I fear you may be using Apple Mail. If so you have you have my condolences as Apple Email is not truly an email program, but some sort of psychological test program designed at driving its users insane. I suggest using thunderbird - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/ [mozilla.com]. There are many add-on for backup email. Again its free and easy to use.
Apple Mail has worked fine for our users for a number of years, the big advantage is obviously its integration with OS X features like the address book, dictionary, keychain, and for iPhone users the todo and notes.
I can't imagine how he's having trouble recovering deleted messages from his Time Machine backup -- he talks about "wherever they are" which makes me think he's rooting around in the Finder trying to dig up his mail files. If you run Time Machine while Mail is open, it will show you right in the Mail interface all your old deleted stuff and let you restore. It's pretty simple. Far simpler (yet more powerful) than any other mail application backup or restore process.
I have a fool-proof method for completely avoiding any future attacks upon our troops in Iraq. Get the fuck out of Iraq.
Didn't you hear President Bush explain how they'd follow us home if we left Iraq? There's only one guy causing all this conflict. If he's there, he can't be here. But if he doesn't need to be there, he can easily move his family here and cause all sorts of trouble.
Al Qaeda is Platinum on American Airlines, he actually is a million miler from way back, which means free upgrades for life, so he doesn't mind a long-haul flight! He has plenty of Starwood points to come over here, don't make him cash those in when he was planning on surprising his wives with a trip to the Bahamas next Spring!
How about not placing artillery and missile positions in densely populated civilian neighborhoods? That way you don't get bombed.
Well, unfortunately the guys placing the artillery are not necessarily the ones who live there, and the ones who do live there will get a gun pointed at their family if they ask for it to be moved.
Which is not to say that civilians getting caught in the middle between two warring sides is anything new or novel, but the least we could do is not try to dismiss it by implying they deserve to get killed.
True, Toughbooks are only beaten by even more ruggedized systems like Fieldworks (I did lots of remote international travel for a group with a big budget, so I've used pretty much every system available in the worst possible conditions). But for "normal" abusive business travelers, I think the Thinkpads are more than enough (particularly with a SSD). The Toughbooks really come into their own in places where they're regularly exposed to moisture/mud/dust, weird power, animals, etc -- not the typical business abuse of dropping, spilling, smacking, etc where the Thinkpads are tough enough. But yeah, if money is no object, you may as well get a Toughbook over a Thinkpad.
Apple's are well-designed, nice looking pieces of gear. But they are - and always will be - more expensive than similar class PCs simply because of the economy of scale.
I don't disagree with anything else you said, but did want to point out that if anything the economy of scale favors Apple. They're the number three computer manufacturer these days, and I probably creeping up on being number two in the laptop arena. And they have far, far fewer models that don't change nearly as often as Windows OEM manufacturers, so their sales (and purchases) aren't broken up among 150 different hardware configurations. Granted, of course manufacturers negotiate their volume contracts for multiple parts at once, but that's always going to be less financially advantageous than buying a huge volume of a single part.
I would suspect that the base model Macbook is probably the best selling laptop model ever made by any company. If Apple wanted to, they could undercut anyone else's comparable laptop models without losing money, but they aren't interested in being the "low cost" option even when they can be.
Apple has a core group of customers who will buy anything from Apple, even if there are better products available.
Apple and IBM/Lenovo both have a core group of customers who laugh at people carrying Toshibas. Look at reliability surveys and you'll see why most professional computer users wouldn't dream of buying a laptop that doesn't say either Apple or Thinkpad on it. "Better" on a spec sheet doesn't mean a damn thing in the real world.
What's the point of putting TWO speaker drivers inside the case when the discernible stereo effect will be mild to absent under a normal usage scenario?
A Nintendo DS is barely larger than a deck of cards, and has very nice stereo effects (I assume they're using one of the psychoacoustic stereo "expanders"). Granted, with artificial sounds like a video game, you can play a lot more with DSP effects to create the impression of greater stereo separation -- but it's certainly not a waste of resources to put in that second speaker.
I don't like having that little thing in the keyboard; maybe it's the way I type, but every time I have had to use a laptop which had one, my fingers were constantly 'tripping' on it.
