That so-called "number 1 reason" they dumped google maps in favor of their own application is a feature that isn't even available on the iPhone 4. Their 3-d flyover view isn't available on it either.
It seems strange that they would have bothered to even make iOS6 compatible with older phones at all when what was evidently a key factor in their decision to change the OS mapping application will not work on such devices.
Your initial point seems to take exception to my views, and yet you conclude with a point that is the very reason why I would expect such a response time in the first place.
You seem to want to start an argument over something that it's quite apparent that we completely agree upon.
You may be right about Silicon Valley, but personally I'm not a big fan of at-will employment, because it can easily turn employees into something very expendable to employers (contributing to higher degrees of unemployment among qualified workers), and offers absolutely no benefits to any potential employee which are not already guaranteed by things such as wage laws and prohibitions against slavery.
Sure you can fire anybody anytime you like... but in some jurisdictions, you just either have to give them a certain amount of notice of such action (where I live, not counting a probationary period, the law requires one week's notice up until the end of their first year with the employer, two week's notice after the end of the first year, and after three years, one week's notice for every full year worked to a maximum of 8 weeks notice) or else the employer must pay them out in lieu of said notice. If you're doing this to all of your employees at the same time, it could get expensive.
Personally, I find that even 10" readers aren't quite large enough, actually (although admittedly, they come pretty close).
What would be much better, IMO, is a full A4-sized or letter-sized display for a reader (which would be a 14" diagonal). While probably unnecessarily large for strictly narrative reading, it'd be an ideal size for textbooks and other reference material.
All it would need after that are flicker-free fast page refresh times (where you cannot perceive the time it takes to switch pages), throw in a full color display, and add genuinely intuitive and useful navigation functionality, and you'd have something that comes pretty close to perfect.
I use a projector to watch television instead of owning a TV with a built-in tuner. If this device were built into the cable decoder box, then more than half the time it wouldn't work at all for me. My cable decoder box is positioned quite far off to one side of the actual viewing area, and not anywhere near the actual screen. If this device were attached to the decoder box then most of the time, I expect it wouldn't see anyone at all unless somebody always sat way over on to one side of the regular viewing area.
Most professional book publishers do not use ink, they use toner. Which does not bleed unless the printer was faulty.
The highest resolution electronic display devices commercially available right now are in the vicinity of about 350 dpi. At a reading distance of 12 to 18", admittedly, this is well within an order of magnitude of the actual optical capability of the human eye based on rod and cone density. Laser printers with better than 10 times that resolution are not infrequently used for commercial production.
Whats more is [on a high resolution display] that I can read much smaller text from a greater distance without having to focus
I find exactly the opposite, actually. I regularly find myself having to zoom in to a page to view it on a retina ipad when reading on it, resulting in less of a page's contents actually being visible at one time, and requiring me to scroll, which constantly redirects my attention from simply reading the content.
I would seriously love to replace my many physical reference books with electronic ones, but to this day there is still no solution that meets all of the technical challenges involved which make it just as easy and quick to use as physical books are. I expect we may see something viable emerge within the next one or two decades, however.
But reading reference books on a kindle sucks, where one is often needing to quickly flip to different parts of the book that may not be connected by actual hyperlinks within it, or if you are searching for a particular full-page picture.
If actually reading anything but fiction on an electronic device was just as convenient as reading a physical book, where you can flip forward or backward an arbitrary number of pages entirely at your own discretion, it might replace them. Not before.
But they both *require* a form of user interaction. A link requires clicking, this notice requires scrolling. What they've done here arguably even worse, in terms of complying with the spirit of the court order, because it comes across as a deliberate effort to conceal it, defeating the very reason that Apple was ordered explicitly to put it on their home page in the first place.
