The guy who wrote that article knows pretty much nothing about Android tablets.
The article is missing the first successful Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab, altogether. It's still selling, it's a great format, and lots of people are using it. It's more popular in Europe than the US because AT&T crippled the US version.
Then the article goes on to dismiss the best-selling Android tablet, the EEE Transformer, in a sidebar. The Transformer has shipped about half a million units in a few months and they can't make them fast enough.
Another big story is that Samsung has come out with some really nice second generation tablets: slim, beautiful, fast, and what happend to them was that Apple blocked their sales by asserting bogus design patents.
What does matter is that the device works, works well, and that the user enjoys using it.
And these specs are what makes the device work, and work well. And it's been selling well too, at about half a million units and selling out quickly.
See, unlike Apple, where one size fits all and specs don't matter because your only choice is to buy or not to buy (kind of like the Soviet Union), there are dozens of Android tablets and that's why the specs matter. Also the specs for the connectivity matter, because built-in SD card reader, USB, and HDMI output are really nice.
And Apple knows that Android tablets are a real threat; that's why they have been filing all these bogus patent claims against Samsung (another company that makes very nice tablets). If iPads were selling based on how good they are, Apple wouldn't have to play these evil tricks.
So, according to you "unbelievers will burn in hell" (Christian dogma) is not trolling, but "these writings contain no factual information" is trolling. Thanks for demonstrating again what kind of ideology Christianity actually is.
Look at the article: they get sued to release their data and research, which was gathered using public funds. And, yeah, people are asking hard questions of scientists when they are asked to create massive new government programs and expenses. I don't have a problem with that.
Now, go back 30 years and tell us that you could have come up with a Droid or iPhone then. Not just a general idea (little handheld-device that lets you do things), but an actual, working, Droid or iPhone or equivalent. Remember, there were no Li-ion batteries, no touch displays, no GSM, no ARM processors.
Except that Apple didn't invent any of those things. Apple didn't invent high powered batteries, or magnets, or touch screens, or multitasking, or GUIs, or outdoors LCDs, or browsers, or even phone number highlighting, or text message handling. Apple didn't even create their own software; they cobbled together Mach, GNU, and Objective-C, and then liberally copied from Smalltalk and a few other frameworks to get iOS. iOS 5's "new" features are, again, almost all copied from other platforms.
All Apple ever did was copy other people's ideas and stick them into shiny boxes. And when they were feeling particularly evil, they'd add insult to injury by filing a patent on stuff they didn't invent. So, yeah, some patents are good, but if you go through your list, you'll find that they are mostly hardware patents. None of the patents Apple ever got "encouraged innovation".
Oh, and incidentally, 30 years ago, people did have personal electronic organizers, made by Psion. The company turned into Symbian and Nokia. They were the innovators. Apart from the hardware limitations (e.g., hardware keyboard instead of touch screen), it is quite analogous to modern smartphones. Apple basically took those ideas, did a better job at design and marketing, and killed the people who invented most of this stuff in the first place.
Defence is allowed to mean unlimited budgets, unopposed missions and indeterminate arbitrary scope. Globally.
Allowed by who? Certainly not small-government, states-rights advocates; those want the US to withdraw its troops from most of the world.
The people wanting to continue the status quo are large parts of both sides of the political spectrum, who like the vast money flows, as well as our European and Asian "allies", who can spend the money they save on defense for infrastructure and social services. Every time the US actually tries to reduce its military spending (or achieve balanced trade for that matter), those nations scream bloody murder.
Ultimately, I suspect that it is the result of aggressive parenting, with limited compassion and few outward expressions of affection.
Ultimately, I suspect your kind of reasoning is the result of pseudo-intellectual parenting and a total lack of understanding of economics. Oh, and let's throw a lack of compassion in there as well, because paying a few percent more taxes just so that you can assuage your guilty conscience and think you "did something for the poor" is a scam, and should be transparent to anybody with half a brain.
The iPad uses a monobloc metal case, the Galaxy 10.1 uses plastic.
