There is one other thing, a thing that most in the US have lot sight of. All mobile operators use the public space to generate a profit and as such should be required to use that space for the public good. If they cannot make a profit using the public space for public good, that public space should be given to someone who can. Nowhere is it written that profit is a fundemental right, although some conservative wackos want profit to be a fundemental right, I am talking about bush and reagan and the bailouts. Profit is merely something we have the right to persue.
We lost this when TV and radio took over our government and decided they were entitled to the bandwidth loaned to them by the people. The people have every right to take that bandwidth back. Even the cable operators, whose cable runs though and limits the use of public space, has a duty to the public though they too believe they can take from the people without giving anything back.
The argument for net neutrality is simply that the airwaves are public property and the public should make the decision on what it is used for, not the firms who are borrowing them. Like I said, if the mobile companies can't make a profit, then take the bandwidth away and attempted to be let to a new firm that can make a profit. This is what is done in real life. When a firm rents a space and does not make enough money to pay for that space, the space is taken back and rented to someone else. In the US we do say that they space is theirs forever just because they squatted on it and no one else wants it. We let the market work, except when a firm is so big they can corrupt the market by creating regulation to favor them. Which is the purpose of many regulations. To keep competition out.
And as far as sig goes with Ron Paul, remember that instead of letting the market work and allowing his constituents to suffer for bad housing and car choices, or to allow the public to decide what food was best for them, he used tax payer money to build a million dollar bus stop and gave untold hundred of thousands of dollars to his fishing buddies so they could be hired as consultants to push shrimp. This is what is wrong with the market. Even those that claim be hands off will not be able to avoid the temptation of free money and helping their friends steal from the poot.
A patent troll is someone who has patents, not devices. From this point of view, MS is not a patent troll because it has been in the smart phone business before there were smartphones. So in a sense it is asserting patents to make sure other don't use it's proprietary processes to create equal competing products. This is what patents are for.
OTOH there is another type of patent troll. A patent troll who is rather incompetent at creating or marketing a specific device or process but still wants to profit off the production of the device. This is MS. MS has had years to bring smartphones to market. They have not done so. They have had years to work within the market to produce a product people want. They have not. So now they are pushing trivial patents to profit off other peoples works. This is not what patents are for.
If MS were to sue someone because they were copying key points from Xbox, there would be no issue. But people are not. Firms are using industry standard methods to develop a mobile device. Using filename, icons, and redenering techniques that MS did not develop, but merely copied from others and was the fist to patent.All they want is a share of a market that they do not have the skill to get. As a result the consumer is being asked to pay more than would otherwise be necessary. Does this sound familiar. It should because it is how MS operates. By getting a cut from ever sale even if MS has no input into that sale. Can any say naked PC?
I am thinking more of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It wasn't a bad rewrite. It was a decent iteration of a story that has been iterated many times. But it was a bad movie. At this point there is no canonical Dr. Who. It has been sexualized since Sarah Jane Smith came out in a swimsuit back when the episodes were still grainy B&W. it only became more so with the minimizing of Teagan's outfits, not to mention Turlough in speedos. Certainly many of us consider the relationship of the Doctor and Rose to be a little over the line, and the opposite kind of relationship between Donna Noble was kind of a way to fix that. I suspect the issue with a major movie will the that the fx will continue to degrade the importance of the story and characters.
You have found that the issue is the stylus. This is what I have found as well. Every stylus I have tried has been pretty bad. The iPad with a screen protector is a good writing surface, but I cannot use a stylus.
In terms of general note taking, the one app I do use is evernote. I like the way it integrates between the tablet and laptop or desktop. This might be useful in terms of organization.
I have several note taking apps on my iPad. They all seem about the same. Some have more emphasis on organzation or on integrated all your devices. The basis of the app is simple enough that there is likely a variation that will work, once a good stylus is found.
Let me make one suggestion that may be a bit out there. There is an app called chalkboard wich I use to scribble down notes. It has a simple and elegant interface. You can use different colors, just like some people do when they take notes.
Light pollution is something that, as a fiscal conservative, really annoys me. Clearly lighting the sky is not of long term interest to the taxpayer who pays for the electricity over the years. It may cost more upfront to put in lights that only light the ground, not only because of the need for more light but the costs of each light, but clearly we save in terms in electricity over the years. Also, as municipalities switch to such lights the cost will go down as manufacturers move away from the old wasteful lights to carefully designed lights that minimize pollution. One form of pollution that I would like to see gone are neighbors who have these huge light that land outside of their property.
Of course one issue that keeps this from happening is the frightened populous. If the sky does not look as bright as it does in the daytime, people panic.
I suppose someone is getting kickbacks from the utilities and the light manufacturers to continue this wasteful behaviour. I suppose the social conservatives, who seem to care not about the amount of money that is wasted in the name of their beliefs, also limit progress because anything that reeks of progress and efficiency just rubs them the wrong way.