It required that it be on their "home page" The obvious subtext here is that the intent is such that user interaction would not be required (clicking a link, to give an example) in order to see the notice... if that were not the case, the requirement that it be on their home page, explicitly, would not exist, and they simply would have made the requirement that it be *easily accessible* from their home page
While yes, they do have something on their home page about this, it is *NOT* positioned such that it does not require user interaction to view. They are resizing the contents of their page to always keep the footer of the browser window below the bottom of the window, which quite strongly comes across as an even more deliberate attempt to hide it than a plain old link on their home page.
This isn't an issue if merely *might* having to scroll... it is an issue of *ALWAYS* having to scroll. Apple is using javascript to resize the objects and spacing of the objects on their home page so that the message is always just below the bottom of the user's browser window, regardless of the user's browser window size.
Since it previously was the case that a user was *not* required to scroll to see the footer contents as long as their browser window was large enough (it's worth noting that they are sharing this resizing behavior on other country's home pages, but again, this was not the behavior it had last week), this is quite clearly a deliberate effort on Apple's part to keep the message from view, and defeats much of the intent behind the notion of Apple being required to put it on their home page, since it *always* requires some explicit user interaction to view.
Although it is definitely on their home page, It is still effectively just as "invisible" as it was by requiring the link be clicked, because clicking the link requires some user interaction, just as scrolling does. Because Apple has configured the page so that regardless of the size of the browser window, the statement they were asked to put on their home page *always* requires the user to scroll in order to see it, it's not that conceptually different from if it actually were on a different page.
Their only out in this case is that they complied with the literal requirements of the court order. It remains to be seen if it this satisfies the court.
Apple has arranged the flow of their site so as to make it impossible to see the notice without scrolling, regardless of how tall your browser window is made to be.
That comment bothered me too, because even so... I think changing the criteria to preventing more would still be help, because then new ones wouldn't keep getting added in, and making the problem even worse.
Solve the problem one step at a time. The first step would be to prohibit algorithms from future patentability. The second is to examine on a case-by-case basis the merits of existing ones, as the need actually arises.
It's worth pointing out, however, that even the worst president was still voted for by the majority.
Ultimately, a huge factor when a person gets into power at all that a lot of people don't agree with is because they compromise on their own values when it comes to voting.
"Compromising is worth avoiding...." Why? You'd still be avoiding voting for the guy you really don't agree with if you voted independent, so why bother "compromising"? In the end, if you chose to go for 80 instead of 96, you'd still be voting for someone who doesn't represent your values as much as an alternative candidate. It follows that if the best reason that anyone has for doing that is because they just don't want the other guy to win, then they are defeating the entire point of democracy, which is to elect somebody who best represents the values of the voters. Instead, the election race becomes nothing more than a childish popularity contest, with very little bearing on whether the elected candidate actually represents what the voters desire.
This isn't school. It's not a quiz... there's no bonus marks for voting for the winner, nor are there penalties for voting for somebody who doesn't win. The point is to exercise your right to express your own values, and to be part of the democratic process. Even if that person doesn't win, the process still ensures that whoever does win will actually represent what most voters decided. And if the guy you really can't stand wins, will it really be the end of the world? If everybody who voted for somebody who didn't get in was that convinced it was going to be so terrible, there would be a mass exodus from America every 4 years, as all the people who didn't vote for the winner just up and decide they can't handle living in the country anymore.
Of course, the kind of voting practice that I'm advocating looks at a much bigger picture than just a single government term anyways... more like on the order of about a generation or two. It's not likely to make a significant different initially, but as more people do it, the notion that there really are more than two choices will catch on, and will forever change how the public votes... and we can do our part today to give our children, and our children's children, the benefit of increased choice.
What I can't help but find funny is that so many Americans, like yourself, actually do identify most strongly with an independent. But they perceive voting that way as "wasting" their vote. Of course, what that implies is that a good percentage of people who don't vote for the winner have "wasted" their vote. It's a very self centered notion, however... Every vote counts, and the winner reflects the votes of the majority. If you weren't among the ones who voted for the winner, what difference should that actually make in how you live your life for the next 4 years?
