Purdey's theory is that prions are an effect of environmental poisoning, not the cause of Mad-Cow-esque disease.
First off, those two statements are unrelated. Prions can cause TSEs regardless of if copper or manganese from the environment causes them. Secondly, it is pretty well accepted by the scientific community that prions are the cause of TSEs. You can infect animals with PrP-Sc (the misfolded form of the prion protein (PrP-C being the normally folded version) and cause TSE. If you knock out the PrP protein, mice are not susceptible to PrP-Sc.
What causes the first misfolding of PrP-C to PrP-Sc is unknown (unfortunately), and it is clear that PrP-C has copper-binding repeats, so an effect of Cu on the protein is a very likely possibility.
Actually, she was for that before she was against it. Also she was against it only after it became apparent that the state would have to kick in serious $$$ that the feds weren't providing, *and* Alaska still got the federal dollars, just not earmarked specifically for that project anymore.
Not quite the maverick-y bucking the party line that McCain'd have you believe.
Also, she is anti-abortion (even in the case of rape), pro-creationism in science classes, a global warming denier, and has it out for polar bears.
It is about reducing "greenhouse gases", primarily CO2, which is an essential part of the atmosphere.
The incorrect implication being that we risk reducing CO2 too much, as it is 'essential.' It is unlikely that we even *could* do this, and we are certainly not at risk of doing so.
So, it does matter if "global warming" is true, because people like Al Gore are asking us to cripple our economies to reduce CO2 emissions, which are only a problem if global warming is a problem.
The cripple our economies claim is so non-sensical, I wonder if people actually believe it. Reducing carbon emissions != economic disaster. It will mean an adjustment that more accurately prices the use of carbon-heavy items (fossil fuels in particular) by accounting for the huge negative externalities they cause. So yes, oil will get more expensive, but cleaner technology will get cheaper. Capital investment will funnel towards greener technology at the cost of high-carbon-output technology. Rather than there being tons of profit in, say, mining coal, there will profit in, say, developing high efficiency refrigeration or higher temperature superconductors.
The crippling-the-economy baloney assumes that our economy can not change and adapt to a different set of value models, something that is just clearly not true.
If Global Warming is true, is it really a problem?
If you care to believe science, climate change is true. If you think adapting 6 billion people to new shorelines, climates, and weather patterns is not a problem, then no..it might not be such a big deal. Seems to me, though, it probably will be.
I'm no fan of RyanAir but largely because they have the ruthless attitudes necessary to prosper in a free market, inspired by the American example of SouthWest airlines.
The problem with Al Gore is that his dire predictions don't match his behavior, and that makes him look the hypocrite, rightly or wrongly.
Unfortunately you are correct, and this particular circumstance always comes under heavy criticism (particularly by those who disagree to begin with). I'm not sure, though, what kind of solution there could reasonably be, given what gore already does (ie drive a hybrid, flies commercially when possible, buys green power, & buys carbon offsets when he does fly private jets).
However, when one looks at solar in particular, photovalic cells have been on the market for well over 20 years and still aren't as efficient as fossil fuels when measured by cost per KwHour.
True. Yet that does not factor in the major negative externalities that fossil fuels produce. Think pollution (& related health issues), think political discomfort & wars in oil-rich regions, think climate change. All of those things *do* cost us, just not in a easily quantifiable ways. If we could price in the effects of such things, I think you'd see alternative sources of energy start to be a much more common option simply due to economics.
like Gore does with claiming the superiority of alternative energy.
I would suggest that alternative energey issuperior, just not cheaper.
What with the selling carbon credits like they were indulgences from the middle ages? How about just cutting some emissions and avoiding creating fake industries...
Assuming you are actually interested, and not just being flip about something you don't like, there is a good reason for it. To reduce emissions, you need to make carbon more expensive for business to produce. You can either do that with regulations and fines, with a straight carbon tax, or with a cap and trade policy. The latter is generally better as it allows for the marketplace to figure out where and how to reduce emissions best, rather than an external source (gov't) dictating what each industry needs to do.
Let's say I run a coal-plant and you run a water purification plant. It may be very easy for you to reduce your carbon footprint, but very hard for me, so you sell me your extra credits. Together we've still reduced our carbon output by x%. At some point it will behoove me to spend the $$ to actually reduce my footprint, but until then I can just buy my way out of it while still allowing the overall system to effectively lower carbon output.