Most people I know don't know how climb trees well. I wonder how many have climbed trees. When I was you there were a few years where I almost lived in a tree.
i have never had any skill for handwriting. 100 years ago this might have really meant that I did not make it through elementary school. If I had been born 10 years later I might have made better grades because I would have had more access to a computer, or at least a typewriter.
Any technology arguably changes the brain and the skills we value. Be it moving from a stick to a hammer to electric nail guns or moving from spoken language to written language in clay tablets to the varied and persistent written language presented in text messages twitter and facebook updates. Some may decry this, but really widely available written language in a recent phenomenon, and for the first time with mobile devices and e books we are no longer slaves to the publisher on what we read. Sure most of what we read might be crap, but it is our crap. We no longer have to look at other peoples crap.
There is only so many skills a human can master. We must pick and choose. There are people who do not have current skills, and those people of course are going to decry that changes mean the old ways are gone. But are we going to say a builder is not good simply because they need to use a nail gun. Is a painter less of painter if they cannot gather their own pigments and make their own paints. Is the hacker less of an hacker if they cannot solder their own boards and code in assembly.
Of course there are new problems associated with every advance that makes old problems become lesser problems. And yes many would rather deal with the old problems than the new problems. But I think most would admit the particulate pollution from automobiles is in many ways preferable to horse crap all over the place.
Such a teaching method is very enlightening. One very good way to get everyone to learn is give them different but similar problem sets and let them work though the problems. Cheating is minimized, and learning is maximized.
I recall in high school our programming class, Fortran, was a vey isolating experience, and though I learned I did not learn how to manage the writing of code. I could write any program you wanted to, as long as it was small enough to do on my own. One thing that changed my outlook was an upper level college physics class in which we had to model energy levels of the atom. This was very much a collaborative semester long research project. I admit that not every did an equal amount of programming, but everyone did an equal amount of work, and that is really what being a professional is all about.
All this collaboration would be well and good except for how topic are tested. We know in the professional world a lot of success is based on what one can learn and assimilate through research and personal discussion after a problem is presented, yet that is not the focus of learning, especially in high school. High level test are based on, at least in science and math, on giving student relatively novel problems for thier age and then expecting them to solve it with no outside resources. I am sure this is a good way to determine who is a good student, but maybe not such a good way to determine who is going to be the good professional problem solver.
So really, good programming courses have always been based on sharing and collaborations. The most succesful will help and share with everyone else, and accept help and input. The problem is that when the subject is tested, too often one is tested on standard sort routines, or debugging a bit of code without context, or identifying some minor piece of jargon.
I have always felt the current elimination of many of our basic rights began with the drug war. In fact I believe the drug war was used to scare the populous in the post soviet world.
Look at it this way. The law says that if someone accuses of being a drug dealer, not convicts, but just accuses you with a little bit of probable cause, they can take away your assets. And people think this is reasonable? The state to take assets without a convictions?
People do think it is reasonable, but when the government goes in and actually takes out a military/religious compound that is abusing children, people cry foul. How does this make sense.
It is reasonable for the you taxpayer funds to be used to track someone simply because they have gone into a club frequented by member of the Army of God, the people connecte with the US Olympic bombing. Simple association is nothing.
Here is the only argument that I think holds traction against GPS tracking, and that is property rights. It is not OK for the government to mess with my property. The car is mine, I am responsible for it, so attaching a GPS they are violating my property rights.
Of course people are so scared of crime that are willing to give up any and all personal rights to stop the villains.
The tablet wars on going to won on infrastructure and free stuff. The iPad has apps and the ITMS. Both provide lots of great free content, and stuff you can buy. It allows deep integration between devices, now for free. Amazon has, well Amazon, where free stuff can be had. If you join Amazon prime more stuff can be had at no additional price. Music is integrated through their sites, and lots of stuff can be streamed.People are going to buy the iPad and Kindle because of available free or cheap content.
Now, the Android tablets, as much as people might talk about their abilities, do not have a source of free content. They have a source of integration through Google, but most other tablets do as well. There may be a source of exclusive free content, but who is going to do it? Google has not done so thus far. BN could do it. They could give away tracks and video and books like Apple and Android does, but will they make enough money to cover the free content? As it is we see that Hulu and Netflix is the big thing, but Hulu cost $120 a year for mobile devices, versus $80 for Amazon Prime. Netflix also costs $120 a year, and the availability of any given video on a mobile device is always in flux as the licensing changes.
BN has the power to put content and integration behind an Android tablet and make them competative.
I would also say just get an iPad. I know two people in your general situation and the iPad works well. The Internet connectionn is still useful because they can still read and the Internet allows to read international papers.
Dell and others sell an inexpensive base product the can then be expanded. For those who want an efficient quality product, the inexpensive base is the limiting factor. No magsafe which is a godsend. The computer needs an adapter that is almost twice as power hungry and over twice as big. The stock battery onynlasts half as long. With full spec the computer is at least a pound heavier. For people who need an Inexpensive machine to play or give to the worker bees, it is a ggod deal. For me where my time is limited and I pay my own expenses, dell is not good enough. This was shown when I running autodesk on a macbbokmand it was the only machine that would render quickly and at full resolution.
