Yeah, there had to be some way to blame the Republicans for Obama's three and a half years of failure. It's too late to say "Bush's fault," so let's grab onto the fact that the Republicans control one house of Congress. Let's forget that they didn't have that control for Obama's first two years in office. Democrats had a lock for two years and have only a worsening economy to show for it. It doesn't help that Democrats were neck deep in the financial crisis, defenders of the worst financial offenders.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, can be the fault of the Democrats. It all has to be the eeeeevil Republicans.
The jailbreaking situation is an aspect of the user experience
No, it isn't. Jailbreaking is outside of the user experience for which the product was designed. Supercharging your Toyota Prius may be something you want to do, and may even provide better performance, but it's outside of the designed experience, may cause problems that will leave you unsupported, and is not something Toyota should support either officially or by making it easier for users to do.
They're called the politicians who are supporting and funding AGW for a variety of reasons: honest belief, a bogey man to point to in order to gain power (Christians and gays, Hitler and Jews, a bogey man helps rally the masses to your cause), or just plain greed with all the money-funneling schemes made up so far.
You seem to think that fragmenting the user experience is an enhancement to the user experience. I disagree.
As I have demonstrated, Apple can set things up so that the user experience of the 99.99% (which is an exaggeration, but whatever)
Apple has sold around 200 million iPhones. That would peg the jailbreaking community at about 20,000 using my SWAG figure. So maybe I revise to 99.9% to be probably far bigger than the community.
my point is to disprove your claim that Apple always puts user experience first.
Except that I never said that. I did say they try to make the user experience perfect. Their concept of it has historically meant creating a homogenous environment, not purposely fragmenting it.
So you admit that Apple doesn't always put user experience first. QED.
Your desired user expreience and the user experience Apple desires for the other 99.99% of iPhone users to have are in conflict. Therefore, Apple will put them first and ignore you. It makes sense.
It is a strength of Apple's. However, they aren't perfect at it (nobody can be, really), and as such should focus their efforts on the area which actually has a significant impact: the device itself.
Remember the loupe? Remember the other poster who mentioned Jobs' Sunday night call because the gradient in an icon of Google's was off? Apple puts an obsessive-compulsive level of effort into the devices themselves. Having done that, they also focus on the entire experience.
No, Apple isn't always perfect, sometimes misses the mark in design (hockey-puck mouse) and software (Final Cut Pro X released too soon). However, Apple's usual way is to make lots of mistakes in-house, and there's an extremely low bar for what gets called a mistake, downright nit-picky. Apple is willing to dump a project if it isn't up to snuff, where other management often says it has to be released in order to get some revenue to pay for that R&D or hit a quarterly earnings target.
Basically, Apple doesn't play "good enough" like Google and others. That bar set, there's time to do other things to make the customer happy. Make the customer happy, what a concept!
(or whatever you'd call it if it were officially available)
That means extra effort, development and support liability on Apple's part. For what return? Something that only a fraction of a percent wants to do? That's not good business and bypasses Apple's quality controls. Apple wants a consistent experience, always, and has no good reason to to go out of the way to provide a method for some users to achieve an inconsistent experience.
The ideology was communist and sympathetic to the Soviets. They rejected any condemnation of Soviet policies or actions, placing all blame on the US. The Weather Underground was an offshoot that concentrated on the *violent* overthrow of the government with the end goal of world communism, a goal shared with the Soviets.
Obama had been an excellent senator
Obama basically spent two years as a Senator. The rest was his run for president. During this time he was pretty much a rank-and-file Democrat, nothing special. As far as Romney's record, I'm not a fan either.
I prefer someone have some executive experience. Business experience is preferable so that the person knows how the real world out there works, or at least a decent history of holding down working-class or professional private-sector jobs. Military experience is not necessary but would be a plus so that the person can know how the military works for the Commander in Chief role.
GW Bush had been a governor and in the military (I don't count business, he just floated around with Daddy's friends). Bill Clinton was a pure political animal who never even held a regular job AFAIK, but at least he had been a governor. Ronald Reagan was in the military, held a job as actor and even ran a union (Screen Actors Guild) before becoming a governor. Jimmy Carter was military, successful businessman, state senate and governor. Richard Nixon was military, successful practicing attorney, congressman and VP, so he missed my executive criteria. John Kennedy did military, congressman, senator, so misses it too.
He ran on the issues: Iraq and polarization, not his biography.
He re ran on vague "hope and change.' He won because he did the best "I'm not Bush." That was the real deciding factor in the election, given how tired everyone (including conservatives) was of Bush. Well, that and being black pushed him into victory.
The media check this out, and found he was stellar.
The media take the liberal view that there's nothing to see here. Remember, the WaPo even admitted having been biased for Obama. At least they were honest.
That's not memogate. That's the Killian documents controversy
That was known as memogate or rathergate before this recent one.
There appeared to be some degree of question.
You are doing the same thing, equivocating when caught. Appeared to be? No, they were obvious fakes, acquired from an untrustworthy anti-Bush fanatic, in coordination with a senior Kerry campaign manager.
I'm hard pressed to see how this doesn't reflect positively on CBS.
CBS was in a press to do as much hurt to Bush as possible. Because of this, they jumped on the memos and aired the story knowing there were authenticity issues. The story was even pitched to CBS as a way to alter the election in Kerry's favor, and CBS jumped at it.