You can just pull the little rubbery/textured piece off the top and the actual trackpoint stick sits below the keys.
I suspect there's a reason that IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads, which are the best-engineered laptops that sell to real road warriors who rely on laptops for their livelihood, are the ones that continue to integrate the trackpoint. Most of the heavy-duty, long-time computer abusers I know who have had an opportunity to use one prefer it to a touchpad, for a variety of reasons.
It's typical of those members of the cult of death to make statements such as those above when confronted with the possibility of other approaches other then their coveted death based solutions.
And it's typical of some people to ignore that sometimes, just sometimes, violence really is the answer. or at least the fastest, surest one.
Ironically enough (given this conversation), I'm pretty much a pacifist. I've never struck anyone in anger in my life, I don't understand the obsession with violence, I can talk my way out of most any situation by making an aggressor understand that violence won't achieve his goals (and have, in several different countries across a number of continents). I am happy to simply walk away from most any perilous situation, because it's generally unfulfilling for an aggressor to engage with someone who doesn't resist, and my ego is firm enough that I don't care if some random people I'll never see again think I wasn't "a man" by fighting some drunk or distressed idiot.
But I'm also a realist, and know that there are some situations where a person would honestly have no acceptable alternative but to beat an aggressor to death with whatever blunt object was handy. It's (thankfully) unlikely I'll ever encounter one of those situations in my life, I'm much happier to travel the world providing health care to remote villages where the locals are happy to see me and the greatest danger I really face is robbery by outsiders who see a wealthy westerner (which of course has happened, but a couple thousand dollars in computer equipment ultimately isn't that big a deal to me -- the annoyance is when they get your passport, because that is just a real inconvenience).
I'd love to have a universal solution to violence. I don't expect one to come down the pike anytime soon, though I agree 99% of the violence that occurs could be avoided if people and leaders would just chill the fuck out a little bit.
It might have something to do with the vast majority of attacks on DoD and other US Government systems coming from China (as reported on Slashdot last year). Just a guess, though.
Personal self defense is one thing, war is quite another.
Well, war can be, essentially, lots of personal self-defense at the same time. How do you think primitive wars took place? It was 50 guys showing up with rocks and clubs demanding tribute from another group they thought was weaker, and the second group all getting out their rocks and clubs and fighting them off. I don't know many people who would honestly argue the second group had much of a choice but to go to war, or that if they won they hadn't achieved their purpose.
Oh, wait, the Iraq War was the USA, Britian, et. al., invading and killing people in Iraq. Oops. Your argument back fired. Those in Iraq were defending themselves!!!
I don't know why you assume it "back fired", I never claimed all war was good, you're the one who claimed all war was bad and served no purpose to the participant. Indeed, many Iraqis do think they are defending themselves and their families from invaders. If they manage to chase the US out of their country, then waging war might have been the best choice for them to make for their families, depending on what their goals are.
You've identified a problem that needs solutions other than killing. When someone comes into your country with weapons demanding your women and property there are other solutions than killing them or surrendering to them. Solutions will not be easy. Killing will only beget more killing. Haven't you read history?
Well, I'd love to hear your other guaranteed solution if someone comes in with a gun and demands they he be allowed to rape your wife, enslave your children and set fire to your property. Humanity has been waiting many thousands of years for the solution to war and violence, we're ecstatic but a little surprised to find out it will be revealed to us on slashdot.
What is the Air Force doing in charge of America's cyber warfare abilities?
It seems to me that we should have a specialized agency, or perhaps even a military branch, for cyber warfare.
indeed, it seems like it would be best to have it under the JSOC or something similar, but the Air Force has traditionally been the "high tech" branch of the military, so of the existing services it makes sense and would probably remain there administratively even if it were moved elsewhere.
War is never necessary except for those who's purpose it serves.
Well, yeah, that's a tautology. War is only useful when its useful.
No, it doesn't solve all problems, or even many. Truly the threat of war is a far more useful tool than actual war, which has high costs for both sides.
