough potable water to meet the needs of modern society, so you don't blow off the water vapor into the air, you capture it cool it down and put it into the municipal system. You get you're uranium (to power the plant whose "waste" heat you're using to boil off the water in the first place, you get clean water, and I imagine some of the left over salt can be used in one of those fancy new solar plants that concentrate the sun to melt salt and run an electric generator (maybe Stirling Engine based, I don't know).
It seems like a generally synergistic system to me.
Since AT&T has been spying on everyone since spring of 2000, why not ask them for copies of Whitehouse and NRC.com emails?
Whoever modded this "funny" clearly doesn't "get" it.
+5 "insightful (and scary as hell)", not "funny".
Just because something is insightful and scary doesn't mean it's not also funny. Haven't you ever heard someone complain that if they didn't laugh they'd have to cry?
It always makes me recoil in perplexity when I hear someone saying that a non-mutilated penis is a 'gross looking wiener'. It's a kind of Only In America statement. Think about if it was customary to cut off all girls' hair all the time; society would be saying girls with hair were 'gross'. Does that sound retarded?
Actually, here in the U.S. I've heard plenty of comments about women being gross when they don't shave their armpits. To a lot of Americans many natural things are considered gross and wrong. Sadly, I think that says a lot about us.
I don't understand why such a large portion of the Church is opposed to science and evolution.
[...]
So many of my fellow Christians seem to think that evolution is an attack on us and our beliefs. It's not. It is simply the result of rational consideration of the facts at hand.
[...]
They also make the mistake of lumping everything they disagree with under the name "evolution". I've heard the Big Bang mentioned in discussions of evolution, even though it's part of a completely different field of science.
The reason so many of them are opposed to science is that they have a gut understanding that ultimately religion cannot stand in the face of science. Arguably, all of human advancement has been due to rational thought, so we can expect that rational thought will continue to play a larger and larger role in the human condition. The realm of rational thought is science. The realm of religion is faith, and faith is irrational thought. In essence, science is not an attack on their beliefs, but rather it is an attack on all beliefs that are not supported by evidence. When it comes to beliefs that are not supported by evidence, belief in God is right there at the top of the list.
Given all of that, I don't find it in the least surprising that many of the minds that are capable of accepting belief without evidence are also capable of conflating wildly different scientific disciplines. Weakness of the mind will show itself in many ways.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that belief in God implies weakness of the mind, I'm saying that weakness of the mind is likely to lead to acceptance of the unsupported allegations of religion. It's perfectly possible, also, for brilliant minds to be brainwashed into believing the unsupported allegations of religion.
[...] which becomes a vicious circle. (Can't play to gain rank because your rank isn't high enough.)
Just to be pedantic, that's not a vicious circle, that's a catch-22. A vicious circle would be if playing caused both the requirements to raise and your rank to raise but it raised the requirements faster. Now, because of the catch-22 you can't have that happen, but if the requirements started low enough that you could play, the vicious circle would eventually cause that to change. So in that sense, a vicious circle can lead to a catch-22.
When computers evolve into a more transparent role in our life, layering this digital world on our physical world will be next.
I'm replying to this way late, so I don't know if you'll ever read this or not, but you should pick up a copy of Vernor Vinge's latest book, "Rainbows End," which came out last May. It does an amazing job of imagining a world in which computers augment our physical world (the display is built in to contact lenses).
There's several Slashot [sic] users that one can count on only seeing when there's some bad Apple news to spin.
I agree with most all of your post, but on this point I'd like to make it clear that there are Slashdot users that can be counted on both pro and con. Every story brings out the apologists, the attackers and the defenders, as well as both the informed and the uniformed.
Spelling and grammar matter if I was a journalist, since I am not, it simply isnt a big deal except to nazi's like yourself.
You are attempting to communicate through a written medium. Unless you are just posting for self gratification and don't care if anyone reads or understands what you are saying, than spelling and grammar do matter.