In any case the original Mac differential resulted in non commodity hardware. No one had a GPU, no one had a PMMU, no one had a huge ROM. In the late 90s they had a commodity laptop with IDE drive and it was crap. Way too slow. In the mid 2000s it was mostly attributable to low end PC having a few buzzword high end specs but nothing underneath to use those cheap high end components, for instance slow fsb or graphics. Now it is mostly pure industrial design. Buy the efeecient well integrated machine or the hacked together inexpensive machine. It is a choice.
Which is of course why Apple and RIM control their own hardware. If you let commodity manufacturers create product, then the product inevitably is going to be inferior. Furthermore customers are going to receive an inferior customer experience as everyone blames everyone else for problems.
For instance Google is not even going to take responsibility for bad software. This i worse than MS blaming everyone on the hardware people, and the hardware people blaming everything on MS. With apple if the software fries a motherboard, it is a warranty replacement.
The fact is when a product is released like this it is the whole array of products that makes or breaks the market, not just the chosen representtives. It is after all the whole market, including the $100 phones sold through cricket, that has made adroid the most of the most bought phones. No one is saying it is unfair to say that android is popular because they have sold low price phones. Now I have said it is unreasonable to compare Apple sales to Android sales right now becaue Apple has only recently been selling in multiple outlets. If in a year Apple is still lagging, then Android has won the market.
This was pretty much the argument used IBM 25 years ago to keep cheap commodity PCs out of the enterprise. MS used it to keep Macs out of the office even though Macs were more solidly built than the crap many offices used to run MS software. Yet commodity PCs took over the office, and Macs were integrated by the IT staff of the time.
Now, I will entertain the idea that modern IT people are not nearly as cleaver as 20 years ago. I mean, what do you need to know now a days, how to plug in a cable, randomly check GUI boxes, and say "Have you turned the computer off and on"? But then given the level of standards and integration between all equipment that exists, I can't really imagine that such support should be beyond the budgets and ability of even the most unqualified IT department.
This is where I believe many business pundits really don't get business. It is like just because they don't succeed or a product they like doesn't succeed, they attribute failure to regulations or random luck. Random events do play a part is some cases, and lack of sophistication concerning the regulatory, demographics, and other vaguaries of a market will certainly lead to definite failure, but neither of these need to be the defining role in product development.
I know many business people and they have a solid product with solid customer support. I see other businesses that just are trying random things to make a buck, and of course then random things happen. The gold rush was a good example. Some people got rich, some didn't. There was certainly some skill, but most people were just trying to make easy money. I think many treat the App store in this way, and that any business rag would consider these firms as legitimate businesses is beyond me.
It is unclear in terms of economic growth whether deficiet spending on the part of government or private individuals produces different results. Certainly government can borrow money much more cheaply than private individuals. Furthermore, there is not necessarily a finite amount of money to lend. If businesses want to borrow to expand, there is money, but no sane business is going to expand because there is no demand.
In terms of government spending, there may be a difference between airport screeners and jobs where actual infrastructure is created. The economic benefit of airport screeners ends if and when those jobs are ended. If someone builds a useful road, or write useful code, or creates a new knowledge through research and development, that is money that is invested and will continue to generate economic growth long after the jobs or funding ends. Just look at the uproar about closing military bases. The economic growth spurred by those bases end the minute those bases are closed. This is the kind of government spending we need to minimize, spending that is not long term or can be used or repurposed to a large variety of industries.
One thing that is true is that small firms, that is firms that fall under the number of employees that require a large amount of regulation, do create jobs. What is also true is that the tax burden on these small firms, firms of a few to tens of people, creates an environment where such firms have an extremely difficult time surviving and employing people. What is also true is such firms must be are crucial as they make everyone a job creator, which takes the government out of the equation. We do not need to bail out a bank, as it becomes better from a tax perspective to be a small independent bank rather than a mega bank.
I will second this. I ordered the cheapest GAL programmer I could find off eBay and it arrived and worked fine. I spent no where near 80. A USB to rs-242 converter will add to the cost, but if you find a good deal on serial it is no a big deal.
It is true is that Apple is competing. We see this in that for the first time Apple is making a phone, not a computer. What was interesting to me, not being a person who likes spending hours talking on the phone when I could be talking and having fun in person, is that Apple made a small computer and not a phone. I have never really kept a cell phone primarily as a way to talk all day. My Razr was not a great phone, but it was small and let me communicate when I needed to. So Apple is fixing one big problem.
There is one more thing that makes the Samsung market share numbers uninteresting, and we will have to see how this pans out over time. So far Apple has been in limited distribution, only ATT in the US. Recently they have gone to Verizon and Sprint which gives them mass market distribution for the first time. Samsung, OTOH, appears to be the primary smartphone supplier to Cricket. This gives them a huge market, but mostly for handset around $150 and below. One would assume at these prices they have to sell in huge volume to generate a profit. Note that the volume of sales are comparable to Apple's. Therefore either the smart phone segment is growing so fast that marketshare is not so much of an issue as volume and profit, or marketshare is important but only in terms of overwhelming percentages.