The iPad has its back camera in a corner near the top in portrait mode, the Galaxy 10.1 has it centered on a side. Ditto for the front facing cameras.
The iPad has its connector at the bottom in portrait mode, the Galaxy has it on its side.
The Galaxy Tab has its cameras and connectors in the same places as the iPad 2, but it _predates_ the iPad 2, so if anything, Apple copied Samsung. Furthermore, the placement is utilitarians: do you want to use he device in portrait or landscape mode. Landscape turns out to be more useful for large tablets and Apple got the design of the iPad 2 wrong.
Just about the ony thing the Galaxy 10.1 and the iPad have in common is that they have glass on the front , are thin, and are rectangular. But there are several designs that predate even the iPad 1 that look like that.
Apple and that judge are full of shit. And the entire iPad is a photocopy of non-Apple designs. Apple steals and then markets the hell out of their products so that people like you believe the "innovated".
It's not the "small government types" you have to worry about; whether they like authoritarianism or not, it's kind of hard to be authoritarian if there is so little government.
It's both progressives and Christian conservatives that are fond of totalitarian solutions to political, economic, and social problems, both historically and today.
I don't see a contradiction. Small government types believe that the function of the federal government is defense, diplomacy, and international trade, and little else; but those functions, the federal government should perform well and should have all the power to carry out. That includes keeping secrets secret.
If there is a contradiction, it is in the social engineering laws of the Republicans, when they try to prohibit gay marriage and drugs. But the part of the Republican party that wants those is the Christian conservatives, and they are distinct from the libertarians and the small government types (I'm a Democrat, and I can't stand half the people in the Democratic party either).
But that's not quite what Google Books is. Google Books is a single archive under the control of a single company. If something should happen to Google, it would disappear. Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive are more of what you envision.
A monopoly in copying and republishing books that belong to someone else.
Many of these books don't belong to anybody identifiable; they are orphan works.
Of course, they should really be out of copyright entirely. Under our old copyright system they would be (because they wouldn't be registered), but under the idiotic copyright system European publishers imposed on the world and forced the US to agree to, they are now in limbo.
Many big companies used to invest in long term research, and some still do: IBM, Google, Microsoft, Xerox, Nokia, and others. In addition to their own research labs, they also have been paying for university research, gave scholarships, collaborating with researchers, participating in the scientific community, etc.
A company that hasn't been doing any significant research in 15 years is... Apple. All Apple ever does is suck up other people's research results and computer science graduates, charge inflated prices to students, and write inane patents.
If Apple's irresponsible business model catches on (invest everything in marketing, design, and lawyers), there isn't going to be a US computer industry in a decade or two.
By the way, the DV program notifies more winners than actually can get visas (among other things because winners may also bring family members, which count against the quota). So, you can meet all the requirements and still not get a visa.
That's bullshit. You have to funds in hand in order to qualify for the visa, if the only way to get those funds is for you to sell your house then your advice leads to a catch-22.
You have to demonstrate that you aren't a public charge; selling your house has nothing to do with that.
Your problem is accepting that a visa can be denied for arbitrary reasons.
Quite to the contrary: because a visa can be denied for arbitrary reasons, you shouldn't burn your bridges until you actually have the visa in hand.
That's not the way it is supposed to work,
That is the way it is supposed to work: immigration is a series of judgment calls, not a series of checklists.
Patents are screwing up the US market because there are actually many independent software companies making money, and both big companies and patent trolls are trying to cash in.
In Europe and Asia, the market is screwed up in other ways so that patents don't even have to come into play.
HTC clearly infringed those patents; the question is why Apple was awarded those idiotic patents in the first place. The patents should get invalidated. And if we had a saner legal system, Apple and the inventors should be charged with fraud for filing them in the first place.
US citizens: you have made your nest (by voting between two evils) now sleep in it.
And where is this any different? European intelligence services have at least as much power to access private data of European citizens, and they have had it pretty much forever.