To be frank, I expect that if everybody who actually thought this way decided to abandon their wholly irrational fear of "wasting" their vote, and genuinely vote with their conscience, although I can't say I could seriously imagine an independent winning this election, the impact iut would have on the election outcome would certainly forever change the almost inherent belief in a strict dichotomy when it comes to federal elections in the USA, as more people would wake up to the fact that there really are more than two viable ways to vote, and the following election would be *VERY* different, indeed.
The very notion of feeling that you have to choose "the other guy" says that your whole perception of a democratic voting system is flawed.
Vote for the candidate who genuinely best represents your own ideals. If the best reason you can come up with for not voting for a lesser known candidate who you can identify well with is that you figure he doesn't have a hope in hell of winning, then one of two things is occurring:
1. You lack confidence in a democratic voting system to adequately represent the views of its population, or else you believe that not enough people share the same values as you to make a difference. The former is only true when people don't vote in a manner consistent with their actual views (which is exactly what you'd be doing yourself if the only reason you had to vote for "the other guy" was because you didn't want his opponent to win). While those who fall into the latter category are selling out their votes for a candidate that they don't even want to support just to get their vote over with, and are, to be quite frank, wholly counterproductive to the democratic process, because the winner of such an election can rarely, if ever, actually reflect the ideals and views of a majority of the voters.
2. You are afraid of being wrong... or different.
The first is either hypocritical or lazy. The second is just plain cowardice.
Also, surveillance cameras in public places are installed there under the authorization of people who have been democratically elected by society to preserve the best interests of that society.
An arbitrary person pointing a camera at you is somebody you do not know, and you have had absolutely no involvement in getting them to point that camera at you.
In a democratic society, however, the government is elected by the people, and for their term is entrusted by them to preserve the best interests of that society. This is entirely different from some random person you meet on the street, and have no prior connection to.
While admittedly, possibility for corruption in the government exists, and to use it for no less honorable purposes than somebody who had no business recording you at all, at least with the government, you've had some say on what sort of people would be monitoring those cameras, where you have absolutely no say at all on the type of people you might meet on the street.
Slashdot Mirror
That so-called "number 1 reason" they dumped google maps in favor of their own application is a feature that isn't even available on the iPhone 4. Their 3-d flyover view isn't available on it either.
It seems strange that they would have bothered to even make iOS6 compatible with older phones at all when what was evidently a key factor in their decision to change the OS mapping application will not work on such devices.
Your initial point seems to take exception to my views, and yet you conclude with a point that is the very reason why I would expect such a response time in the first place.
You seem to want to start an argument over something that it's quite apparent that we completely agree upon.
Oh right.... this is slashdot.
You may be right about Silicon Valley, but personally I'm not a big fan of at-will employment, because it can easily turn employees into something very expendable to employers (contributing to higher degrees of unemployment among qualified workers), and offers absolutely no benefits to any potential employee which are not already guaranteed by things such as wage laws and prohibitions against slavery.
Sure you can fire anybody anytime you like... but in some jurisdictions, you just either have to give them a certain amount of notice of such action (where I live, not counting a probationary period, the law requires one week's notice up until the end of their first year with the employer, two week's notice after the end of the first year, and after three years, one week's notice for every full year worked to a maximum of 8 weeks notice) or else the employer must pay them out in lieu of said notice. If you're doing this to all of your employees at the same time, it could get expensive.
I've even heard that Canada's actually intending to tighten border security if Romney wins.
If it's not an accident, then it's intentional. For it to be intentional, it must have been designed.
Sounds to me like they are trying to make a teleological argument for the existence of God.
Personally, I find that even 10" readers aren't quite large enough, actually (although admittedly, they come pretty close).
What would be much better, IMO, is a full A4-sized or letter-sized display for a reader (which would be a 14" diagonal). While probably unnecessarily large for strictly narrative reading, it'd be an ideal size for textbooks and other reference material.
All it would need after that are flicker-free fast page refresh times (where you cannot perceive the time it takes to switch pages), throw in a full color display, and add genuinely intuitive and useful navigation functionality, and you'd have something that comes pretty close to perfect.