But if the problem is some group of people coming into your territory with weapons demanding your women and property, then yes, war is good at solving that problem. If war is serving the purpose of not having someone show up and kill your family, then 99.999% of people think that's a purpose worth serving.
I don't think you actually understand what I wrote. I didn't say anything about aliases and I've made the point EXPLICITLY that there IS NO INTERMEDIATE STORAGE involved.
place alias of folder on desktop. Drag file onto alias, congratulations, you've just moved the file to the folder you aliased without intermediate storage or two finder windows. Welcome to the cutting edge of 1991. if you learn about your OS every decade or so, you'll find that they create better ways to do things than existed in the days of 8-bit processors.
if they don't provide equivalent capabilities (and they haven't) that's a "bug", not a "preference"
yeah, good luck raging against that machine. I filed a bug report with Microsoft that they no longer support QEMM386 in Windows Vista. Until they provide equivalent capabilities, I'm considering it a bug. I have a bunch of RLL drives and ADB keyboards that Apple is not supporting, that's clearly a bug.
The provide plenty of ways to move files from one place to another. Of the more than a dozen different ways to accomplish that task, you personally prefer the method that was eliminated a decade ago when they realized that it was no longer necessary to provide workarounds for moving files from one floppy to another while only using a single floppy drive.
I'm not sure if you're in the US or not (I've assumed not), but I don't get a sense that there's any particularly strong feeling in the US about China. Sure, we're wary of their economic, political and military potential, but they're also one of our largest trading partners and we have totally normal relations with them.
Nobody on the street mentions China other than in economic discussions about losing factory jobs and getting lead-painted toys at Wal*Mart. It's nothing like our relationship was with the Soviet Union -- we're honestly still much more wary of Russia on a daily basis than we are of China, due to Russia's instability and our highly symbiotic economic relationship with China. Neither the US nor China could really afford to be at odds in any significant way.
That doesn't mean anyone's tolerant of espionage, particularly regarding aerospace technology which has pretty direct military applications. But even our closest allies spy on us (and us on them). There was a large scandal years back about Airbus supposedly stealing secrets from Boeing, and we certainly don't have any issues with the European Airbus countries other than normal economic competition and bragging rights.
They're broken. You can't move a file from one folder to another without having both folders open. You used to be able to, by putting them on the desktop, but the desktop isn't the desktop any more, it's just a folder in your home directory, so putting stuff on the desktop makes an extra copy of it.
Again, not broken, just not your preference for what the desktop should represent. If you want to place aliases instead of actual files on your desktop, go ahead. If you want to use your desktop as an intermediate storage space for moving files, go ahead. If you want to move files without opening two windows, there are a number of ways to accomplish it, including spring-loaded folders, aliases, the sidebar, etc.
Things changed from Classic to Mac OS X, and they aren't going to change back, so you better get used to it or move to a different OS, because they're mostly working as intended. You and John Siracusa can play all day on your Quadras under System 7, Apple isn't going to "fix" any of the "problems" with the "broken design" that most people don't think are broken and are working as Apple intended. The spatial Finder isn't coming back, applications aren't going to rely on creator codes in the resource fork, and the desktop is a folder.
Thanks for the lesson on something that has no bearing whatsoever on the discussion.
Did you know that the fastest land animal is the cheetah?
Neither cheetahs nor a Democratically controlled Congress have anything to do with the Executive breaking the law, there's certainly no incentive for a Democratic Congress to want to support a rival party abusing the power of the Executive, which is, after all, the question I was answering.
Nothing in Article 3 (or anywhere else in the US Constitution) affirmatively creates a federal court system inferior to the Supreme Court. The U.S. federal courts system only exists if Congress says it does. Further, the federal courts are only capable of hearing cases "arising under this Constitution [and] the laws of the United States". If congress changes a "law of the United States" (say, to give telcos immunity from violating their contractual obligations to you, their customers), presumably, that act strips the federal court of any jurisdiction to hear a case regarding the telcos' improper behavior.
You're completely correct, if they make it not illegal, then there's nothing for the courts to hear. That has nothing to do with Article 3 section 2, or jurisdiction, which is what your earlier statement and quote were both about. The Congress cannot remove the Supreme Court's ability to hear a case, but they can make an action legal so that there's no point for any court anywhere to hear it.
