I can't "prove" something. "Australia is better than the US." But how to prove that statement?
I'm not trying to prove that the US is better generically. We're talking about civil liberties in the context of hate speech laws. Show me a country that offers more civil liberties than the US because it has adopted stronger hate speech laws.
You get to assert your opinion without support and pass it as fact, while you've simultaneously set up the rules to where I can't do the same.
You haven't made any significant arguments about civil liberties at all, let alone hate speech laws. All you do is point out political and social problems in the US. Yes, the US is far from perfect. But I'm saying that it is usually ahead of other nations in addressing its problems related to civil liberties.
Try comparing one that's close. You sound like you hand-picked one you knew would support your argument,
Good, so at least you agree then that the situation in Germany is problematic.
I picked it for three reasons. First, I happen to know a lot about it. Second, it strongly influences European policies. Third, Germany is a model European democracy, widely respected for its protection of civil rights. Germany also has strong restrictions on First Amendment rights, and those are usually cited by German politicians as one of the ways in which Germany supposedly supports civil rights. Germany is probably one of the best examples of positive effects of hate speech laws, and even Germany falls short of the US on civil liberties.
Other Western nations are arguably worse. UK? State financed state church, no gay marriage, a long history of mass murder in third world nations, extensive privacy violations by the government, hate speech laws used to punish advocates of atheism. France? There is separation of church and state, but still no gay marriage, a long history of mass murder in third world nations, restrictions on press reporting and photography, and extensive discrimination against immigrants from its ex-colonies. Japan? Extensive discrimination against non-Japanese, difficult immigration, no gay marriage. We're running out of big nations here; where is this civil liberties paradise supposed to be?
I guess what I've been saying is "You are wrong, but the effort required to prove it to you is beyond what I'm capable of producing, so you win, but you are wrong anyway."
So, according to you, there are many large nations where civil liberties are protected better than in the US, and where that is done by curtailing First Amendment rights, but you simply can't be bothered to name either the nations or which liberties actually are protected and how that relates to First Amendment rights. Yeah, right...
If Microsoft needs to do something special in order to get hardware acceleration for the HTML canvas, then there is something seriously wrong with their graphics APIs. A window system should automatically use GPU hardware for all 2D and 3D graphics where possible; application programmers shouldn't have to do any special work to do it.
Humans are not hyperadapted to the current biosphere.
Hyperadaptation has nothing to do with it. In past mass extinctions, dominant classes changed, and with them many species became extinct.
In case you hadn't noticed, we're not all that different from our ancestors in the late Pleistocene. Many extinctions have happened over the course of human and pre-human existence, and we have survived them all. We used to eat mammoths, but their extinction did not cause ours.
We're in the middle of a mass extinction; you can't infer anything about the long term effect of mass extinction based on whether we survived short term, local extinction effects.
Humans are dependent not a resource, or a handful of resources, like a specialized animal, but instead we can use damn near any resource in (relative to other animals) virtually unlimited ways.
Western nations can currently get away with monocultures and effectively chemically synthesizing food because of the use of vast amounts of energy per capita. That's not sustainable. If we had unlimited amounts of energy, we wouldn't have to drill through miles of rock in the Gulf in order to tap oil reserves there.
Ease of extraction my ass. Ask a metallugist if it's easier to get aluminum from ore or from a discarded soda can. In the latter case all of the heavy lifting has been done,
And soda can recycling is a great idea. Unfortunately, the heavy lifting it becomes undone as soon as you mix that soda can with tons of other trash and bury it in a landfill for a few decades.
than at levels of lower population. So, you would have people sacrifice their freedom and their happiness to retrogress the whole humanity to a state where a greater portion is impoverished, just so long as the absolute number is lower? Pathetic.
Decreases in poverty are largely the result of technological progress; that progress occurred in nations with lower population growth. If we hadn't had population explosions in Africa and Asia over the last century, we'd now be doing much better both in absolute numbers and in percentages.
Even if population growth were an answer to poverty, it is simply impossible to sustain a 1-2% percent growth rate per year (world population growth rate over the last century) indefinitely. That's not a Malthusian consideration, it's simply physically impossible.
Humans are more adaptable than any animal before us ever has been because we solve problems critically.
Ah yes. Even if I were to prove it conclusively, it's still ok because you can argue no place else is better.