Here's the really bad thing: When caught CBS immediately pressed forward, airing another story that tried very hard to convince people that the memos were real, or at least that the information they contained was true. CBS was desperate, their attempt to smear Bush was falling apart. Their document experts went public about telling CBS their opinions of the documents.
Then CBS's malfeasance itself became a story and the other news outlets smelled blood. After almost two weeks of very bad press, and the public not buying the story anymore, only then did CBS agree there could have been a mistake and started a review of their practices. Even then it glossed over the political bias (probably didn't want to get sued for flat-out calling it political bias). And to this day Dan Rather and the producer claim they did no wrong. These are the kind of people who run our media, partisan hacks.
It's worth nothing next to the actual experience of using the device. Who cares if the packaging is good, when the device has some user interface flaw that annoys you?
Something else Apple excels at. They even looked at the original iPhone icons with a loupe to make sure not one pixel was off. Attention to detail, not something Google is noted for. Apple goes further, trying to ensure that apps don't stray too far from reasonable user interfaces, another reason for the app store.
You still haven't given one good reason why Apple should officially support this jailbreak-equivalent hack you want. Why add the extra headache? Why make any effort to support what could potentially cause even one user to get pissed off at Apple? Doing nothing is better. Right now the jailbreakers will jailbreak, and Apple can wash their hands of them. Start making it official, and Apple goes down the rabbit hole.
Any facet of the device's function, whatsoever, will have a much larger impact on you than those fleeting moments.
Those moments shape the perception of the product and keep people coming back. Good old-fashioned customer service is getting too rare these days. The feeling that the company actually gives a damn about making you happy is worth a lot.
Apple should be preserving the user experience of the larger group.
That is exactly what Apple is doing right now. It is not worth it for Apple to support a tiny fringe customer base that could have a negative impact on the larger customer base.
As long as the phone can be reset to factory condition, the warranty should be in force to cover hardware defects.
Long ago I remember a computer hoax about a program that could harm your computer. That's not a hoax anymore. You can change the software in a car and blow the engine, and that violates the warranty too. There will always be bickering about whether the unsupported modification caused the hardware failure. The extreme of this is a generic PC, which is reasonable designed to run any PC OS, having its warranty invalidated over installing Linux. That is a stupid extreme. But the iPhone was designed specifically to run iOS in certain supported configurations, so Apple would have more power here.
No, I just don't call those things part of the user experience
They are part of the interaction with the device, they are part of the user experience. I bought a car from a Ford dealer once, basic business transaction, let's do some paperwork, okay, here are your keys. For warranty service I got grumblings about whose responsibility the service was, and I dropped it off and found something to do for that time. I got the car back as I left it, with a bit of extra dirt.
I bought a car from a somewhat higher-end dealer once, relaxing couch, refreshments and snacks available, personal half-hour tour of and instruction on all the features of my new car, all-around good treatment down to the bouquet of flowers they gave my wife when we left. For warranty service, they'd immediately take it and I'd get a loaner without question. My car would be waiting for me washed and detailed in the end.
Guess which one I would prefer to go to again? The one that provided me with the best experience.
It is quite possible to have the ability to install non-sanctioned apps buried so deep, or beneath such a technical and arcane process, that it will only be accessed by those who are cognizant of and willing to accept the risks.
Then you sell your phone and the person who gets it has these problems. It's not worth the trouble and potential customer dissatisfaction for Apple for the larger population in order to appease a fraction of a percent of them who are geeks. However, I do agree jailbreaking by any means should be 100% legal, but it should invalidate your warranty since you put it into a state that Apple can't plan support for. Conversely, you should be able to sue Apple if they purposely brick your phone on detection of a jailbreak.
if an argument is left wing it should be downplayed.
No, a standard reflex of liberals when terrorists Americans don't like are mentioned is to regurgitate the "America supports terrorists!" mantra.
All of them were looking to change or impose policies because they believed those policies to be in the best interest of America
This is the same Bill Ayers who said some tens of millions of people would have to die in his revolution, right? They were in the best interests of his ideology, an ideology that this country was at the time fighting against.
That's what they did to several of his friends. They didn't catch him.
That sucks. The not catching him and killing him part. I don't remember the FBI killing any WU members. I knew a few of them died when the bomb they were making to murder soldiers and their dates at a Fort Dix dance went off. That's poetic justice.
Further the norm for candidates is to hand over the tax returns.
Romney has. End of story.
Obama has never claimed that attending Columbia is what made him qualified to be president.
Actually, nothing made him qualified to be president. He must be the most under-qualified president we've had in scores of years. The presidency was the first election he ever won against viable competition.
What he was doing at Columbia, whether he was in glee club or the harley davidson fan club is completely irrelevant to whether he was there or not.
Skull and Bones was a big deal for Bush, covered extensively. Actually, his entire time at school was covered quite extensively, and in the most detail the investigators could dig up.
About Obama's time at school? "He went there." That's all the press had the "resources" to dig up. Of course that's all the resources they had, the rest of their reporters were up in Alaska picking apart Sarah Palin's past bit by bit.
The media does not have infinite resources.