Still, I'm amazed that is all people have to explain it.
Well, a lot of people would be amazed that you don't understand how and why rivalries form. The US and USSR were the two biggest kids on the block, inevitably a rivalry happened and each tried to shore up support and allies for their "team". The USSR collapsed, now the US and China are the big kids and will inevitably find that sometimes what is in the best interest of one is not in the best interest of the other.
Are you similarly baffled why China and Japan mistrust each other? Why France and England "fight" over so much when they are very close allies and have negligible ideological and economic differences? They haven't fought on opposite sides of a conflict for a century and a half, while Chinese soldiers have killed Americans (and vice-versa) within our lifetimes.
I don't know why you expect the US should be the first country in human history to collectively sit down and document explicitly logical reasons to distrust and act wary of another powerful nation with vast resources and some significant differences in how they think world politics should play out.
I always thought that was what the power to pardon someone was for.
Among other tools, yes. But pardons don't change the fact that someone may have been found guilty of breaking the law, nor do they affect civil liability in the same way. The point of making something legal after it has been done is to say "oops, we were wrong, we're changing the law and telling the world that the unfortunate people who got caught up in it earlier never really did anything wrong, the law was messed up".
All a pardon does is say "whatever you did, we won't impose criminal penalties".
It's the difference between being a criminal and getting away with it, and never having been a criminal in the first place.
Hi! Welcome to 2008! We understand you've been sleeping since 2004, so some level of confusion on your part is to be expected!
Are you under the impression that GW Bush is no longer the President? That doesn't happen until Jan 2009. The Dems may have a slim majority in Congress, but Congress has nothing to do with any of the FISA/eavesdropping/intelligence controversies, so they certainly don't get a black eye by letting bad news come out. All of the illegal activities in question were instigated and encouraged by the Executive branch.
Weird, I have no idea how I seemingly responded to the wrong message:P
I agree that they have some issues with choices made about how/when to back up and retain given files. I think that TM is a very v1.0 product and is as much a framework to build on right now as it is a shipping backup solution. Just looking at the hardware issues involving anything more advanced than a USB hard drive makes clear they have a LOT of room to grow in every aspect of how well it works.
Wel, the major issues (manifesting themselves in a myriad of ways) were the problems with network connections.
In addition, they eliminated numerous file management issues (not being able to operate on one file because another file in the same directory is being operated on, spurious error messages due to other activity, etc).
Essentially it was an extensive retooling of the Finder to make more things operate on separate threads and not be as dependent on each other.
The things you're complaining about aren't, quite frankly, issues, just preferences. Numerous actual performance and data problems have been fixed. I certainly wouldn't expect Apple to "fix" being able to get rid of the sidebar other than the way it currently works, because they expect you to use it, or use the bastardized spacial view. I wouldn't expect them to make moving desktop icons around a high priority when there already exists an option to keep them arranged automatically. In dozens of threads about FTFF, I'd never even heard this mentioned before now.
I agree that getting more information on selected items would be great -- they seem to be slowly adding more along those lines to the Finder (the path bar, for example). In the meantime, you can command-option-i to get the collective information on selected objects. Certainly less convenient than putting it in the status bar, but hardly the sort of thing people have been bitching at Apple to fix the Finder about.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple Mail has worked fine for our users for a number of years, the big advantage is obviously its integration with OS X features like the address book, dictionary, keychain, and for iPhone users the todo and notes.
I can't imagine how he's having trouble recovering deleted messages from his Time Machine backup -- he talks about "wherever they are" which makes me think he's rooting around in the Finder trying to dig up his mail files. If you run Time Machine while Mail is open, it will show you right in the Mail interface all your old deleted stuff and let you restore. It's pretty simple. Far simpler (yet more powerful) than any other mail application backup or restore process.
Nope, they improved support for Spotlight and things like that, but it's still one giant file that gets updated anytime anything changes.
Didn't you hear President Bush explain how they'd follow us home if we left Iraq? There's only one guy causing all this conflict. If he's there, he can't be here. But if he doesn't need to be there, he can easily move his family here and cause all sorts of trouble.