You've lost context somewhere. We're talking about hate speech laws. The US is one of the few nations that doesn't have them. Hence it's relevant to see how well nations work that do have them.
You've presented nothing that indicates the US is better than anywhere else,
What were your examples again? A Christian litmus test for public office and gay marriage? Well, let's look at the biggest European country, Germany: it's run by a Christian party, has two government-established Christian churches, consults clerics in order to draft laws, and politicians and government-salaried clerics both agree that Christianity is the basis for citizenship and that atheists were responsible for the holocaust. Abortion remains illegal and gay marriage doesn't exist because that's the way the official German Christian churches want it. And discrimination and prejudice against immigrants are extensive, even on the part of the government.
And the reason all those things can happen in Europe is because Europe doesn't have something like the First Amendment. An inevitable consequence of something like the First Amendment is that it protects hate speech.
Based on history and current social conditions, we have to conclude that hate speech laws are a failure. Europe would do well to adopt a US-style First Amendment and enforce it similarly strictly.
We screw around the formula to prevent exactly that. There is a reason why the US is called a Republic and NOT a democracy.
Oh, please, not that b.s. again. The US is a representative democracy, just like most other modern Western nations. "Republic" is just a more generic and traditional term.
Frankly, I think the rah-rah for "democracy" has resulted in laziness in terms of our political thinking.
Nothing "lazy" about it; we constantly tinker with our system of representation. That's why people elect senators now, why California has referendums, why we have primaries, etc. Those are all fairly recent innovations. And I'm sure more things will change this century.
Or where you don't have to profess a belief in a specific God to hold office (what percentage of people in the US are Christian, and what percentage of elected officials at the state or higher level are self-proclaimed Christians?).
The US doesn't require belief in a specific god or any god at all. Several of its founders were deists, not Christians. The US separates church and state cleanly. Voters, of course, have the right to pick whatever candidate they like, including based on their religious preference.
That's quite different from Europe, where many nations either have state churches or special relations between church and state, where the state often pays religious officials, where religious officials meddle in politics, and where you even have Christian political parties.
And don't forget that the USA has massive systemic anti-black biases in the justice system.
I don't know of any "systemic anti-black biases in the US justice system". Can you give examples? And can you point at laws and procedures that other justice systems use in order to do better?
Mass extinctions enabled you to exist. Mass extinctions are in many ways the engine that drives evolution in punctuated equilibrium.
Quite right; and I'd like for this equilibrium not to be punctuated for many millions of years longer so that the human race actually has a chance to grow up.
We, if anything, are getting in the way of new paradigms in the biosphere
You bet we are getting in the way. That's because the "current paradigm" is our paradigm. If the "current paradigm" is replaced by a new one, we and all of our primate and mammalians relatives are going to go with it.
The earth is, for all intents and purposes, a closed system. All the metals we've pulled out of the ground aren't going anywhere.
Elemental abundance is not the limiting factor for raw materials, ease of extraction is. Using resources means transforming them from a comparatively easily accessible form into a nearly useless form.
One billion? You really are a neo-Malthusian. Of course, why shouldn't the grand, all-wise yyxx determine the value of human life arbitrarily for the entire world.
It's you who devalues human life by arguing that people should procreate like lemmings with no regard to consequences.
Fuck all those people who want to have the freedom to decide what kind of family they want. You probably don't even have kids and have no frame of reference for the experience, but you think you can decide for the whole world what they should and shouldn't do. What monumental, disgusting conceit.
No, the "monumental, disgusting conceit" is that you are arguing for selfish, unlimited reproduction in the face of extreme global poverty and suffering.
I know Apple's so-called open source contributions; they mostly fall into three categories: (1) useless, (2) self-serving, (3) coerced due to license.
Can you name voluntary (i.e., not coerced by license) open-source contributions that Apple has made that is in widespread use on non-Apple platforms? I'm not aware of any. But, please, knock yourself out.
Looking at the ANSI spec, it seems like all that's specified is the diameter and end-to-tip length of the cell. So, any device that relies on the depth or diameter of the "+" protrusion is likely not compliant with the spec. (Incidentally, the protrusion is there because it used to cover a graphite rod.)
Also, putting plus and minus contacts next to one another with only a few millimeters of separation and no electronic protection seems like a recipe for disaster; any small piece of metal (staple, metal filing, bits of aluminum foil, etc.) will cause a short, and sweat and condensation will result in relatively large currents.