Of course not. They make best use of those resources by committing 90% of them to digging dirt on Republicans, the other 10% by coming up with reasons to say "Nothing to see here, move along" on Democrat dirt.
Memogate? As far as I know both sides of the American system are on the same side of that one.
Wrong Memogate. This is the one with the faked memos about GW Bush's National Guard days that Dan Rather and CBS pushed as real. You know, the ones that were supposed to by typed on a mid-70s typewriter, but looked exactly like a faxed Microsoft Word document typed in a proportional font using the standard template? Four out of five document experts refused to authenticate them before the airing of the story, which allowed CBS to claim a document expert had determined them to be authentic.
Conservatives who weren't even document experts realized the documents were fake within hours and the fact went viral among non-liberal sites. If it had not been for the Internet, the fact that they were fake may have never been widely known, and the lie could have threatened Bush's reelection.
When faced with the absolute fact that they could not be real, and with mounting public pressure from conservatives, CBS heavily investigated -- with the goal to prove the memos were real, not to actually determine if they were real. Eventually CBS was forced to backpedal, a bit. But their general stance was not to admit they were fake, only that they could not be proven real, and that the content was correct anyway, leading to the "Fake but accurate" description. BTW, CBS also got caught coordinating this story with John Kerry's campaign.
But under Bush a bipartisan consensus was reached that put an end to the problem.
So you only use electronics? You've never shopped for them, purchased them, unboxed them, set them up, gotten support for them or recycled them? Impressive. You must be rich and have lackeys do all that for you.
Easy example: Apple could make a setting buried deep within iOS, or even an official tool of some kind, to enable the install of non-app store apps.
Which would harm the user experience because poorly written or presented apps, apps that use undocumented APIs that may be closed on the next update, deceptive apps, and many more undesirable traits in apps will be installed by users. When they don't work, who will the users blame? Apple, of course. Even if they don't blame Apple, they are still having a bad experience on Apple's platform, something Apple would like to avoid as much as possible.
You don't like the sandbox, fine, but to say it's an absolute negative is wrong. There are sound usability and engineering reasons behind the decision, even if you disagree with it.
The tendency with any apple evangelists is that anything apple does well (packaging, etc.) is assigned a very high value, and anything that apple does poorly (replaceable batteries, standard SSDs, etc.) is assigned a very low value.
To say that Apple does replaceable batteries or standard SSDs poorly first assumes that those things are a desired trait above the simplification and miniaturization gained by not having them. It is an engineering decision to do it that way, not a flaw in execution. What is gained for the user by Google doing unboxing poorly?
Which is fine but wholly different than the media not reporting them.
The point is not that they don't always report, but that they show favoritisim. They can do this by not reporting negatives, glossing over negatives, or harping on positives (or turning negatives into positives with spin).
Except its not. The United States has always been the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism
Yeah, leftwing reactionary verbal regurgitation noted. This guy was a terrorist AGAINST the very country Obama was wanting to lead.
No I'm saying that your point about him not being captured is the norm in war.
Well, if you want to define it as war then the FBI should have just shot him on sight based on the intel they had. That's what you do to enemy soldiers, right? But this wasn't war, the FBI was operating under the regular rules for investigation, and they broke those rules, preventing prosecution.
And in the 4 years since very little about his past has come out. Which refutes that.
Doesn't refute it, confirms it. Back then they didn't care to check, and they still don't care to check. Yet they demand Romney's tax returns NOW.
Columbia confirmed and has records to verify Obama was there fall 81 - spring 83 as per his books.
Transcript? Courses? Society memberships? Bush's were released.
That's true. And they still are friendly to Obama.
That's pretty much my point in this. Obama gets a free ride relative to his competition. Remember memogate? Manufactured by the media, immediately accepted by the media as truth, pushed by the media as truth, exposed by conservatives, still supported by the media with "Fake, but accurate."
Do you think that would happen with a liberal? In that same election they sent out swarms of reporters to scrutinize every facet of the Swiftboat claims, eager to disprove them.
Reporters are urban voters who often are paid poorly, i.e. people with more education than money.
No, what matters is that they are mainly graduates of journalism schools that are run by liberals. The media is liberal because most of the people in it were indoctrinated in liberalism.
Obama also has the advantage of not having to defend the craziness of the current Republican party,
No, he would just have to defend the craziness of the current Democratic party, if the press pushed him on it.
Come on, these people were complaining that Republicans are holding up judge confirmations in the Senate, when they were doing the exact same thing during Bush. They even did it with a pandering racist motive, preventing an Hispanic Republican who was being groomed for the Supreme Court from sitting on a stepping-stone bench. Why? So they could get the first Hispanic on the Court as a liberal, and Obama appointed her. With this insane playing of games, no challenge to Obama for the actions of his party.
Google and others think the user experience of a product is confined only to the actual use of it. But that's only one part pf a user experience, and forgets walking into the store (or using the online store), buying, unboxing, first start and setup, support, and eventual recycling.
Apple does everything in its power to make all aspects of the user experience perfect. Apple does unboxing tests for products, even did store mock-ups instead of just slapping up the usual crowded aisles. That's their brand strategy, and it's popular with consumers and profitable.