I look at the mature PC market, the commodity market started when Compaq reversed engineered the PC and took off the late 80's when everyone could get commodity parts and put a computer together in their living room. 20 years later how many dedicated mass market vendors are left? There is not enough money in it for IBM. It is basically HP, Dell and Asus.
Netflix raised prices, but also gave customers an out if they were extremely sensitive to prices. One could go just streaming or just delivery and pay less. Netflix has understood that movie rental is extremely sensitive to pricing, and has done a ok job maintaining value.
Redbox OTOH, now that it has banished most of the Blockbuster and all the Hollywood video stores, seems to be taking advantage of the situation. There is no acknowledgement that some customers might have trouble with the extra cents and have to cut back. A more reasonable way to do this would be a dolar for the first day and then $1.20 for each additional day, or even a dollar if you get it back within 10 hours. As it is, it is just charging more money because the market will bear, which is fine, but certainly much more of a screw up than netflix. I already though $1 a day was too much and seldom use Redbox. Now I will even be more hesistant.
The problem is that everyone is looking for a loophole or unenforced rule to gain some advantage. In terms of parking, just look at the number of SUVs parked in spots that are clearly marked 'compact car only'. Now, if there are no other spaces available that might be justifiable but it is mostly because these people don't want to walk to an extra 20 feet. I drive a compact car, but it is on the big side of compact, so I don't generally park in these spaces anymore.
So if one is trying to secure a system, and one is dealing with people who can't even follow a simply rule that doesn't really cost them anything, how can one use a light touch. I am sure that many people will say how unfair it is to put parking spaces in that cannot accomodate a troop carrier, but really, each square foot of parking costs money and have a variety of spaces ultimately reduces the necessary prices. Everyone has a choice of what to drive.
Shall we cry for the person who no longer had a job because some thought of a shovel, or a hammer, or pitchfork?
Humans were hunter gathers for a really long time, and the time from agriculture to post-industrial and informational is just a tiny sliver of the human timeline. The people who don't have jobs now are just like the people who sat on the farm expected the society to provide them with the living that they had grown accustomed to rather than moving to the city. Yes, it is perhaps sad that a person cannot do the same job year after year, generation after generation, but it might also be good that children have an opportunity to do something different from their parents, even if it is not their wish.
It is easy to blame someone else for all the woes in life, but there is some personal responsibility. Maybe one believed that there would always be high paying jobs for unskilled high school graduates. or maybe one believed that a BBA for a JD would guarantee a lifetime of easy money. Or that knowing superficailly how to use a computer would guarantee a high wage. I look at the fields of the South and know that what many Americans want is an easy office job with benefits, and even if they did not spend their youth gaining skills for that, the prospect of doing an honest days work picking fruit is not superior to receiving a government check. Not that I disagree with that. People on the dole serve the important function of increasing the acceleration of money. But to blame machines rather human greed and lack of motivation is simply silly.
On one hand it will prevent many caners in future generations, thus decreasing suffering and medical expenses.
OTOH, SEX!
On one hand it will allow many couples to have children that may not have otherwise due to cancer, which most agree is a good thing
OTOH, SEX!
And really isn't that what is all about? Preventing anyone from having sex outside a state defined and mandated relationship. We can't have people going around enjoying themselves without the approval of the feds, can we?
I was amazed at the opposition to HPV for vaccines. Do people really think that kids alone in the backyard are going to limit themselves to mutual handjobs because they are afraid they might give each other cancer? Do they really think that kids are going to be more likely to want to see what all the fuss is about because they have the vaccine? Sure I understand the implicit idea is that the vaccine assumes multiple partners over a life time, but isn't that the status quo that is modeled? Newt Gingrich has slept with at least three women. If marriage is between one man and one women, and we promise god that we will be faithful untile death do us part, isn't any number more than one kind of morally equivalent.
One hesitates to suggest that if this was a vaccine against prostate cancer there would not be so much discussion.
My question would be what kind of language is Dart supposed to be. Is meant for rapid development? Is it there to allow incompetent coders to write code that is not error ridden? Does it exist to protect coders from any knowledge of how a computer operates? Is it the new just-above-bare-metal language It seems that we have all these already, and they work pretty well.
In the US at leaset, carriers are the customer, not the end user. The carriers determine which features are required and how much money will be spent by the end user and how much support is required from the carrier. This presumable is the reason why Verizon would not deal with Apple back in 2007. Apple was designing a phone for that Apple wanted, and determined the prices Apple wanted. Verizon was not yet in a position where it had to play.