I'm fairly certain that Blizzard has not written sex into the actual game, so therefore it doesn't officially exist. You can't have a gay or straight character -- you can't have sex at all.
Being Gay (or any variation thereon) does not require having sex. It is a condition of interest and desire, not of acts. It is separate from sex in the same way that love is separate from sex.
I have a couple of LaCie disks that are chained together with FW800. They connect to my PowerBook via a single FW800 cable, and it is noticeably faster than using FW400 (which they support, but only by limiting me to a single disk, since they only have one FW400 port).
I believe you're wrong in this. I have two external LaCie drives which, like you mention, have two FW800 ports and one FW400 port each. Since I was considering buying one of the new iMacs, I was concerned about daisy-chaining them. I hooked the first one up to a FW400 port on my system and the next one up to the first one with a FW800 cable (and then, for good measure, hooked an iSight to the second drive's FW400 port). Everything worked.
So you don't need any special cables or converters, but you will be limited to FW400 speeds.
Slashdot Mirror
I have physical discs of 3D movies. I can no longer buy a new TV that will show them in 3D. Nothing is safe.
Do you really think the annoying, flashing, pop-up, not relevant to your interests, ads are coming from the companies that are tracking you? Personally, I think the companies that are willing to throw that kind of garbage into our faces are not the ones that spend money to try and figure out what interests us.
Purity of essence is the most important thing.
Then get an iPhone 4, go to the app store and buy iMovie, for 5 bucks.
What it seems to me that we have here is a huge tempest over a badly worded statement from one of Apple's PR flacks.
The statement in question says that if content for an iOS app is available for purchase outside of the app that it must also be available for purchase inside of the app and through Apple's in-app purchasing framework. What I think it was meant to say is that if content is available for purchase via in-app purchase it must go through Apple's framework, and possibly also that if there is an in-app purchase mechanism that all content that is available for purchase outside of the app must also be available through the in-app mechanism.
I'll tell you why I think the above, it's because of the actions that Apple has taken more than the words they have spoken.
This was all set off by Sony reporting that their app was rejected because of offering an in-app purchase mechanism that did not use Apple's framework. This was a clear violation of the developer guidelines and also clearly done at least in part to bypass Apple's fees. An additional data point is that Apple has approved Amazon's Kindle app and that at the time it was approved much press was made over the fact that Amazon had to redirect people outside of the app to make new purchases (to the Amazon website through Safari), rather than host the Amazon web pages in an in-app browser (which many apps have), in order to comply with Apple's rules and be able to both avoid Apple's fees and avoid Apple's need to approve every individual thing that might be sold for the Kindle (app).
Appleinsider reported that Apple has said that the Kindle app is not in danger. They don't seem to have attributed this headline to a quote that specifically backs it up, so it may just be an overly zealous apple-friendly interpretation of the part of the PR statement that says they (Apple) have not changed any rules. It's hard, therefore, to let this lend too much credence to the argument one way or the other, but is nonetheless part of what went into my thinking.
In the absence of further clarifications from Apple, either in statements about the policy or in rejecting the existing Kindle app, I'm going to go with Apple's (lawyer vetted) written app guidelines and actions over the possibly-off-the-cuff comment of one of their PR minions.
There's nothing to see here, nothing has changed. Sony is whining. Apple is still a little evil, but still makes incredible consumer products.
As a "consumer" of news, I can't keep up with my news provider's constant feed; I actually appreciate the services of an editor that will cull through yesterdays events and let me know what were the most important stories. That way I don't have to read everything and then have to read it again as they update and correct all the shoddy reporting that the "instant" news cycle has made the norm.
Instant news is the informational equivalent of thinking that quantity is a substitute for quality.
And therein lies one of the big failures of FOSS, failure to recognize that if something is more "polished" then it is more useful.
Ah, you've fallen into their trap of conflating the flatness of the tax rate chart with the presence or absence of loopholes. I assure you, the goal of the rich is to flatten the tax (ideally to a single rate) but to still keep all their cherished deductions and loopholes.