But Microsoft thinks it can succeed by ignoring backward compatibility
Microsoft succeeded because of backwards compatibility. You could run DOS on Windows, 16-bit Windows on 32-bit Windows, etc. With the exception of system utilities, which are OS-specific, I only know a few esoteric apps made for Windows 95 that won't run on Windows 7 (for example, a certain SCSI-based RIP solution that wouldn't even run on Windows 98).
But that backwards compatibility brings with it a lot of baggage. Apple chooses to ditch this baggage after some number of years. Microsoft is doing it now too, and that means the software will probably be more solid. There's a lot of resources and added complexity that goes into making a modern large software suite fully compatible with an 11 year-old OS.
alienating _their_ customers (office workers) with a third UI change in three versions.
That's a different issue completely, not backwards compatibility, but simply having no idea how they want to do a UI.
If it is just that Barack Obama and Bill Ayers are friends, that was investigated and verified.
Investigated, downplayed, conclusion reached, "nothing to see here."
was the Bill Ayers who won citizen of the year from the city of Chicago
To liberals, Ayers' Weather Underground terrorist days weren't something to be ashamed of, they were a valuable part of his liberal resume.
Bill Ayers retired from being a terrorist in 1972
Here's the point: He didn't regret setting bombs. He was open to doing it all again. Reformed terrorist, we could agree on. Unrepentant terrorist, should be poison for any politician to associate with. But with the liberal environment these days, it's honey, not poison.
But Ayers might have spent a decade or more behind bars. Not getting caught by the enemy is part of being a soldier
So now you're equating a fugitive terrorist with soldiers? I think I understand where you're coming from. I bet you're a fan of Irmgard Moeller. Were you there at the gate when she was released, cheering her for her murders?
Well Mitt Romney was a Bishop in the Mormon church which was institutionally racist.
Was racist. Also, a bishop to Mormons is more like a priest in other religions. He had no high, influential office. Of course, that's the religion he grew up in. Obama was raised pretty much white middle-class, and gravitated towards this racist anti-semite personally.
But originally the claim was that the media had failed to uncover some secret truth.
That was not the claim. The media failed to investigate very much when it came to Obama, and where it did anything it glossed over anything. Look at even today. The media's harping about how Romney should release his tax returns further back. Meanwhile, Obama's missing years at Columbia and Harvard are still not investigated. Obama's profitable dealings with convicted felon Tony Rezko, glossed over.
Overall, they were very friendly to Obama. After the election, even the Washington Post's own ombudsman admitted their coverage had been heavily biased towards Obama.
What exactly is the association that the media is failing to report?
So you think Obama would have had to associate with Ayers during his Weather Underground days in order for the claim of association with an unrepentant terrorist to be true? Hey, can I get chummy with Charles Manson? I was only a kid during his killing days. That association shouldn't reflect on my character, right?
I don't know about you, but I prefer my elected officials to be free of such associations that would likely deny the average person a security clearance.
As for not being punished he lost several of his best friends and spent years of his life in hiding, I'd say he was punished.
That makes no sense whatsoever. Those were decisions he made on his own, associations he made on his own. Punishment by the people for the crimes he committed never happened.
The police didn't want to go after the Weatherman because:
The only reason he wasn't prosecuted was because the FBI conducted illegal surveillance, which irreparably tainted the case against him. His fugitive status dragged everything on long enough for this to happen. Had he been immediately arrested, he'd probably be in prison.
He denied having been present for some specific remarks.
Riiiiight. If we knew after a couple reports, he must have known over 20 years of actually being there. Is our President really that dumb, dense and inattentive to what is going on around him? Was he that bad a judge of character? Again, I don't know about you, but I prefer that my elected officials not have long-standing close voluntary relationships with racists and anti-semites.
But these relationships are easy to explain. I don't actually think Obama is a racist, anti-semite or terrorist, or likes associating with those people. Obama uses people. Ayers was a shot at coming up in local politics, and Wright was an influential community leader who could raise his profile and make him connections. He didn't care how many dogs he had to lie with, because he could count on the liberal establishment to ignore the fleas, or even admire them.
Of course, that also describes a type of person I definitely don't want as an elected official.
There was some limited involvement during Obama's run for the national Senate and while in office as a Senator. The media reported this. What else was there to say?
That you obviously bought the media spin that downplayed his association with the terrorist. BTW, Ayers didn't do time for his terrorism. He was a fugitive for long enough for COINTELPRO to be exposed, which poisoned their case. He's still guilty as hell and was never punished.
As for Rev. Wright, Obama attended a very liberal black church with a black nationalist agenda.
For some strange reason, the media eventually bought the spin that Obama attended the services for 20 years and had no idea he was supporting a black racist anti-semite, so the issue died rather quickly after Obama threw him under the bus. Being a racist anti-semite is quite different from having one of the variety of kooky religious beliefs common in this country.
Prosecution requires proof of intent to succeed. Palin was just an idiot who didn't understand. I know someone like this, email is email. Bush was juggling two laws that made business difficult, especially since his staff was loaded with people who considered their jobs as Republican operatives more important than their government jobs. But there they are with their beloved RNC Blackberrys, and an email that needs to get sent.
Cuomo is just purposely circumventing FOIA, but it looks like he found a loophole.