Well tough tits - Apple is a business, not a hippy commune.
Yes, and if they can extract more money from your pocket through sleazy tricks and misrepresentations, they have shown time and again that they will do so.
They aren't there to provide Linux freetards with free stuff.
But apparently they think that the open source community is there to provide them with free stuff and then just shut up.
Which is why I get so sick and tired of religious folks complaining about gay marriage destroying marriage in general.
But it is! All those closeted gay religious folks would just abandon their spouses and go into same sex marriages if it became legal! Just look at Ted Haggard and those people, they are already taking the first step in anticipation!
Google is likely offering domestic partner benefits, which means it also applies to unmarried heterosexual couples.
But assuming they don't, why should they be forced? Because they can get married. It's not like gay couples don't want to get married, they are prohibited by law. As soon as that prohibition is lifted, Google will scrap those extra benefits. The fact that some people who might not marry if they could happen to fall under this special policy doesn't make it "discrimination", it just makes it an imperfect, temporary solution.
The Malthusian disaster is already here; we're in the middle of a mass extinction and are consuming resources at a totally unsustainable rate.
A sustainable and reasonable world population is under one billion; there is no reason to have a world population larger than that. And the only way to get there is to have fertility rates below replacement for an extended period of time.
Of course, the whole reason why this exists is to encourage HAVING CHILDREN.
Yeah, like a planet with 6 billion people and a nation with 330 million people needs more CHILDREN.
Besides, if marriage were about having children, why not just give benefits to couples with children? Why should childless marriages or women past menopause receive any benefits?
So why should they get the tax benefits of married people, if I, as an unmarried single person without kids cannot?
Probably because your assumption about the reasons for legal support of marriage are wrong. It's not about children, it's about creating a legal framework for partnerships because that's arguably a good thing. And having stable gay relationships is just as beneficial to society as having stable straight relationships, regardless of whether there are kids involved or not.
So, either (1) abolish legal marriage altogether and treat everybody equally, (2) provide tax and legal benefits only for couples with children, or (3) provide tax and legal benefits to all stable, committed couples. None of those depend on the gender of the partners involved.
It's not a "democratic society" if offended people can oppress minorities. A democracy does not give you the right not to be offended. In fact, any political system that protects people from being offended simply cannot be democratic.
And what fantastical fairy realm do you live in where things are better? Do you really believe that law enforcement or the legal system are race blind in the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Iceland, or any other nation?
The only reason many European nations didn't have a problem with race or religion for a while is because at some point in the past, they purged themselves (often violently) of anybody who was different. Of course, with massive immigration from outside Europe, even that is changing again, and with it, you're seeing riots, violence, and second-class citizens.
Yeah, the US isn't perfect, but it's doing a lot better than most other places on earth.
Since we will always live in unjust society, there has to be a better argument for supporting hate speech.
Hate speech is legal under the US Constitution; there is no argument needed. In fact, US courts have re-affirmed that free speech includes hate speech again and again.
If you want to make it illegal, you need to come up with clear and convincing arguments and empirical evidence.
In Latvia (where I am), during gay pride people form catholic church threw excrements at participants of the pride. No arrests or anything. Makes me wonder.
That's not speech, that's bodily harm; that's prohibited by law, I assume even in Latvia. Penalties for those actions may be enhanced by hate crime legislation, even in the US.
When not throwing feces, however, Catholics will be permitted to continue to preach hate against homosexuals, atheists, and anybody else who challenges their authority; no government will restrict that because it is considered part of protected religious freedoms (whether that is reasonable is another debate).
The only question is whether people will be able to respond by pointing out the hypocrisy, lack of legitimacy, and crimes of the Catholic church, so that through reason and debate we can convince people to abandon that ancient and evil cult. That is where hate crime laws come in, because they will be applied when people try to respond to attacks and political machinations by powerful religious forces in their society.
I'm in the UK. The iPhone 4 starts at £499 which is $754. So again you're either mistaken or just making things up.
I'm neither mistaken nor am I making things up, that's how much it costs unlocked in Germany.
In the UK, you can get a Motorola Milestone for £339. If we look at continental Europe, in France, the 16G iPhone starts at EU 629, while you can get a Motorola Milestone for EU 350.