Google meant to change this situation with Android. Make a phone that consumers wanted, Create a market where consumers bought a phone made for end users, and then allow the carriers to complete for service. This plan, unfortunately, did not work. One reason is that Google was actually not going to service the Google phone, but rather allow the carriers to do incur those costs while Google made a huge profit on each phone. Obviously end users were not wild about paying a company for a product that denied the product was even made by them, and carriers were not wild about providing service for which they would not be paid.
In any case, everyone has basically blinked and phones are once again made, at least in part, for the carriers. This will happen until we have an old-ATT style breakup in which the governement tells everyone that they have to play nice.
What i see is that most people are arguing over predetermined facts, while science is concerned with creating knowledge and applying that knowledge to innovate. The difference between the two is where the facts come from and the damage caused by them.
For instance those who are anti-science might say that the Earth is 7,0000 years old, the pseudo science guy might say that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, how stupid the short earthers, and how educated I am for knowing simple facts.
Scientist talk about who cool the processes are that we sue to estimate the age of the earth. and what implications that number has on other parts of science. The number is simply a reference that will certainly be adjusted over time.
The anti-science person might buy into modern medicine might by into the modern medicine but not the process to develop it, while the pseudo scientist might buy into an valid argument of health care not supported by legitimate initial assumptions.
The thing is that the anti-science person is not going to much long term damage to science. Science is too useful. Almost no one, no matter how devout is going to give up their flat screen TVs or cell phones or computers. They will just ignore the science and deny it exists. I had one devout christain undergraduate physics student tell me that there was nothing in a modern computer chip that had anything to do with quantum mechanics.
The pseudo scientist however can do great damage. We see this with the pro and anti vaccination people, both arguably pseudo scientists. The anti-vax takes anecdotal evidence combined with personal beliefs and limited understanding to say that vacines are dangerous. We really have no evidence to say there are particularly dangerous. The pro-vax, some calling themselves skeptics, say that there is no evidence of any danger. This is not really true either. We know that vaccines contian mercury, we know heavy metals at any dosage in children is dangerous, which is why we ban lead and no longer have mercury in schools A reasonable person would say that there is enough doubt to remove mercury from vaccines, just like we have have from thermometers.
Science, which does not necessarily include medical research, is going to look at the research and risk and benefits. Certainly we don't want a small pox epidemic, so children should be vaccinated. If the medicine in question was not for vaccine, but to maximize the breast size in girls, many would likely choose to use it despite the risks, but science would be much more likely to counter-indicate it due to risks. The process of science is really clear.
So both while groups certainly base their weltanschauung on personal beliefs ad static facts rather than the process of discovery, I would say the pseudo scientists is more of a threat because not only do are they mistaken for scientists, but presents science as a simply bundle of facts that can be used to attack those whom one does nat agree with, which is very attractive to those that cannot or do not wish to explore the intriguing and wonderful world that is real science.
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We lost this when TV and radio took over our government and decided they were entitled to the bandwidth loaned to them by the people. The people have every right to take that bandwidth back. Even the cable operators, whose cable runs though and limits the use of public space, has a duty to the public though they too believe they can take from the people without giving anything back.
The argument for net neutrality is simply that the airwaves are public property and the public should make the decision on what it is used for, not the firms who are borrowing them. Like I said, if the mobile companies can't make a profit, then take the bandwidth away and attempted to be let to a new firm that can make a profit. This is what is done in real life. When a firm rents a space and does not make enough money to pay for that space, the space is taken back and rented to someone else. In the US we do say that they space is theirs forever just because they squatted on it and no one else wants it. We let the market work, except when a firm is so big they can corrupt the market by creating regulation to favor them. Which is the purpose of many regulations. To keep competition out.
And as far as sig goes with Ron Paul, remember that instead of letting the market work and allowing his constituents to suffer for bad housing and car choices, or to allow the public to decide what food was best for them, he used tax payer money to build a million dollar bus stop and gave untold hundred of thousands of dollars to his fishing buddies so they could be hired as consultants to push shrimp. This is what is wrong with the market. Even those that claim be hands off will not be able to avoid the temptation of free money and helping their friends steal from the poot.
OTOH there is another type of patent troll. A patent troll who is rather incompetent at creating or marketing a specific device or process but still wants to profit off the production of the device. This is MS. MS has had years to bring smartphones to market. They have not done so. They have had years to work within the market to produce a product people want. They have not. So now they are pushing trivial patents to profit off other peoples works. This is not what patents are for.
If MS were to sue someone because they were copying key points from Xbox, there would be no issue. But people are not. Firms are using industry standard methods to develop a mobile device. Using filename, icons, and redenering techniques that MS did not develop, but merely copied from others and was the fist to patent.All they want is a share of a market that they do not have the skill to get. As a result the consumer is being asked to pay more than would otherwise be necessary. Does this sound familiar. It should because it is how MS operates. By getting a cut from ever sale even if MS has no input into that sale. Can any say naked PC?