The ruling class won't get prosecuted for this. But, yes, the liberal media will follow the Republicans more rabidly and give the Democrats a break. For the most part it isn't a conspiracy, it's just what they are, mostly staffed by liberals who think they are reporting honestly and fairly. They honestly didn't think Ayers was news (presidential candidate associating with an unrepentant terrorist, nah, not important), but they tried hard as hell to turn Palin birthing and raising a Downs kid into a negative.
Bush's staff had to worry about using government issued blackberries when doing RNC business, so they erred on the side of caution to avoid violating the Hatch Act. Unfortunately, this created a problem with other laws. Think, you're using your Blackberry to do RNC business, the subject turns to government business. Most people wouldn't say, oh wait I have to switch to my government account to talk about that. Then we'll go back to the RNC account to continue the conversation. No, the email just continues. It was a screw-up, they should have been more careful even if it made business more cumbersome.
This is quite a bit different from Cuomo, who is doing this precisely to avoid FOIA. He doesn't care, and he plans to continue doing it.
Palin used Yahoo because, well, she's a nitwit who didn't understand the distinction.
Clinton was a president, Palin was a governor like Cuomo, who, because of his dad and running New York, has an even bigger name.
As soon as Palin's name was mentioned for VP, CNN sent reporters to Alaska to dig up as much dirt as possible on her and her children. How many went to Columbia or Harvard to investigate Obama's past? Were they knocking down the doors of Rev Wright or Bill Ayers? Nah, it was all a right-wing smear attempt, long-term ties to a racist preacher and an unrepentant murderous terrorist weren't newsworthy.
They even had an operative in Alaska rapid-firing baseless ethics complaints so fast that Palin eventually resigned because she couldn't afford to defend herself. This is obvious to me, and I don't even like Palin.
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Yeah, there had to be some way to blame the Republicans for Obama's three and a half years of failure. It's too late to say "Bush's fault," so let's grab onto the fact that the Republicans control one house of Congress. Let's forget that they didn't have that control for Obama's first two years in office. Democrats had a lock for two years and have only a worsening economy to show for it. It doesn't help that Democrats were neck deep in the financial crisis, defenders of the worst financial offenders.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, can be the fault of the Democrats. It all has to be the eeeeevil Republicans.
No, it isn't. Jailbreaking is outside of the user experience for which the product was designed. Supercharging your Toyota Prius may be something you want to do, and may even provide better performance, but it's outside of the designed experience, may cause problems that will leave you unsupported, and is not something Toyota should support either officially or by making it easier for users to do.
They're called the politicians who are supporting and funding AGW for a variety of reasons: honest belief, a bogey man to point to in order to gain power (Christians and gays, Hitler and Jews, a bogey man helps rally the masses to your cause), or just plain greed with all the money-funneling schemes made up so far.
Remember the political spectrum isn't a straight line, but a circle; go far enough right you end up left.
You seem to think that fragmenting the user experience is an enhancement to the user experience. I disagree.
Apple has sold around 200 million iPhones. That would peg the jailbreaking community at about 20,000 using my SWAG figure. So maybe I revise to 99.9% to be probably far bigger than the community.
Except that I never said that. I did say they try to make the user experience perfect. Their concept of it has historically meant creating a homogenous environment, not purposely fragmenting it.
Your desired user expreience and the user experience Apple desires for the other 99.99% of iPhone users to have are in conflict. Therefore, Apple will put them first and ignore you. It makes sense.
Remember the loupe? Remember the other poster who mentioned Jobs' Sunday night call because the gradient in an icon of Google's was off? Apple puts an obsessive-compulsive level of effort into the devices themselves. Having done that, they also focus on the entire experience.
No, Apple isn't always perfect, sometimes misses the mark in design (hockey-puck mouse) and software (Final Cut Pro X released too soon). However, Apple's usual way is to make lots of mistakes in-house, and there's an extremely low bar for what gets called a mistake, downright nit-picky. Apple is willing to dump a project if it isn't up to snuff, where other management often says it has to be released in order to get some revenue to pay for that R&D or hit a quarterly earnings target.
Basically, Apple doesn't play "good enough" like Google and others. That bar set, there's time to do other things to make the customer happy. Make the customer happy, what a concept!
That means extra effort, development and support liability on Apple's part. For what return? Something that only a fraction of a percent wants to do? That's not good business and bypasses Apple's quality controls. Apple wants a consistent experience, always, and has no good reason to to go out of the way to provide a method for some users to achieve an inconsistent experience.
The ideology was communist and sympathetic to the Soviets. They rejected any condemnation of Soviet policies or actions, placing all blame on the US. The Weather Underground was an offshoot that concentrated on the *violent* overthrow of the government with the end goal of world communism, a goal shared with the Soviets.
Obama basically spent two years as a Senator. The rest was his run for president. During this time he was pretty much a rank-and-file Democrat, nothing special. As far as Romney's record, I'm not a fan either.
I prefer someone have some executive experience. Business experience is preferable so that the person knows how the real world out there works, or at least a decent history of holding down working-class or professional private-sector jobs. Military experience is not necessary but would be a plus so that the person can know how the military works for the Commander in Chief role.