Al Qaeda is Platinum on American Airlines, he actually is a million miler from way back, which means free upgrades for life, so he doesn't mind a long-haul flight! He has plenty of Starwood points to come over here, don't make him cash those in when he was planning on surprising his wives with a trip to the Bahamas next Spring!
Well, unfortunately the guys placing the artillery are not necessarily the ones who live there, and the ones who do live there will get a gun pointed at their family if they ask for it to be moved.
Which is not to say that civilians getting caught in the middle between two warring sides is anything new or novel, but the least we could do is not try to dismiss it by implying they deserve to get killed.
True, Toughbooks are only beaten by even more ruggedized systems like Fieldworks (I did lots of remote international travel for a group with a big budget, so I've used pretty much every system available in the worst possible conditions). But for "normal" abusive business travelers, I think the Thinkpads are more than enough (particularly with a SSD). The Toughbooks really come into their own in places where they're regularly exposed to moisture/mud/dust, weird power, animals, etc -- not the typical business abuse of dropping, spilling, smacking, etc where the Thinkpads are tough enough. But yeah, if money is no object, you may as well get a Toughbook over a Thinkpad.
I don't disagree with anything else you said, but did want to point out that if anything the economy of scale favors Apple. They're the number three computer manufacturer these days, and I probably creeping up on being number two in the laptop arena. And they have far, far fewer models that don't change nearly as often as Windows OEM manufacturers, so their sales (and purchases) aren't broken up among 150 different hardware configurations. Granted, of course manufacturers negotiate their volume contracts for multiple parts at once, but that's always going to be less financially advantageous than buying a huge volume of a single part.
I would suspect that the base model Macbook is probably the best selling laptop model ever made by any company. If Apple wanted to, they could undercut anyone else's comparable laptop models without losing money, but they aren't interested in being the "low cost" option even when they can be.
Apple and IBM/Lenovo both have a core group of customers who laugh at people carrying Toshibas. Look at reliability surveys and you'll see why most professional computer users wouldn't dream of buying a laptop that doesn't say either Apple or Thinkpad on it. "Better" on a spec sheet doesn't mean a damn thing in the real world.
And even McDonald's offers free wifi in most of their locations now.
Every coffee house I know of within 500 miles of me that ISN'T a Starbucks has free totally open wifi 24/7, no codes or purchase required.
A Nintendo DS is barely larger than a deck of cards, and has very nice stereo effects (I assume they're using one of the psychoacoustic stereo "expanders"). Granted, with artificial sounds like a video game, you can play a lot more with DSP effects to create the impression of greater stereo separation -- but it's certainly not a waste of resources to put in that second speaker.
You can just pull the little rubbery/textured piece off the top and the actual trackpoint stick sits below the keys.
I suspect there's a reason that IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads, which are the best-engineered laptops that sell to real road warriors who rely on laptops for their livelihood, are the ones that continue to integrate the trackpoint. Most of the heavy-duty, long-time computer abusers I know who have had an opportunity to use one prefer it to a touchpad, for a variety of reasons.
And it's typical of some people to ignore that sometimes, just sometimes, violence really is the answer. or at least the fastest, surest one.
Ironically enough (given this conversation), I'm pretty much a pacifist. I've never struck anyone in anger in my life, I don't understand the obsession with violence, I can talk my way out of most any situation by making an aggressor understand that violence won't achieve his goals (and have, in several different countries across a number of continents). I am happy to simply walk away from most any perilous situation, because it's generally unfulfilling for an aggressor to engage with someone who doesn't resist, and my ego is firm enough that I don't care if some random people I'll never see again think I wasn't "a man" by fighting some drunk or distressed idiot.
But I'm also a realist, and know that there are some situations where a person would honestly have no acceptable alternative but to beat an aggressor to death with whatever blunt object was handy. It's (thankfully) unlikely I'll ever encounter one of those situations in my life, I'm much happier to travel the world providing health care to remote villages where the locals are happy to see me and the greatest danger I really face is robbery by outsiders who see a wealthy westerner (which of course has happened, but a couple thousand dollars in computer equipment ultimately isn't that big a deal to me -- the annoyance is when they get your passport, because that is just a real inconvenience).