Slashdot Mirror
Generals work for the public good. Jobs worked for his own wealth and power. When generals do that, we call them "warlords".
The guy who wrote that article knows pretty much nothing about Android tablets.
The article is missing the first successful Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab, altogether. It's still selling, it's a great format, and lots of people are using it. It's more popular in Europe than the US because AT&T crippled the US version.
Then the article goes on to dismiss the best-selling Android tablet, the EEE Transformer, in a sidebar. The Transformer has shipped about half a million units in a few months and they can't make them fast enough.
Another big story is that Samsung has come out with some really nice second generation tablets: slim, beautiful, fast, and what happend to them was that Apple blocked their sales by asserting bogus design patents.
The article is an uninformed troll, nothing more.
And these specs are what makes the device work, and work well. And it's been selling well too, at about half a million units and selling out quickly.
See, unlike Apple, where one size fits all and specs don't matter because your only choice is to buy or not to buy (kind of like the Soviet Union), there are dozens of Android tablets and that's why the specs matter. Also the specs for the connectivity matter, because built-in SD card reader, USB, and HDMI output are really nice.
And Apple knows that Android tablets are a real threat; that's why they have been filing all these bogus patent claims against Samsung (another company that makes very nice tablets). If iPads were selling based on how good they are, Apple wouldn't have to play these evil tricks.
The only "right direction" is for Oracle to destroy both Java and itself: Oracle is evil and Java is a disaster that is going nowhere fast.
So, according to you "unbelievers will burn in hell" (Christian dogma) is not trolling, but "these writings contain no factual information" is trolling. Thanks for demonstrating again what kind of ideology Christianity actually is.
The Dead Sea Scrolls don't contain "information", they contain superstitions. There is a difference.
I don't see the big problem. The more robots can automate, the cheaper things get and the less money we need and hence the less we need to work.
No, "Developers, Developers, Developers" is out of date. The new motto is "Advertising, Advertising, Advertising":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTkA9L2J2gY
It's the "monkey see, monkey do" approach to business.
Look at the article: they get sued to release their data and research, which was gathered using public funds. And, yeah, people are asking hard questions of scientists when they are asked to create massive new government programs and expenses. I don't have a problem with that.
Except that Apple didn't invent any of those things. Apple didn't invent high powered batteries, or magnets, or touch screens, or multitasking, or GUIs, or outdoors LCDs, or browsers, or even phone number highlighting, or text message handling. Apple didn't even create their own software; they cobbled together Mach, GNU, and Objective-C, and then liberally copied from Smalltalk and a few other frameworks to get iOS. iOS 5's "new" features are, again, almost all copied from other platforms.
All Apple ever did was copy other people's ideas and stick them into shiny boxes. And when they were feeling particularly evil, they'd add insult to injury by filing a patent on stuff they didn't invent. So, yeah, some patents are good, but if you go through your list, you'll find that they are mostly hardware patents. None of the patents Apple ever got "encouraged innovation".
Oh, and incidentally, 30 years ago, people did have personal electronic organizers, made by Psion. The company turned into Symbian and Nokia. They were the innovators. Apart from the hardware limitations (e.g., hardware keyboard instead of touch screen), it is quite analogous to modern smartphones. Apple basically took those ideas, did a better job at design and marketing, and killed the people who invented most of this stuff in the first place.
Allowed by who? Certainly not small-government, states-rights advocates; those want the US to withdraw its troops from most of the world.
The people wanting to continue the status quo are large parts of both sides of the political spectrum, who like the vast money flows, as well as our European and Asian "allies", who can spend the money they save on defense for infrastructure and social services. Every time the US actually tries to reduce its military spending (or achieve balanced trade for that matter), those nations scream bloody murder.
Ultimately, I suspect your kind of reasoning is the result of pseudo-intellectual parenting and a total lack of understanding of economics. Oh, and let's throw a lack of compassion in there as well, because paying a few percent more taxes just so that you can assuage your guilty conscience and think you "did something for the poor" is a scam, and should be transparent to anybody with half a brain.