GW Bush had been a governor and in the military (I don't count business, he just floated around with Daddy's friends). Bill Clinton was a pure political animal who never even held a regular job AFAIK, but at least he had been a governor. Ronald Reagan was in the military, held a job as actor and even ran a union (Screen Actors Guild) before becoming a governor. Jimmy Carter was military, successful businessman, state senate and governor. Richard Nixon was military, successful practicing attorney, congressman and VP, so he missed my executive criteria. John Kennedy did military, congressman, senator, so misses it too.
He re ran on vague "hope and change.' He won because he did the best "I'm not Bush." That was the real deciding factor in the election, given how tired everyone (including conservatives) was of Bush. Well, that and being black pushed him into victory.
The media take the liberal view that there's nothing to see here. Remember, the WaPo even admitted having been biased for Obama. At least they were honest.
That was known as memogate or rathergate before this recent one.
You are doing the same thing, equivocating when caught. Appeared to be? No, they were obvious fakes, acquired from an untrustworthy anti-Bush fanatic, in coordination with a senior Kerry campaign manager.
CBS was in a press to do as much hurt to Bush as possible. Because of this, they jumped on the memos and aired the story knowing there were authenticity issues. The story was even pitched to CBS as a way to alter the election in Kerry's favor, and CBS jumped at it.
Here's the really bad thing: When caught CBS immediately pressed forward, airing another story that tried very hard to convince people that the memos were real, or at least that the information they contained was true. CBS was desperate, their attempt to smear Bush was falling apart. Their document experts went public about telling CBS their opinions of the documents.
Then CBS's malfeasance itself became a story and the other news outlets smelled blood. After almost two weeks of very bad press, and the public not buying the story anymore, only then did CBS agree there could have been a mistake and started a review of their practices. Even then it glossed over the political bias (probably didn't want to get sued for flat-out calling it political bias). And to this day Dan Rather and the producer claim they did no wrong. These are the kind of people who run our media, partisan hacks.
Something else Apple excels at. They even looked at the original iPhone icons with a loupe to make sure not one pixel was off. Attention to detail, not something Google is noted for. Apple goes further, trying to ensure that apps don't stray too far from reasonable user interfaces, another reason for the app store.
You still haven't given one good reason why Apple should officially support this jailbreak-equivalent hack you want. Why add the extra headache? Why make any effort to support what could potentially cause even one user to get pissed off at Apple? Doing nothing is better. Right now the jailbreakers will jailbreak, and Apple can wash their hands of them. Start making it official, and Apple goes down the rabbit hole.
Those moments shape the perception of the product and keep people coming back. Good old-fashioned customer service is getting too rare these days. The feeling that the company actually gives a damn about making you happy is worth a lot.
That is exactly what Apple is doing right now. It is not worth it for Apple to support a tiny fringe customer base that could have a negative impact on the larger customer base.
Long ago I remember a computer hoax about a program that could harm your computer. That's not a hoax anymore. You can change the software in a car and blow the engine, and that violates the warranty too. There will always be bickering about whether the unsupported modification caused the hardware failure. The extreme of this is a generic PC, which is reasonable designed to run any PC OS, having its warranty invalidated over installing Linux. That is a stupid extreme. But the iPhone was designed specifically to run iOS in certain supported configurations, so Apple would have more power here.
They are part of the interaction with the device, they are part of the user experience. I bought a car from a Ford dealer once, basic business transaction, let's do some paperwork, okay, here are your keys. For warranty service I got grumblings about whose responsibility the service was, and I dropped it off and found something to do for that time. I got the car back as I left it, with a bit of extra dirt.
I bought a car from a somewhat higher-end dealer once, relaxing couch, refreshments and snacks available, personal half-hour tour of and instruction on all the features of my new car, all-around good treatment down to the bouquet of flowers they gave my wife when we left. For warranty service, they'd immediately take it and I'd get a loaner without question. My car would be waiting for me washed and detailed in the end.
Guess which one I would prefer to go to again? The one that provided me with the best experience.
Then you sell your phone and the person who gets it has these problems. It's not worth the trouble and potential customer dissatisfaction for Apple for the larger population in order to appease a fraction of a percent of them who are geeks. However, I do agree jailbreaking by any means should be 100% legal, but it should invalidate your warranty since you put it into a state that Apple can't plan support for. Conversely, you should be able to sue Apple if they purposely brick your phone on detection of a jailbreak.
No, a standard reflex of liberals when terrorists Americans don't like are mentioned is to regurgitate the "America supports terrorists!" mantra.
This is the same Bill Ayers who said some tens of millions of people would have to die in his revolution, right? They were in the best interests of his ideology, an ideology that this country was at the time fighting against.
That sucks. The not catching him and killing him part. I don't remember the FBI killing any WU members. I knew a few of them died when the bomb they were making to murder soldiers and their dates at a Fort Dix dance went off. That's poetic justice.
Romney has. End of story.
Actually, nothing made him qualified to be president. He must be the most under-qualified president we've had in scores of years. The presidency was the first election he ever won against viable competition.
Skull and Bones was a big deal for Bush, covered extensively. Actually, his entire time at school was covered quite extensively, and in the most detail the investigators could dig up.
About Obama's time at school? "He went there." That's all the press had the "resources" to dig up. Of course that's all the resources they had, the rest of their reporters were up in Alaska picking apart Sarah Palin's past bit by bit.