I'd love to have a universal solution to violence. I don't expect one to come down the pike anytime soon, though I agree 99% of the violence that occurs could be avoided if people and leaders would just chill the fuck out a little bit.
It might have something to do with the vast majority of attacks on DoD and other US Government systems coming from China (as reported on Slashdot last year). Just a guess, though.
Well, war can be, essentially, lots of personal self-defense at the same time. How do you think primitive wars took place? It was 50 guys showing up with rocks and clubs demanding tribute from another group they thought was weaker, and the second group all getting out their rocks and clubs and fighting them off. I don't know many people who would honestly argue the second group had much of a choice but to go to war, or that if they won they hadn't achieved their purpose.
I don't know why you assume it "back fired", I never claimed all war was good, you're the one who claimed all war was bad and served no purpose to the participant. Indeed, many Iraqis do think they are defending themselves and their families from invaders. If they manage to chase the US out of their country, then waging war might have been the best choice for them to make for their families, depending on what their goals are.
Well, I'd love to hear your other guaranteed solution if someone comes in with a gun and demands they he be allowed to rape your wife, enslave your children and set fire to your property. Humanity has been waiting many thousands of years for the solution to war and violence, we're ecstatic but a little surprised to find out it will be revealed to us on slashdot.
indeed, it seems like it would be best to have it under the JSOC or something similar, but the Air Force has traditionally been the "high tech" branch of the military, so of the existing services it makes sense and would probably remain there administratively even if it were moved elsewhere.
Well, yeah, that's a tautology. War is only useful when its useful.
No, it doesn't solve all problems, or even many. Truly the threat of war is a far more useful tool than actual war, which has high costs for both sides.
But if the problem is some group of people coming into your territory with weapons demanding your women and property, then yes, war is good at solving that problem. If war is serving the purpose of not having someone show up and kill your family, then 99.999% of people think that's a purpose worth serving.
place alias of folder on desktop. Drag file onto alias, congratulations, you've just moved the file to the folder you aliased without intermediate storage or two finder windows. Welcome to the cutting edge of 1991. if you learn about your OS every decade or so, you'll find that they create better ways to do things than existed in the days of 8-bit processors.
yeah, good luck raging against that machine. I filed a bug report with Microsoft that they no longer support QEMM386 in Windows Vista. Until they provide equivalent capabilities, I'm considering it a bug. I have a bunch of RLL drives and ADB keyboards that Apple is not supporting, that's clearly a bug.
The provide plenty of ways to move files from one place to another. Of the more than a dozen different ways to accomplish that task, you personally prefer the method that was eliminated a decade ago when they realized that it was no longer necessary to provide workarounds for moving files from one floppy to another while only using a single floppy drive.
I'm not sure if you're in the US or not (I've assumed not), but I don't get a sense that there's any particularly strong feeling in the US about China. Sure, we're wary of their economic, political and military potential, but they're also one of our largest trading partners and we have totally normal relations with them.
Nobody on the street mentions China other than in economic discussions about losing factory jobs and getting lead-painted toys at Wal*Mart. It's nothing like our relationship was with the Soviet Union -- we're honestly still much more wary of Russia on a daily basis than we are of China, due to Russia's instability and our highly symbiotic economic relationship with China. Neither the US nor China could really afford to be at odds in any significant way.
That doesn't mean anyone's tolerant of espionage, particularly regarding aerospace technology which has pretty direct military applications. But even our closest allies spy on us (and us on them). There was a large scandal years back about Airbus supposedly stealing secrets from Boeing, and we certainly don't have any issues with the European Airbus countries other than normal economic competition and bragging rights.
Again, not broken, just not your preference for what the desktop should represent. If you want to place aliases instead of actual files on your desktop, go ahead. If you want to use your desktop as an intermediate storage space for moving files, go ahead. If you want to move files without opening two windows, there are a number of ways to accomplish it, including spring-loaded folders, aliases, the sidebar, etc.