(Try learning how to use a price search engine. Oh, wait, I forgot, you're just an Apple fanboy, so you just buy whatever they sell to you at whatever price they're asking.)
Meanwhile iPhone OS 3 and earlier apps run on the iPhone 4 in full resolution for any text or anything that's drawn, or anything that uses system controls. The only time there will be pixel doubling is for bitmap app resources.
I own an iPad and have it right here. iPhone OS 3 apps on iPad use pixel doubling for everything: the text is pixelated, the keyboard is pixelated, even native iPhone widgets are pixelated and show pixelated text. The iPad demonstrates how crappy iOS handling of resolution and screen size issues is.
Basically, you have no idea of what you're talking about.
Don't bother trying to argue the toss with me. I've been developing smartphone UIs for more than a decade.
Any idiot can develop smartphone UIs, and obviously any idiot does.
No. That was true for PalmOS back in the day, but it's not true for iOS. iOS is every bit as resolution independent as Android is. All coordinates are given in points, not pixels. Font sizes are given in points, not pixels. On old iPhones one point was 1.0 pixels. On the new iPhones 1 point is 2.0 pixels.
That isn't resolution independence. A resolution independent UI adapts to new screen sizes not by scaling coordinates, but by actually changing the layout of components.
It's perfectly possible for Apple to have introduced a new iPhone where there was a non integer number of pixels. The reason they didn't is because a UI scaled by a non integer number wouldn't look as good.
That's what "it lacks resolution independence" means: on larger screens, iPhone just scales up the smaller layout, unless the code itself is altered. You can see exactly how iOS handles larger screens by looking at iPhone apps on iPad: you get a big black border, a pixelated keyboard, and a layout that is ill-suited to the large screen.
That's true whether you are talking about iOS or Android.
No, it's not. Android apps look fine at non-integer multiples.
It's the highest res screen on a smartphone. That would be something to brag about no matter what the reasons behind it.
It exposes a limitation of the operating system, and it forces a bad design compromise. Putting a 323dpi screen on a cell phone is a bad cost/benefit tradeoff.
Again, complete nonsense. The better Android smartphones (i.e. the ones that are always brought up by people trying to claim that Android has caught up with iPhone) cost about the same as the iPhone. For example the HTC Evo 4G with 8GB costs $199.99 with a 2 year contract. The iPhone 4 16GB costs $199 with a 2 year contract.
You can't compare phone prices that way because phone companies play games with subscription rates. The iPhone costs more than $1000 when purchased separately (outside the US), compared to about $500 for the Motorola Droid (in the same markets).
And yet the iPhone has changed its hardware to be significantly better 4 times. And each time it's been way ahead of any Android devices. The current one has a display that is far higher resolution than any Android device, has a far better camera than any Android device, and has a gyroscope, which none of the Android devices has.
The reason iPhone 4 has a 960x640 resolution on such a small screen is not because it's good for you, it's because their software is not resolution independent so they need to use pixel doubling. It's not something to brag about really. The Motorola Droid has an 850x480 screen at 240 dpi, which is probably at the limit of what's useful.
The iPhone camera is pretty comparable to the latest Android phones, and it's far worse than the best phone cameras on the market.
Given the steep price that iPhone hardware effectively commands, they have room for some gimmicks that other companies cut out.
The iPhone is a luxury product at a premium price, nothing more.
Neither the Dell Mini 5 nor the Archos are really tablets; their 800x480 screens are the same as high end phones, and 5" isn't substantially larger than phone screens.
When people talk about "tablets", I think they generally think of 9" or larger screens with a resolution of at least 1024x768.
Read the article: the official interpretation is that photographers can be asked by the police "to move on" and that this is up to the discretion of the police.
There are no specific patents covering PSK-31, so that's free and open. The fact that you are paying someone else to build hardware and software for you doesn't matter; nobody in particular benefits from implementing that standard. If you like, you could even use PSK-31 with completely open, patent-unencumbered hardware and software.
In contrast, there are specific patents covering DSTAR; the only way anybody can use that is by paying licensing fees to specific patent holders.
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I can't "prove" something. "Australia is better than the US." But how to prove that statement?
I'm not trying to prove that the US is better generically. We're talking about civil liberties in the context of hate speech laws. Show me a country that offers more civil liberties than the US because it has adopted stronger hate speech laws.
You get to assert your opinion without support and pass it as fact, while you've simultaneously set up the rules to where I can't do the same.