Of course not. They make best use of those resources by committing 90% of them to digging dirt on Republicans, the other 10% by coming up with reasons to say "Nothing to see here, move along" on Democrat dirt.
Wrong Memogate. This is the one with the faked memos about GW Bush's National Guard days that Dan Rather and CBS pushed as real. You know, the ones that were supposed to by typed on a mid-70s typewriter, but looked exactly like a faxed Microsoft Word document typed in a proportional font using the standard template? Four out of five document experts refused to authenticate them before the airing of the story, which allowed CBS to claim a document expert had determined them to be authentic.
Conservatives who weren't even document experts realized the documents were fake within hours and the fact went viral among non-liberal sites. If it had not been for the Internet, the fact that they were fake may have never been widely known, and the lie could have threatened Bush's reelection.
When faced with the absolute fact that they could not be real, and with mounting public pressure from conservatives, CBS heavily investigated -- with the goal to prove the memos were real, not to actually determine if they were real. Eventually CBS was forced to backpedal, a bit. But their general stance was not to admit they were fake, only that they could not be proven real, and that the content was correct anyway, leading to the "Fake but accurate" description. BTW, CBS also got caught coordinating this story with John Kerry's campaign.
AFTER they had achieved their goal of blocking
So you only use electronics? You've never shopped for them, purchased them, unboxed them, set them up, gotten support for them or recycled them? Impressive. You must be rich and have lackeys do all that for you.
Which would harm the user experience because poorly written or presented apps, apps that use undocumented APIs that may be closed on the next update, deceptive apps, and many more undesirable traits in apps will be installed by users. When they don't work, who will the users blame? Apple, of course. Even if they don't blame Apple, they are still having a bad experience on Apple's platform, something Apple would like to avoid as much as possible.
You don't like the sandbox, fine, but to say it's an absolute negative is wrong. There are sound usability and engineering reasons behind the decision, even if you disagree with it.
To say that Apple does replaceable batteries or standard SSDs poorly first assumes that those things are a desired trait above the simplification and miniaturization gained by not having them. It is an engineering decision to do it that way, not a flaw in execution. What is gained for the user by Google doing unboxing poorly?
My iPhone cost the same as the then most-current-generation Androids, and even less than the base RAZR.
The point is not that they don't always report, but that they show favoritisim. They can do this by not reporting negatives, glossing over negatives, or harping on positives (or turning negatives into positives with spin).
Yeah, leftwing reactionary verbal regurgitation noted. This guy was a terrorist AGAINST the very country Obama was wanting to lead.
Well, if you want to define it as war then the FBI should have just shot him on sight based on the intel they had. That's what you do to enemy soldiers, right? But this wasn't war, the FBI was operating under the regular rules for investigation, and they broke those rules, preventing prosecution.
Doesn't refute it, confirms it. Back then they didn't care to check, and they still don't care to check. Yet they demand Romney's tax returns NOW.
Transcript? Courses? Society memberships? Bush's were released.
That's pretty much my point in this. Obama gets a free ride relative to his competition. Remember memogate? Manufactured by the media, immediately accepted by the media as truth, pushed by the media as truth, exposed by conservatives, still supported by the media with "Fake, but accurate."
Do you think that would happen with a liberal? In that same election they sent out swarms of reporters to scrutinize every facet of the Swiftboat claims, eager to disprove them.
No, what matters is that they are mainly graduates of journalism schools that are run by liberals. The media is liberal because most of the people in it were indoctrinated in liberalism.
No, he would just have to defend the craziness of the current Democratic party, if the press pushed him on it.
Come on, these people were complaining that Republicans are holding up judge confirmations in the Senate, when they were doing the exact same thing during Bush. They even did it with a pandering racist motive, preventing an Hispanic Republican who was being groomed for the Supreme Court from sitting on a stepping-stone bench. Why? So they could get the first Hispanic on the Court as a liberal, and Obama appointed her. With this insane playing of games, no challenge to Obama for the actions of his party.
Google and others think the user experience of a product is confined only to the actual use of it. But that's only one part pf a user experience, and forgets walking into the store (or using the online store), buying, unboxing, first start and setup, support, and eventual recycling.
Apple does everything in its power to make all aspects of the user experience perfect. Apple does unboxing tests for products, even did store mock-ups instead of just slapping up the usual crowded aisles. That's their brand strategy, and it's popular with consumers and profitable.
Microsoft succeeded because of backwards compatibility. You could run DOS on Windows, 16-bit Windows on 32-bit Windows, etc. With the exception of system utilities, which are OS-specific, I only know a few esoteric apps made for Windows 95 that won't run on Windows 7 (for example, a certain SCSI-based RIP solution that wouldn't even run on Windows 98).
But that backwards compatibility brings with it a lot of baggage. Apple chooses to ditch this baggage after some number of years. Microsoft is doing it now too, and that means the software will probably be more solid. There's a lot of resources and added complexity that goes into making a modern large software suite fully compatible with an 11 year-old OS.
That's a different issue completely, not backwards compatibility, but simply having no idea how they want to do a UI.
Newer applications are going to want to leverage features found in the newer operating systems.
Most OS X programs require Tiger from 2005, or at least Jaguar from 2002. Quite a few already require at least Leopard from 2007.
Investigated, downplayed, conclusion reached, "nothing to see here."