Things changed from Classic to Mac OS X, and they aren't going to change back, so you better get used to it or move to a different OS, because they're mostly working as intended. You and John Siracusa can play all day on your Quadras under System 7, Apple isn't going to "fix" any of the "problems" with the "broken design" that most people don't think are broken and are working as Apple intended. The spatial Finder isn't coming back, applications aren't going to rely on creator codes in the resource fork, and the desktop is a folder.
Thanks for the lesson on something that has no bearing whatsoever on the discussion.
Did you know that the fastest land animal is the cheetah?
Neither cheetahs nor a Democratically controlled Congress have anything to do with the Executive breaking the law, there's certainly no incentive for a Democratic Congress to want to support a rival party abusing the power of the Executive, which is, after all, the question I was answering.
You're completely correct, if they make it not illegal, then there's nothing for the courts to hear. That has nothing to do with Article 3 section 2, or jurisdiction, which is what your earlier statement and quote were both about. The Congress cannot remove the Supreme Court's ability to hear a case, but they can make an action legal so that there's no point for any court anywhere to hear it.
Well, a lot of people would be amazed that you don't understand how and why rivalries form. The US and USSR were the two biggest kids on the block, inevitably a rivalry happened and each tried to shore up support and allies for their "team". The USSR collapsed, now the US and China are the big kids and will inevitably find that sometimes what is in the best interest of one is not in the best interest of the other.
Are you similarly baffled why China and Japan mistrust each other? Why France and England "fight" over so much when they are very close allies and have negligible ideological and economic differences? They haven't fought on opposite sides of a conflict for a century and a half, while Chinese soldiers have killed Americans (and vice-versa) within our lifetimes.
I don't know why you expect the US should be the first country in human history to collectively sit down and document explicitly logical reasons to distrust and act wary of another powerful nation with vast resources and some significant differences in how they think world politics should play out.
Among other tools, yes. But pardons don't change the fact that someone may have been found guilty of breaking the law, nor do they affect civil liability in the same way. The point of making something legal after it has been done is to say "oops, we were wrong, we're changing the law and telling the world that the unfortunate people who got caught up in it earlier never really did anything wrong, the law was messed up".
All a pardon does is say "whatever you did, we won't impose criminal penalties".
It's the difference between being a criminal and getting away with it, and never having been a criminal in the first place.
Are you under the impression that GW Bush is no longer the President? That doesn't happen until Jan 2009. The Dems may have a slim majority in Congress, but Congress has nothing to do with any of the FISA/eavesdropping/intelligence controversies, so they certainly don't get a black eye by letting bad news come out. All of the illegal activities in question were instigated and encouraged by the Executive branch.
Weird, I have no idea how I seemingly responded to the wrong message :P
I agree that they have some issues with choices made about how/when to back up and retain given files. I think that TM is a very v1.0 product and is as much a framework to build on right now as it is a shipping backup solution. Just looking at the hardware issues involving anything more advanced than a USB hard drive makes clear they have a LOT of room to grow in every aspect of how well it works.
Wel, the major issues (manifesting themselves in a myriad of ways) were the problems with network connections.
In addition, they eliminated numerous file management issues (not being able to operate on one file because another file in the same directory is being operated on, spurious error messages due to other activity, etc).
Essentially it was an extensive retooling of the Finder to make more things operate on separate threads and not be as dependent on each other.
The things you're complaining about aren't, quite frankly, issues, just preferences. Numerous actual performance and data problems have been fixed. I certainly wouldn't expect Apple to "fix" being able to get rid of the sidebar other than the way it currently works, because they expect you to use it, or use the bastardized spacial view. I wouldn't expect them to make moving desktop icons around a high priority when there already exists an option to keep them arranged automatically. In dozens of threads about FTFF, I'd never even heard this mentioned before now.
I agree that getting more information on selected items would be great -- they seem to be slowly adding more along those lines to the Finder (the path bar, for example). In the meantime, you can command-option-i to get the collective information on selected objects. Certainly less convenient than putting it in the status bar, but hardly the sort of thing people have been bitching at Apple to fix the Finder about.