You haven't made any significant arguments about civil liberties at all, let alone hate speech laws. All you do is point out political and social problems in the US. Yes, the US is far from perfect. But I'm saying that it is usually ahead of other nations in addressing its problems related to civil liberties.
Try comparing one that's close. You sound like you hand-picked one you knew would support your argument,
Good, so at least you agree then that the situation in Germany is problematic.
I picked it for three reasons. First, I happen to know a lot about it. Second, it strongly influences European policies. Third, Germany is a model European democracy, widely respected for its protection of civil rights. Germany also has strong restrictions on First Amendment rights, and those are usually cited by German politicians as one of the ways in which Germany supposedly supports civil rights. Germany is probably one of the best examples of positive effects of hate speech laws, and even Germany falls short of the US on civil liberties.
Other Western nations are arguably worse. UK? State financed state church, no gay marriage, a long history of mass murder in third world nations, extensive privacy violations by the government, hate speech laws used to punish advocates of atheism. France? There is separation of church and state, but still no gay marriage, a long history of mass murder in third world nations, restrictions on press reporting and photography, and extensive discrimination against immigrants from its ex-colonies. Japan? Extensive discrimination against non-Japanese, difficult immigration, no gay marriage. We're running out of big nations here; where is this civil liberties paradise supposed to be?
I guess what I've been saying is "You are wrong, but the effort required to prove it to you is beyond what I'm capable of producing, so you win, but you are wrong anyway."
So, according to you, there are many large nations where civil liberties are protected better than in the US, and where that is done by curtailing First Amendment rights, but you simply can't be bothered to name either the nations or which liberties actually are protected and how that relates to First Amendment rights. Yeah, right...
If Microsoft needs to do something special in order to get hardware acceleration for the HTML canvas, then there is something seriously wrong with their graphics APIs. A window system should automatically use GPU hardware for all 2D and 3D graphics where possible; application programmers shouldn't have to do any special work to do it.
Humans are not hyperadapted to the current biosphere.
Hyperadaptation has nothing to do with it. In past mass extinctions, dominant classes changed, and with them many species became extinct.
In case you hadn't noticed, we're not all that different from our ancestors in the late Pleistocene. Many extinctions have happened over the course of human and pre-human existence, and we have survived them all. We used to eat mammoths, but their extinction did not cause ours.
We're in the middle of a mass extinction; you can't infer anything about the long term effect of mass extinction based on whether we survived short term, local extinction effects.
Humans are dependent not a resource, or a handful of resources, like a specialized animal, but instead we can use damn near any resource in (relative to other animals) virtually unlimited ways.
Western nations can currently get away with monocultures and effectively chemically synthesizing food because of the use of vast amounts of energy per capita. That's not sustainable. If we had unlimited amounts of energy, we wouldn't have to drill through miles of rock in the Gulf in order to tap oil reserves there.
Ease of extraction my ass. Ask a metallugist if it's easier to get aluminum from ore or from a discarded soda can. In the latter case all of the heavy lifting has been done,
And soda can recycling is a great idea. Unfortunately, the heavy lifting it becomes undone as soon as you mix that soda can with tons of other trash and bury it in a landfill for a few decades.
than at levels of lower population. So, you would have people sacrifice their freedom and their happiness to retrogress the whole humanity to a state where a greater portion is impoverished, just so long as the absolute number is lower? Pathetic.
Decreases in poverty are largely the result of technological progress; that progress occurred in nations with lower population growth. If we hadn't had population explosions in Africa and Asia over the last century, we'd now be doing much better both in absolute numbers and in percentages.
Even if population growth were an answer to poverty, it is simply impossible to sustain a 1-2% percent growth rate per year (world population growth rate over the last century) indefinitely. That's not a Malthusian consideration, it's simply physically impossible.
Humans are more adaptable than any animal before us ever has been because we solve problems critically.
Some apparently less so than others...
Ah yes. Even if I were to prove it conclusively, it's still ok because you can argue no place else is better.
You've lost context somewhere. We're talking about hate speech laws. The US is one of the few nations that doesn't have them. Hence it's relevant to see how well nations work that do have them.