I use a projector to watch television instead of owning a TV with a built-in tuner. If this device were built into the cable decoder box, then more than half the time it wouldn't work at all for me. My cable decoder box is positioned quite far off to one side of the actual viewing area, and not anywhere near the actual screen. If this device were attached to the decoder box then most of the time, I expect it wouldn't see anyone at all unless somebody always sat way over on to one side of the regular viewing area.
Bleeding is only an issue with ink.
Most professional book publishers do not use ink, they use toner. Which does not bleed unless the printer was faulty.
The highest resolution electronic display devices commercially available right now are in the vicinity of about 350 dpi. At a reading distance of 12 to 18", admittedly, this is well within an order of magnitude of the actual optical capability of the human eye based on rod and cone density. Laser printers with better than 10 times that resolution are not infrequently used for commercial production.
I find exactly the opposite, actually. I regularly find myself having to zoom in to a page to view it on a retina ipad when reading on it, resulting in less of a page's contents actually being visible at one time, and requiring me to scroll, which constantly redirects my attention from simply reading the content.
I would seriously love to replace my many physical reference books with electronic ones, but to this day there is still no solution that meets all of the technical challenges involved which make it just as easy and quick to use as physical books are. I expect we may see something viable emerge within the next one or two decades, however.
But reading reference books on a kindle sucks, where one is often needing to quickly flip to different parts of the book that may not be connected by actual hyperlinks within it, or if you are searching for a particular full-page picture.
If actually reading anything but fiction on an electronic device was just as convenient as reading a physical book, where you can flip forward or backward an arbitrary number of pages entirely at your own discretion, it might replace them. Not before.
But they both *require* a form of user interaction. A link requires clicking, this notice requires scrolling. What they've done here arguably even worse, in terms of complying with the spirit of the court order, because it comes across as a deliberate effort to conceal it, defeating the very reason that Apple was ordered explicitly to put it on their home page in the first place.
It required that it be on their "home page" The obvious subtext here is that the intent is such that user interaction would not be required (clicking a link, to give an example) in order to see the notice... if that were not the case, the requirement that it be on their home page, explicitly, would not exist, and they simply would have made the requirement that it be *easily accessible* from their home page
While yes, they do have something on their home page about this, it is *NOT* positioned such that it does not require user interaction to view. They are resizing the contents of their page to always keep the footer of the browser window below the bottom of the window, which quite strongly comes across as an even more deliberate attempt to hide it than a plain old link on their home page.
Do you have a cache of what the page looked like 7 days ago?
This isn't an issue if merely *might* having to scroll... it is an issue of *ALWAYS* having to scroll. Apple is using javascript to resize the objects and spacing of the objects on their home page so that the message is always just below the bottom of the user's browser window, regardless of the user's browser window size.
Since it previously was the case that a user was *not* required to scroll to see the footer contents as long as their browser window was large enough (it's worth noting that they are sharing this resizing behavior on other country's home pages, but again, this was not the behavior it had last week), this is quite clearly a deliberate effort on Apple's part to keep the message from view, and defeats much of the intent behind the notion of Apple being required to put it on their home page, since it *always* requires some explicit user interaction to view.
Their only out in this case is that they complied with the literal requirements of the court order. It remains to be seen if it this satisfies the court.
Apple has arranged the flow of their site so as to make it impossible to see the notice without scrolling, regardless of how tall your browser window is made to be.
Solve the problem one step at a time. The first step would be to prohibit algorithms from future patentability. The second is to examine on a case-by-case basis the merits of existing ones, as the need actually arises.
where you can simply think what you want to "type" and the computer does it.
Heck, at least it'd spell the end of RSI. Some keyboard designs are better than others in this regard, but none actually prevent it entirely
It's worth pointing out, however, that even the worst president was still voted for by the majority.
Ultimately, a huge factor when a person gets into power at all that a lot of people don't agree with is because they compromise on their own values when it comes to voting.