To liberals, Ayers' Weather Underground terrorist days weren't something to be ashamed of, they were a valuable part of his liberal resume.
Here's the point: He didn't regret setting bombs. He was open to doing it all again. Reformed terrorist, we could agree on. Unrepentant terrorist, should be poison for any politician to associate with. But with the liberal environment these days, it's honey, not poison.
So now you're equating a fugitive terrorist with soldiers? I think I understand where you're coming from. I bet you're a fan of Irmgard Moeller. Were you there at the gate when she was released, cheering her for her murders?
Was racist. Also, a bishop to Mormons is more like a priest in other religions. He had no high, influential office. Of course, that's the religion he grew up in. Obama was raised pretty much white middle-class, and gravitated towards this racist anti-semite personally.
That was not the claim. The media failed to investigate very much when it came to Obama, and where it did anything it glossed over anything. Look at even today. The media's harping about how Romney should release his tax returns further back. Meanwhile, Obama's missing years at Columbia and Harvard are still not investigated. Obama's profitable dealings with convicted felon Tony Rezko, glossed over.
Overall, they were very friendly to Obama. After the election, even the Washington Post's own ombudsman admitted their coverage had been heavily biased towards Obama.
So you think Obama would have had to associate with Ayers during his Weather Underground days in order for the claim of association with an unrepentant terrorist to be true? Hey, can I get chummy with Charles Manson? I was only a kid during his killing days. That association shouldn't reflect on my character, right?
I don't know about you, but I prefer my elected officials to be free of such associations that would likely deny the average person a security clearance.
That makes no sense whatsoever. Those were decisions he made on his own, associations he made on his own. Punishment by the people for the crimes he committed never happened.
The only reason he wasn't prosecuted was because the FBI conducted illegal surveillance, which irreparably tainted the case against him. His fugitive status dragged everything on long enough for this to happen. Had he been immediately arrested, he'd probably be in prison.
Riiiiight. If we knew after a couple reports, he must have known over 20 years of actually being there. Is our President really that dumb, dense and inattentive to what is going on around him? Was he that bad a judge of character? Again, I don't know about you, but I prefer that my elected officials not have long-standing close voluntary relationships with racists and anti-semites.
But these relationships are easy to explain. I don't actually think Obama is a racist, anti-semite or terrorist, or likes associating with those people. Obama uses people. Ayers was a shot at coming up in local politics, and Wright was an influential community leader who could raise his profile and make him connections. He didn't care how many dogs he had to lie with, because he could count on the liberal establishment to ignore the fleas, or even admire them.
Of course, that also describes a type of person I definitely don't want as an elected official.
That you obviously bought the media spin that downplayed his association with the terrorist. BTW, Ayers didn't do time for his terrorism. He was a fugitive for long enough for COINTELPRO to be exposed, which poisoned their case. He's still guilty as hell and was never punished.
For some strange reason, the media eventually bought the spin that Obama attended the services for 20 years and had no idea he was supporting a black racist anti-semite, so the issue died rather quickly after Obama threw him under the bus. Being a racist anti-semite is quite different from having one of the variety of kooky religious beliefs common in this country.
Prosecution requires proof of intent to succeed. Palin was just an idiot who didn't understand. I know someone like this, email is email. Bush was juggling two laws that made business difficult, especially since his staff was loaded with people who considered their jobs as Republican operatives more important than their government jobs. But there they are with their beloved RNC Blackberrys, and an email that needs to get sent.
Cuomo is just purposely circumventing FOIA, but it looks like he found a loophole.
The ruling class won't get prosecuted for this. But, yes, the liberal media will follow the Republicans more rabidly and give the Democrats a break. For the most part it isn't a conspiracy, it's just what they are, mostly staffed by liberals who think they are reporting honestly and fairly. They honestly didn't think Ayers was news (presidential candidate associating with an unrepentant terrorist, nah, not important), but they tried hard as hell to turn Palin birthing and raising a Downs kid into a negative.
Bush's staff had to worry about using government issued blackberries when doing RNC business, so they erred on the side of caution to avoid violating the Hatch Act. Unfortunately, this created a problem with other laws. Think, you're using your Blackberry to do RNC business, the subject turns to government business. Most people wouldn't say, oh wait I have to switch to my government account to talk about that. Then we'll go back to the RNC account to continue the conversation. No, the email just continues. It was a screw-up, they should have been more careful even if it made business more cumbersome.
This is quite a bit different from Cuomo, who is doing this precisely to avoid FOIA. He doesn't care, and he plans to continue doing it.
Palin used Yahoo because, well, she's a nitwit who didn't understand the distinction.
Clinton was a president, Palin was a governor like Cuomo, who, because of his dad and running New York, has an even bigger name.
As soon as Palin's name was mentioned for VP, CNN sent reporters to Alaska to dig up as much dirt as possible on her and her children. How many went to Columbia or Harvard to investigate Obama's past? Were they knocking down the doors of Rev Wright or Bill Ayers? Nah, it was all a right-wing smear attempt, long-term ties to a racist preacher and an unrepentant murderous terrorist weren't newsworthy.
They even had an operative in Alaska rapid-firing baseless ethics complaints so fast that Palin eventually resigned because she couldn't afford to defend herself. This is obvious to me, and I don't even like Palin.