I am thinking more of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It wasn't a bad rewrite. It was a decent iteration of a story that has been iterated many times. But it was a bad movie. At this point there is no canonical Dr. Who. It has been sexualized since Sarah Jane Smith came out in a swimsuit back when the episodes were still grainy B&W. it only became more so with the minimizing of Teagan's outfits, not to mention Turlough in speedos. Certainly many of us consider the relationship of the Doctor and Rose to be a little over the line, and the opposite kind of relationship between Donna Noble was kind of a way to fix that. I suspect the issue with a major movie will the that the fx will continue to degrade the importance of the story and characters.
In terms of general note taking, the one app I do use is evernote. I like the way it integrates between the tablet and laptop or desktop. This might be useful in terms of organization.
I have several note taking apps on my iPad. They all seem about the same. Some have more emphasis on organzation or on integrated all your devices. The basis of the app is simple enough that there is likely a variation that will work, once a good stylus is found.
Let me make one suggestion that may be a bit out there. There is an app called chalkboard wich I use to scribble down notes. It has a simple and elegant interface. You can use different colors, just like some people do when they take notes.
Of course one issue that keeps this from happening is the frightened populous. If the sky does not look as bright as it does in the daytime, people panic.
I suppose someone is getting kickbacks from the utilities and the light manufacturers to continue this wasteful behaviour. I suppose the social conservatives, who seem to care not about the amount of money that is wasted in the name of their beliefs, also limit progress because anything that reeks of progress and efficiency just rubs them the wrong way.
If I had mod points I would mod this funny. It would be like shooting a video of the snail race.
i have never had any skill for handwriting. 100 years ago this might have really meant that I did not make it through elementary school. If I had been born 10 years later I might have made better grades because I would have had more access to a computer, or at least a typewriter.
Any technology arguably changes the brain and the skills we value. Be it moving from a stick to a hammer to electric nail guns or moving from spoken language to written language in clay tablets to the varied and persistent written language presented in text messages twitter and facebook updates. Some may decry this, but really widely available written language in a recent phenomenon, and for the first time with mobile devices and e books we are no longer slaves to the publisher on what we read. Sure most of what we read might be crap, but it is our crap. We no longer have to look at other peoples crap.
There is only so many skills a human can master. We must pick and choose. There are people who do not have current skills, and those people of course are going to decry that changes mean the old ways are gone. But are we going to say a builder is not good simply because they need to use a nail gun. Is a painter less of painter if they cannot gather their own pigments and make their own paints. Is the hacker less of an hacker if they cannot solder their own boards and code in assembly.
Of course there are new problems associated with every advance that makes old problems become lesser problems. And yes many would rather deal with the old problems than the new problems. But I think most would admit the particulate pollution from automobiles is in many ways preferable to horse crap all over the place.
I recall in high school our programming class, Fortran, was a vey isolating experience, and though I learned I did not learn how to manage the writing of code. I could write any program you wanted to, as long as it was small enough to do on my own. One thing that changed my outlook was an upper level college physics class in which we had to model energy levels of the atom. This was very much a collaborative semester long research project. I admit that not every did an equal amount of programming, but everyone did an equal amount of work, and that is really what being a professional is all about.
All this collaboration would be well and good except for how topic are tested. We know in the professional world a lot of success is based on what one can learn and assimilate through research and personal discussion after a problem is presented, yet that is not the focus of learning, especially in high school. High level test are based on, at least in science and math, on giving student relatively novel problems for thier age and then expecting them to solve it with no outside resources. I am sure this is a good way to determine who is a good student, but maybe not such a good way to determine who is going to be the good professional problem solver.
So really, good programming courses have always been based on sharing and collaborations. The most succesful will help and share with everyone else, and accept help and input. The problem is that when the subject is tested, too often one is tested on standard sort routines, or debugging a bit of code without context, or identifying some minor piece of jargon.
Look at it this way. The law says that if someone accuses of being a drug dealer, not convicts, but just accuses you with a little bit of probable cause, they can take away your assets. And people think this is reasonable? The state to take assets without a convictions?
People do think it is reasonable, but when the government goes in and actually takes out a military/religious compound that is abusing children, people cry foul. How does this make sense.
It is reasonable for the you taxpayer funds to be used to track someone simply because they have gone into a club frequented by member of the Army of God, the people connecte with the US Olympic bombing. Simple association is nothing.
Here is the only argument that I think holds traction against GPS tracking, and that is property rights. It is not OK for the government to mess with my property. The car is mine, I am responsible for it, so attaching a GPS they are violating my property rights.
Of course people are so scared of crime that are willing to give up any and all personal rights to stop the villains.
Now, the Android tablets, as much as people might talk about their abilities, do not have a source of free content. They have a source of integration through Google, but most other tablets do as well. There may be a source of exclusive free content, but who is going to do it? Google has not done so thus far. BN could do it. They could give away tracks and video and books like Apple and Android does, but will they make enough money to cover the free content? As it is we see that Hulu and Netflix is the big thing, but Hulu cost $120 a year for mobile devices, versus $80 for Amazon Prime. Netflix also costs $120 a year, and the availability of any given video on a mobile device is always in flux as the licensing changes.