You've presented nothing that indicates the US is better than anywhere else,
What were your examples again? A Christian litmus test for public office and gay marriage? Well, let's look at the biggest European country, Germany: it's run by a Christian party, has two government-established Christian churches, consults clerics in order to draft laws, and politicians and government-salaried clerics both agree that Christianity is the basis for citizenship and that atheists were responsible for the holocaust. Abortion remains illegal and gay marriage doesn't exist because that's the way the official German Christian churches want it. And discrimination and prejudice against immigrants are extensive, even on the part of the government.
And the reason all those things can happen in Europe is because Europe doesn't have something like the First Amendment. An inevitable consequence of something like the First Amendment is that it protects hate speech.
Based on history and current social conditions, we have to conclude that hate speech laws are a failure. Europe would do well to adopt a US-style First Amendment and enforce it similarly strictly.
Democracy implies absolutely nothing about rights of the minority. Democracy is purely 50% + 1 = right and might.
Well, centuries of social and political thought disagree with you.
We screw around the formula to prevent exactly that. There is a reason why the US is called a Republic and NOT a democracy.
Oh, please, not that b.s. again. The US is a representative democracy, just like most other modern Western nations. "Republic" is just a more generic and traditional term.
Frankly, I think the rah-rah for "democracy" has resulted in laziness in terms of our political thinking.
Nothing "lazy" about it; we constantly tinker with our system of representation. That's why people elect senators now, why California has referendums, why we have primaries, etc. Those are all fairly recent innovations. And I'm sure more things will change this century.
I can't list a place that's better. You've made up your mind that the USA is the best, and no facts will every sway you from that opinion.
Facts would sway me; presumptions and prejudice don't.
There are places where gays can get married, for one.
Indeed, many of them in the US.
Or where you don't have to profess a belief in a specific God to hold office (what percentage of people in the US are Christian, and what percentage of elected officials at the state or higher level are self-proclaimed Christians?).
The US doesn't require belief in a specific god or any god at all. Several of its founders were deists, not Christians. The US separates church and state cleanly. Voters, of course, have the right to pick whatever candidate they like, including based on their religious preference.
That's quite different from Europe, where many nations either have state churches or special relations between church and state, where the state often pays religious officials, where religious officials meddle in politics, and where you even have Christian political parties.
And don't forget that the USA has massive systemic anti-black biases in the justice system.
I don't know of any "systemic anti-black biases in the US justice system". Can you give examples? And can you point at laws and procedures that other justice systems use in order to do better?
Mass extinctions enabled you to exist. Mass extinctions are in many ways the engine that drives evolution in punctuated equilibrium.
Quite right; and I'd like for this equilibrium not to be punctuated for many millions of years longer so that the human race actually has a chance to grow up.
We, if anything, are getting in the way of new paradigms in the biosphere
You bet we are getting in the way. That's because the "current paradigm" is our paradigm. If the "current paradigm" is replaced by a new one, we and all of our primate and mammalians relatives are going to go with it.
The earth is, for all intents and purposes, a closed system. All the metals we've pulled out of the ground aren't going anywhere.
Elemental abundance is not the limiting factor for raw materials, ease of extraction is. Using resources means transforming them from a comparatively easily accessible form into a nearly useless form.
One billion? You really are a neo-Malthusian. Of course, why shouldn't the grand, all-wise yyxx determine the value of human life arbitrarily for the entire world.
It's you who devalues human life by arguing that people should procreate like lemmings with no regard to consequences.
Fuck all those people who want to have the freedom to decide what kind of family they want. You probably don't even have kids and have no frame of reference for the experience, but you think you can decide for the whole world what they should and shouldn't do. What monumental, disgusting conceit.
No, the "monumental, disgusting conceit" is that you are arguing for selfish, unlimited reproduction in the face of extreme global poverty and suffering.
I know Apple's so-called open source contributions; they mostly fall into three categories: (1) useless, (2) self-serving, (3) coerced due to license.
Can you name voluntary (i.e., not coerced by license) open-source contributions that Apple has made that is in widespread use on non-Apple platforms? I'm not aware of any. But, please, knock yourself out.
Looking at the ANSI spec, it seems like all that's specified is the diameter and end-to-tip length of the cell. So, any device that relies on the depth or diameter of the "+" protrusion is likely not compliant with the spec. (Incidentally, the protrusion is there because it used to cover a graphite rod.)
Also, putting plus and minus contacts next to one another with only a few millimeters of separation and no electronic protection seems like a recipe for disaster; any small piece of metal (staple, metal filing, bits of aluminum foil, etc.) will cause a short, and sweat and condensation will result in relatively large currents.