Never forget that we really are engaged in class warfare in the U.S. and that ever since Reagan was in office the rich have been winning.
Wrong. A bigger better sensor is never overkill. Every geek has lusted over the scene in Blade Runner where Deckhart sticks a photo in a scanner and "enhances" his way into revealing plot clues. Or countless movies where the orbital spy camera zooms in to read a license plate. When it comes time to crop or zoom, there is no amount of detail that is too much.
Beta is supposed to mean feature-complete (for the version that it represents) but probably still buggy or lacking in performance. Alpha is supposed to mean not yet feature complete, which is what I interpret "something is missing" to mean.
Of course I know that language evolves but we still need terms for what Beta and Alpha originally meant and since I've seen nothing to take their place I'm going to continue to be one of those old curmudgeons that insists on them having their old meanings. This is one area in which Google is screwing things up and I'd really appreciate it if they'd stop.
Well if the poster complaining about being bothered is anything like me, it's not his friends or family that is the problem, so not "hanging out" with them won't solve the problem. The problem is that the pestering comes in the form of legislation (like California's Proposition 8) and in school board rulings and in countless other little ways that we have to waste our time, money and energy fighting against.
Which suggests the best way to distribute these might be to go near some touristy place and put these on cars with out of state plates.
There will be three prices: $.69, $.99, and $1.29.
According to the keynote, there will be more tracks priced at $.69 than at $1.29.
According to the keynote, this will be easily done. When they went DRM-free for the EMI catalog, iTunes offered an option to pay the (then) 30 cent price difference per track and upgrade all songs that you had previously bought.
I have no idea of the numbers that you're asking for and therefore have no idea of the practicality of what I'm suggesting here, but, hey, I'm just throwing out a big picture idea here and will leave it up to people with more specialized knowledge to poke holes in it...
One of the big challenges for the near-to-midterm future is getting enough potable water to meet the needs of modern society, so you don't blow off the water vapor into the air, you capture it cool it down and put it into the municipal system. You get you're uranium (to power the plant whose "waste" heat you're using to boil off the water in the first place, you get clean water, and I imagine some of the left over salt can be used in one of those fancy new solar plants that concentrate the sun to melt salt and run an electric generator (maybe Stirling Engine based, I don't know).
It seems like a generally synergistic system to me.
Just because something is insightful and scary doesn't mean it's not also funny. Haven't you ever heard someone complain that if they didn't laugh they'd have to cry?
The reason so many of them are opposed to science is that they have a gut understanding that ultimately religion cannot stand in the face of science. Arguably, all of human advancement has been due to rational thought, so we can expect that rational thought will continue to play a larger and larger role in the human condition. The realm of rational thought is science. The realm of religion is faith, and faith is irrational thought. In essence, science is not an attack on their beliefs, but rather it is an attack on all beliefs that are not supported by evidence. When it comes to beliefs that are not supported by evidence, belief in God is right there at the top of the list.
Given all of that, I don't find it in the least surprising that many of the minds that are capable of accepting belief without evidence are also capable of conflating wildly different scientific disciplines. Weakness of the mind will show itself in many ways.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that belief in God implies weakness of the mind, I'm saying that weakness of the mind is likely to lead to acceptance of the unsupported allegations of religion. It's perfectly possible, also, for brilliant minds to be brainwashed into believing the unsupported allegations of religion.
I'm replying to this way late, so I don't know if you'll ever read this or not, but you should pick up a copy of Vernor Vinge's latest book, "Rainbows End," which came out last May. It does an amazing job of imagining a world in which computers augment our physical world (the display is built in to contact lenses).
I agree with most all of your post, but on this point I'd like to make it clear that there are Slashdot users that can be counted on both pro and con. Every story brings out the apologists, the attackers and the defenders, as well as both the informed and the uniformed.
Being Gay (or any variation thereon) does not require having sex. It is a condition of interest and desire, not of acts. It is separate from sex in the same way that love is separate from sex.
So you don't need any special cables or converters, but you will be limited to FW400 speeds.