BN has the power to put content and integration behind an Android tablet and make them competative.
I would also say just get an iPad. I know two people in your general situation and the iPad works well. The Internet connectionn is still useful because they can still read and the Internet allows to read international papers.
In any case the original Mac differential resulted in non commodity hardware. No one had a GPU, no one had a PMMU, no one had a huge ROM. In the late 90s they had a commodity laptop with IDE drive and it was crap. Way too slow. In the mid 2000s it was mostly attributable to low end PC having a few buzzword high end specs but nothing underneath to use those cheap high end components, for instance slow fsb or graphics. Now it is mostly pure industrial design. Buy the efeecient well integrated machine or the hacked together inexpensive machine. It is a choice.
For instance Google is not even going to take responsibility for bad software. This i worse than MS blaming everyone on the hardware people, and the hardware people blaming everything on MS. With apple if the software fries a motherboard, it is a warranty replacement.
The fact is when a product is released like this it is the whole array of products that makes or breaks the market, not just the chosen representtives. It is after all the whole market, including the $100 phones sold through cricket, that has made adroid the most of the most bought phones. No one is saying it is unfair to say that android is popular because they have sold low price phones. Now I have said it is unreasonable to compare Apple sales to Android sales right now becaue Apple has only recently been selling in multiple outlets. If in a year Apple is still lagging, then Android has won the market.
Now, I will entertain the idea that modern IT people are not nearly as cleaver as 20 years ago. I mean, what do you need to know now a days, how to plug in a cable, randomly check GUI boxes, and say "Have you turned the computer off and on"? But then given the level of standards and integration between all equipment that exists, I can't really imagine that such support should be beyond the budgets and ability of even the most unqualified IT department.
I know many business people and they have a solid product with solid customer support. I see other businesses that just are trying random things to make a buck, and of course then random things happen. The gold rush was a good example. Some people got rich, some didn't. There was certainly some skill, but most people were just trying to make easy money. I think many treat the App store in this way, and that any business rag would consider these firms as legitimate businesses is beyond me.
In terms of government spending, there may be a difference between airport screeners and jobs where actual infrastructure is created. The economic benefit of airport screeners ends if and when those jobs are ended. If someone builds a useful road, or write useful code, or creates a new knowledge through research and development, that is money that is invested and will continue to generate economic growth long after the jobs or funding ends. Just look at the uproar about closing military bases. The economic growth spurred by those bases end the minute those bases are closed. This is the kind of government spending we need to minimize, spending that is not long term or can be used or repurposed to a large variety of industries.
One thing that is true is that small firms, that is firms that fall under the number of employees that require a large amount of regulation, do create jobs. What is also true is that the tax burden on these small firms, firms of a few to tens of people, creates an environment where such firms have an extremely difficult time surviving and employing people. What is also true is such firms must be are crucial as they make everyone a job creator, which takes the government out of the equation. We do not need to bail out a bank, as it becomes better from a tax perspective to be a small independent bank rather than a mega bank.
I will second this. I ordered the cheapest GAL programmer I could find off eBay and it arrived and worked fine. I spent no where near 80. A USB to rs-242 converter will add to the cost, but if you find a good deal on serial it is no a big deal.
There is one more thing that makes the Samsung market share numbers uninteresting, and we will have to see how this pans out over time. So far Apple has been in limited distribution, only ATT in the US. Recently they have gone to Verizon and Sprint which gives them mass market distribution for the first time. Samsung, OTOH, appears to be the primary smartphone supplier to Cricket. This gives them a huge market, but mostly for handset around $150 and below. One would assume at these prices they have to sell in huge volume to generate a profit. Note that the volume of sales are comparable to Apple's. Therefore either the smart phone segment is growing so fast that marketshare is not so much of an issue as volume and profit, or marketshare is important but only in terms of overwhelming percentages.
I look at the mature PC market, the commodity market started when Compaq reversed engineered the PC and took off the late 80's when everyone could get commodity parts and put a computer together in their living room. 20 years later how many dedicated mass market vendors are left? There is not enough money in it for IBM. It is basically HP, Dell and Asus.
Redbox OTOH, now that it has banished most of the Blockbuster and all the Hollywood video stores, seems to be taking advantage of the situation. There is no acknowledgement that some customers might have trouble with the extra cents and have to cut back. A more reasonable way to do this would be a dolar for the first day and then $1.20 for each additional day, or even a dollar if you get it back within 10 hours. As it is, it is just charging more money because the market will bear, which is fine, but certainly much more of a screw up than netflix. I already though $1 a day was too much and seldom use Redbox. Now I will even be more hesistant.
So if one is trying to secure a system, and one is dealing with people who can't even follow a simply rule that doesn't really cost them anything, how can one use a light touch. I am sure that many people will say how unfair it is to put parking spaces in that cannot accomodate a troop carrier, but really, each square foot of parking costs money and have a variety of spaces ultimately reduces the necessary prices. Everyone has a choice of what to drive.