This is typical Microsoft: creating a costly, overengineered, patented solution in search of a problem.
What this will do, however, is increase the cost and probability of failure of devices, which is, after all, also pretty typical.
Well tough tits - Apple is a business, not a hippy commune.
Yes, and if they can extract more money from your pocket through sleazy tricks and misrepresentations, they have shown time and again that they will do so.
They aren't there to provide Linux freetards with free stuff.
But apparently they think that the open source community is there to provide them with free stuff and then just shut up.
Which is why I get so sick and tired of religious folks complaining about gay marriage destroying marriage in general.
But it is! All those closeted gay religious folks would just abandon their spouses and go into same sex marriages if it became legal! Just look at Ted Haggard and those people, they are already taking the first step in anticipation!
Google is likely offering domestic partner benefits, which means it also applies to unmarried heterosexual couples.
But assuming they don't, why should they be forced? Because they can get married. It's not like gay couples don't want to get married, they are prohibited by law. As soon as that prohibition is lifted, Google will scrap those extra benefits. The fact that some people who might not marry if they could happen to fall under this special policy doesn't make it "discrimination", it just makes it an imperfect, temporary solution.
The Malthusian disaster is already here; we're in the middle of a mass extinction and are consuming resources at a totally unsustainable rate.
A sustainable and reasonable world population is under one billion; there is no reason to have a world population larger than that. And the only way to get there is to have fertility rates below replacement for an extended period of time.
Of course, the whole reason why this exists is to encourage HAVING CHILDREN.
Yeah, like a planet with 6 billion people and a nation with 330 million people needs more CHILDREN.
Besides, if marriage were about having children, why not just give benefits to couples with children? Why should childless marriages or women past menopause receive any benefits?
So why should they get the tax benefits of married people, if I, as an unmarried single person without kids cannot?
Probably because your assumption about the reasons for legal support of marriage are wrong. It's not about children, it's about creating a legal framework for partnerships because that's arguably a good thing. And having stable gay relationships is just as beneficial to society as having stable straight relationships, regardless of whether there are kids involved or not.
So, either (1) abolish legal marriage altogether and treat everybody equally, (2) provide tax and legal benefits only for couples with children, or (3) provide tax and legal benefits to all stable, committed couples. None of those depend on the gender of the partners involved.
It's not a "democratic society" if offended people can oppress minorities. A democracy does not give you the right not to be offended. In fact, any political system that protects people from being offended simply cannot be democratic.
And what fantastical fairy realm do you live in where things are better? Do you really believe that law enforcement or the legal system are race blind in the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Iceland, or any other nation?
The only reason many European nations didn't have a problem with race or religion for a while is because at some point in the past, they purged themselves (often violently) of anybody who was different. Of course, with massive immigration from outside Europe, even that is changing again, and with it, you're seeing riots, violence, and second-class citizens.
Yeah, the US isn't perfect, but it's doing a lot better than most other places on earth.
Since we will always live in unjust society, there has to be a better argument for supporting hate speech.
Hate speech is legal under the US Constitution; there is no argument needed. In fact, US courts have re-affirmed that free speech includes hate speech again and again.
If you want to make it illegal, you need to come up with clear and convincing arguments and empirical evidence.
In Latvia (where I am), during gay pride people form catholic church threw excrements at participants of the pride. No arrests or anything. Makes me wonder.
That's not speech, that's bodily harm; that's prohibited by law, I assume even in Latvia. Penalties for those actions may be enhanced by hate crime legislation, even in the US.
When not throwing feces, however, Catholics will be permitted to continue to preach hate against homosexuals, atheists, and anybody else who challenges their authority; no government will restrict that because it is considered part of protected religious freedoms (whether that is reasonable is another debate).
The only question is whether people will be able to respond by pointing out the hypocrisy, lack of legitimacy, and crimes of the Catholic church, so that through reason and debate we can convince people to abandon that ancient and evil cult. That is where hate crime laws come in, because they will be applied when people try to respond to attacks and political machinations by powerful religious forces in their society.
I'm in the UK. The iPhone 4 starts at £499 which is $754. So again you're either mistaken or just making things up.
I'm neither mistaken nor am I making things up, that's how much it costs unlocked in Germany.