" JavaScript is not actually that bad compared to PHP."
In the same sense that "cancer is actually not that bad compared to smallpox"?
The iPad uses a monobloc metal case, the Galaxy 10.1 uses plastic.
The iPad has its back camera in a corner near the top in portrait mode, the Galaxy 10.1 has it centered on a side. Ditto for the front facing cameras.
The iPad has its connector at the bottom in portrait mode, the Galaxy has it on its side.
The Galaxy Tab has its cameras and connectors in the same places as the iPad 2, but it _predates_ the iPad 2, so if anything, Apple copied Samsung. Furthermore, the placement is utilitarians: do you want to use he device in portrait or landscape mode. Landscape turns out to be more useful for large tablets and Apple got the design of the iPad 2 wrong.
Just about the ony thing the Galaxy 10.1 and the iPad have in common is that they have glass on the front , are thin, and are rectangular. But there are several designs that predate even the iPad 1 that look like that.
Apple and that judge are full of shit. And the entire iPad is a photocopy of non-Apple designs. Apple steals and then markets the hell out of their products so that people like you believe the "innovated".
These aren't environmental do-gooders, they are right-wing populists acting based on what the mob wants. There's a difference.
It's not the "small government types" you have to worry about; whether they like authoritarianism or not, it's kind of hard to be authoritarian if there is so little government.
It's both progressives and Christian conservatives that are fond of totalitarian solutions to political, economic, and social problems, both historically and today.
I don't see a contradiction. Small government types believe that the function of the federal government is defense, diplomacy, and international trade, and little else; but those functions, the federal government should perform well and should have all the power to carry out. That includes keeping secrets secret.
If there is a contradiction, it is in the social engineering laws of the Republicans, when they try to prohibit gay marriage and drugs. But the part of the Republican party that wants those is the Christian conservatives, and they are distinct from the libertarians and the small government types (I'm a Democrat, and I can't stand half the people in the Democratic party either).
But that's not quite what Google Books is. Google Books is a single archive under the control of a single company. If something should happen to Google, it would disappear. Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive are more of what you envision.
Many of these books don't belong to anybody identifiable; they are orphan works.
Of course, they should really be out of copyright entirely. Under our old copyright system they would be (because they wouldn't be registered), but under the idiotic copyright system European publishers imposed on the world and forced the US to agree to, they are now in limbo.
Many big companies used to invest in long term research, and some still do: IBM, Google, Microsoft, Xerox, Nokia, and others. In addition to their own research labs, they also have been paying for university research, gave scholarships, collaborating with researchers, participating in the scientific community, etc.
A company that hasn't been doing any significant research in 15 years is... Apple. All Apple ever does is suck up other people's research results and computer science graduates, charge inflated prices to students, and write inane patents.
If Apple's irresponsible business model catches on (invest everything in marketing, design, and lawyers), there isn't going to be a US computer industry in a decade or two.
By the way, the DV program notifies more winners than actually can get visas (among other things because winners may also bring family members, which count against the quota). So, you can meet all the requirements and still not get a visa.
You have to demonstrate that you aren't a public charge; selling your house has nothing to do with that.
Quite to the contrary: because a visa can be denied for arbitrary reasons, you shouldn't burn your bridges until you actually have the visa in hand.
That is the way it is supposed to work: immigration is a series of judgment calls, not a series of checklists.
Patents are screwing up the US market because there are actually many independent software companies making money, and both big companies and patent trolls are trying to cash in.
In Europe and Asia, the market is screwed up in other ways so that patents don't even have to come into play.
Markets dominated by a few big players are by definition not free.
Maybe you mean "unregulated markets"; that's something very different.
HTC clearly infringed those patents; the question is why Apple was awarded those idiotic patents in the first place. The patents should get invalidated. And if we had a saner legal system, Apple and the inventors should be charged with fraud for filing them in the first place.
And where is this any different? European intelligence services have at least as much power to access private data of European citizens, and they have had it pretty much forever.