Humans were hunter gathers for a really long time, and the time from agriculture to post-industrial and informational is just a tiny sliver of the human timeline. The people who don't have jobs now are just like the people who sat on the farm expected the society to provide them with the living that they had grown accustomed to rather than moving to the city. Yes, it is perhaps sad that a person cannot do the same job year after year, generation after generation, but it might also be good that children have an opportunity to do something different from their parents, even if it is not their wish.
It is easy to blame someone else for all the woes in life, but there is some personal responsibility. Maybe one believed that there would always be high paying jobs for unskilled high school graduates. or maybe one believed that a BBA for a JD would guarantee a lifetime of easy money. Or that knowing superficailly how to use a computer would guarantee a high wage. I look at the fields of the South and know that what many Americans want is an easy office job with benefits, and even if they did not spend their youth gaining skills for that, the prospect of doing an honest days work picking fruit is not superior to receiving a government check. Not that I disagree with that. People on the dole serve the important function of increasing the acceleration of money. But to blame machines rather human greed and lack of motivation is simply silly.
OTOH, SEX!
On one hand it will allow many couples to have children that may not have otherwise due to cancer, which most agree is a good thing
OTOH, SEX!
And really isn't that what is all about? Preventing anyone from having sex outside a state defined and mandated relationship. We can't have people going around enjoying themselves without the approval of the feds, can we?
I was amazed at the opposition to HPV for vaccines. Do people really think that kids alone in the backyard are going to limit themselves to mutual handjobs because they are afraid they might give each other cancer? Do they really think that kids are going to be more likely to want to see what all the fuss is about because they have the vaccine? Sure I understand the implicit idea is that the vaccine assumes multiple partners over a life time, but isn't that the status quo that is modeled? Newt Gingrich has slept with at least three women. If marriage is between one man and one women, and we promise god that we will be faithful untile death do us part, isn't any number more than one kind of morally equivalent.
One hesitates to suggest that if this was a vaccine against prostate cancer there would not be so much discussion.
My question would be what kind of language is Dart supposed to be. Is meant for rapid development? Is it there to allow incompetent coders to write code that is not error ridden? Does it exist to protect coders from any knowledge of how a computer operates? Is it the new just-above-bare-metal language It seems that we have all these already, and they work pretty well.
Google meant to change this situation with Android. Make a phone that consumers wanted, Create a market where consumers bought a phone made for end users, and then allow the carriers to complete for service. This plan, unfortunately, did not work. One reason is that Google was actually not going to service the Google phone, but rather allow the carriers to do incur those costs while Google made a huge profit on each phone. Obviously end users were not wild about paying a company for a product that denied the product was even made by them, and carriers were not wild about providing service for which they would not be paid.
In any case, everyone has basically blinked and phones are once again made, at least in part, for the carriers. This will happen until we have an old-ATT style breakup in which the governement tells everyone that they have to play nice.
For instance those who are anti-science might say that the Earth is 7,0000 years old, the pseudo science guy might say that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, how stupid the short earthers, and how educated I am for knowing simple facts.
Scientist talk about who cool the processes are that we sue to estimate the age of the earth. and what implications that number has on other parts of science. The number is simply a reference that will certainly be adjusted over time.
The anti-science person might buy into modern medicine might by into the modern medicine but not the process to develop it, while the pseudo scientist might buy into an valid argument of health care not supported by legitimate initial assumptions.
The thing is that the anti-science person is not going to much long term damage to science. Science is too useful. Almost no one, no matter how devout is going to give up their flat screen TVs or cell phones or computers. They will just ignore the science and deny it exists. I had one devout christain undergraduate physics student tell me that there was nothing in a modern computer chip that had anything to do with quantum mechanics.
The pseudo scientist however can do great damage. We see this with the pro and anti vaccination people, both arguably pseudo scientists. The anti-vax takes anecdotal evidence combined with personal beliefs and limited understanding to say that vacines are dangerous. We really have no evidence to say there are particularly dangerous. The pro-vax, some calling themselves skeptics, say that there is no evidence of any danger. This is not really true either. We know that vaccines contian mercury, we know heavy metals at any dosage in children is dangerous, which is why we ban lead and no longer have mercury in schools A reasonable person would say that there is enough doubt to remove mercury from vaccines, just like we have have from thermometers.
Science, which does not necessarily include medical research, is going to look at the research and risk and benefits. Certainly we don't want a small pox epidemic, so children should be vaccinated. If the medicine in question was not for vaccine, but to maximize the breast size in girls, many would likely choose to use it despite the risks, but science would be much more likely to counter-indicate it due to risks. The process of science is really clear.
So both while groups certainly base their weltanschauung on personal beliefs ad static facts rather than the process of discovery, I would say the pseudo scientists is more of a threat because not only do are they mistaken for scientists, but presents science as a simply bundle of facts that can be used to attack those whom one does nat agree with, which is very attractive to those that cannot or do not wish to explore the intriguing and wonderful world that is real science.