"Compromising is worth avoiding...." Why? You'd still be avoiding voting for the guy you really don't agree with if you voted independent, so why bother "compromising"? In the end, if you chose to go for 80 instead of 96, you'd still be voting for someone who doesn't represent your values as much as an alternative candidate. It follows that if the best reason that anyone has for doing that is because they just don't want the other guy to win, then they are defeating the entire point of democracy, which is to elect somebody who best represents the values of the voters. Instead, the election race becomes nothing more than a childish popularity contest, with very little bearing on whether the elected candidate actually represents what the voters desire.
This isn't school. It's not a quiz... there's no bonus marks for voting for the winner, nor are there penalties for voting for somebody who doesn't win. The point is to exercise your right to express your own values, and to be part of the democratic process. Even if that person doesn't win, the process still ensures that whoever does win will actually represent what most voters decided. And if the guy you really can't stand wins, will it really be the end of the world? If everybody who voted for somebody who didn't get in was that convinced it was going to be so terrible, there would be a mass exodus from America every 4 years, as all the people who didn't vote for the winner just up and decide they can't handle living in the country anymore.
Of course, the kind of voting practice that I'm advocating looks at a much bigger picture than just a single government term anyways... more like on the order of about a generation or two. It's not likely to make a significant different initially, but as more people do it, the notion that there really are more than two choices will catch on, and will forever change how the public votes... and we can do our part today to give our children, and our children's children, the benefit of increased choice.
What I can't help but find funny is that so many Americans, like yourself, actually do identify most strongly with an independent. But they perceive voting that way as "wasting" their vote. Of course, what that implies is that a good percentage of people who don't vote for the winner have "wasted" their vote. It's a very self centered notion, however... Every vote counts, and the winner reflects the votes of the majority. If you weren't among the ones who voted for the winner, what difference should that actually make in how you live your life for the next 4 years?
To be frank, I expect that if everybody who actually thought this way decided to abandon their wholly irrational fear of "wasting" their vote, and genuinely vote with their conscience, although I can't say I could seriously imagine an independent winning this election, the impact iut would have on the election outcome would certainly forever change the almost inherent belief in a strict dichotomy when it comes to federal elections in the USA, as more people would wake up to the fact that there really are more than two viable ways to vote, and the following election would be *VERY* different, indeed.
The very notion of feeling that you have to choose "the other guy" says that your whole perception of a democratic voting system is flawed.
Vote for the candidate who genuinely best represents your own ideals. If the best reason you can come up with for not voting for a lesser known candidate who you can identify well with is that you figure he doesn't have a hope in hell of winning, then one of two things is occurring:
1. You lack confidence in a democratic voting system to adequately represent the views of its population, or else you believe that not enough people share the same values as you to make a difference. The former is only true when people don't vote in a manner consistent with their actual views (which is exactly what you'd be doing yourself if the only reason you had to vote for "the other guy" was because you didn't want his opponent to win). While those who fall into the latter category are selling out their votes for a candidate that they don't even want to support just to get their vote over with, and are, to be quite frank, wholly counterproductive to the democratic process, because the winner of such an election can rarely, if ever, actually reflect the ideals and views of a majority of the voters.
2. You are afraid of being wrong... or different.
The first is either hypocritical or lazy. The second is just plain cowardice.
It's called voting.
Also, surveillance cameras in public places are installed there under the authorization of people who have been democratically elected by society to preserve the best interests of that society.
An arbitrary person pointing a camera at you is somebody you do not know, and you have had absolutely no involvement in getting them to point that camera at you.
In a democratic society, however, the government is elected by the people, and for their term is entrusted by them to preserve the best interests of that society. This is entirely different from some random person you meet on the street, and have no prior connection to.
While admittedly, possibility for corruption in the government exists, and to use it for no less honorable purposes than somebody who had no business recording you at all, at least with the government, you've had some say on what sort of people would be monitoring those cameras, where you have absolutely no say at all on the type of people you might meet on the street.
So, in the end, they are two different things.