In the UK, you can get a Motorola Milestone for £339. If we look at continental Europe, in France, the 16G iPhone starts at EU 629, while you can get a Motorola Milestone for EU 350.
(Try learning how to use a price search engine. Oh, wait, I forgot, you're just an Apple fanboy, so you just buy whatever they sell to you at whatever price they're asking.)
Meanwhile iPhone OS 3 and earlier apps run on the iPhone 4 in full resolution for any text or anything that's drawn, or anything that uses system controls. The only time there will be pixel doubling is for bitmap app resources.
I own an iPad and have it right here. iPhone OS 3 apps on iPad use pixel doubling for everything: the text is pixelated, the keyboard is pixelated, even native iPhone widgets are pixelated and show pixelated text. The iPad demonstrates how crappy iOS handling of resolution and screen size issues is.
Basically, you have no idea of what you're talking about.
Don't bother trying to argue the toss with me. I've been developing smartphone UIs for more than a decade.
Any idiot can develop smartphone UIs, and obviously any idiot does.
No. That was true for PalmOS back in the day, but it's not true for iOS. iOS is every bit as resolution independent as Android is. All coordinates are given in points, not pixels. Font sizes are given in points, not pixels. On old iPhones one point was 1.0 pixels. On the new iPhones 1 point is 2.0 pixels.
That isn't resolution independence. A resolution independent UI adapts to new screen sizes not by scaling coordinates, but by actually changing the layout of components.
It's perfectly possible for Apple to have introduced a new iPhone where there was a non integer number of pixels. The reason they didn't is because a UI scaled by a non integer number wouldn't look as good.
That's what "it lacks resolution independence" means: on larger screens, iPhone just scales up the smaller layout, unless the code itself is altered. You can see exactly how iOS handles larger screens by looking at iPhone apps on iPad: you get a big black border, a pixelated keyboard, and a layout that is ill-suited to the large screen.
That's true whether you are talking about iOS or Android.
No, it's not. Android apps look fine at non-integer multiples.
It's the highest res screen on a smartphone. That would be something to brag about no matter what the reasons behind it.
It exposes a limitation of the operating system, and it forces a bad design compromise. Putting a 323dpi screen on a cell phone is a bad cost/benefit tradeoff.
Again, complete nonsense. The better Android smartphones (i.e. the ones that are always brought up by people trying to claim that Android has caught up with iPhone) cost about the same as the iPhone. For example the HTC Evo 4G with 8GB costs $199.99 with a 2 year contract. The iPhone 4 16GB costs $199 with a 2 year contract.
You can't compare phone prices that way because phone companies play games with subscription rates. The iPhone costs more than $1000 when purchased separately (outside the US), compared to about $500 for the Motorola Droid (in the same markets).
And yet the iPhone has changed its hardware to be significantly better 4 times. And each time it's been way ahead of any Android devices. The current one has a display that is far higher resolution than any Android device, has a far better camera than any Android device, and has a gyroscope, which none of the Android devices has.
The reason iPhone 4 has a 960x640 resolution on such a small screen is not because it's good for you, it's because their software is not resolution independent so they need to use pixel doubling. It's not something to brag about really. The Motorola Droid has an 850x480 screen at 240 dpi, which is probably at the limit of what's useful.
The iPhone camera is pretty comparable to the latest Android phones, and it's far worse than the best phone cameras on the market.
Given the steep price that iPhone hardware effectively commands, they have room for some gimmicks that other companies cut out.
The iPhone is a luxury product at a premium price, nothing more.
Neither the Dell Mini 5 nor the Archos are really tablets; their 800x480 screens are the same as high end phones, and 5" isn't substantially larger than phone screens.
When people talk about "tablets", I think they generally think of 9" or larger screens with a resolution of at least 1024x768.
Under new UK anti-terror legislation, arguably, the police can stop you from taking pictures of them:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7888301.stm
Read the article: the official interpretation is that photographers can be asked by the police "to move on" and that this is up to the discretion of the police.
There are no specific patents covering PSK-31, so that's free and open. The fact that you are paying someone else to build hardware and software for you doesn't matter; nobody in particular benefits from implementing that standard. If you like, you could even use PSK-31 with completely open, patent-unencumbered hardware and software.
In contrast, there are specific patents covering DSTAR; the only way anybody can use that is by paying licensing fees to specific patent holders.