Why sell the credits? Because they are valuable due to the 'cap' part. If we just gave away as many as business wanted, there would be no need for anyone to reduce their carbon output at all. Additionally, reducing emissions will cost money, and that money is likely to end up raising prices for everything. We can now use the money earned by selling credits to assist the population in dealing with increasing prices. There will inevitably be some loss in the churn, so things will be more expensive, but this is something we as a society seem to be agreeing is more important than the price (like, say seat belts and safety ratings).
This is very typical of Al Gore and many of his ilk. While he is busy flying around in private jets and having his Lincoln idle for 20 minutes,
This one always gets me. Do you think it would be better for Gore to drive a Prius around, thereby reducing the number of truly influential people he can meet and motivate? I'd rather he expand his carbon footprint if the upshot is that big corporations, governments, industries start reducing theirs. I'll trade an extra few tons of CO2 for Gore's jet, as I bet it will help push GM or Turkey or the construction industry to reducing theirs by thousands of tons.
I read a great series of pieces on how much many of these "green" technologies really cost.
Looking through that site a bit, I actually don't see too much of great note, basically it is arguing that newer technology is often times more expensive and less robust than old technology. No shit, sherlock. If there were no negative externalities to our current system, there would be little need to change. There are, however, pretty big negative externalities to fossil fuel dependence. Reducing or eliminating those are quite valuable, and that makes a strict current-economic-state analysis rather simple-minded and short-sighted.
I would submit that prices move against supply/demand only when their are breakthroughs in production or material constraints.
How about economies of scale? Bulk pricing? Or the fact that breakthroughs in production tend to happen more quickly when there is, ya know, more production?
The problem is that these 37% cells are already being produced on the best equipment. So those gains in cost are already priced in...
Um, until some better equipment appears...like when demand for volume production increases. Unless, that is, you are suggesting that we already have the perfect equipment?
But shouldn't one be able to get a phone on a pay-as-you-go plan?
At least with 1st gen ones you could. Wasn't advertised or particularly easy, but you could. With 3G's the price is subsidized, so that's why (at least in the US).
The iPod battery issues don't show up in large numbers until 18 months after a new model comes out, which is still a few months short of the 24-month minimum commitment for iPhone service.
For which ipod versions? Is it possible that the iphone has a newer, better battery? The brief googling has turned up battery problems for ipods of the 2004 and before era.
Going from other comments on Slashdot, it would appear that a lot of people have similar requirements. I have chosen not to buy an iPhone either.
True, amongst a rather selective subset of a rather geeky population who actually knows what ogg vorbis means, a lot of people aren't going to buy an iphone. At the same time, it would seem that a shitload of the rest of the population has and will. Apple clearly has chosen not to aim at the ubergeek market segment...their loss.
That being said, the GP was trying to argue that it requires a certain level of stupidity and sheep-like behavior for one to buy an iphone, and that is just ignorant, egotistical bullshit. I don't want a kindle for any number of reasons, but I am not going to assume that my opinion is the only valid one on the topic...for lots of people such a product works great and provides value for the money.
Watch me get modded into oblivion for daring to criticise the thing. C'est la slashdot.
Or watch you get modded into oblivion for posting the same old boring trollish tripe.
Honestly, I don't understand why so many intelligent people love the iPhone.
Because it proves very useful for many intelligent people. Duh. That it does not for you matters to absolutely no one beyond yourself.
From what I understand (and I'm happy to be corrected) here are some of the big drawbacks:
So you are not only regurgitating the same stupid comments we've heard for a year, you are doing so _without having used one_?! Seriously? You do realize how that undermines your argument don't you?
1) Heavily restricted and requires "jailbreak"
Heavily restricted is in the eye of the beholder, and particularly with the App Store now up, I don't think very many people (outside the hardcore jailbreak community) consider it so. It *never* requires jailbreak, period....*millions* of people have used one for a year without jailbreak, and with tremendous success.
2) I read that in Australia at least must be hooked up to iTunes before it can make anything other than emergency calls! WTF????
Not entirely sure what you are talking about, but it is true that an iPhone with a SIM that isn't attached to a cell plan won't make anything but emergency calls. I assume is actually pretty standard practice for an phone with a unattached SIM. That isn't a WTF????, but how a cell provider makes money...duh.
3) Doesn't play as many different types of media as other devices?
True. Some other devices play more types of media. This will be true of every device, pretty much ever. All that matters is if it plays the types of media you use. Clearly iPod & iPhone users are happy with support for the dominant music format, and one of the few (only?) video formats that you can actually buy very many mainstream videos/TVshows/movies in.
4) Overhyped and overpriced
Subjective on the overhyped thing. Even so, who the hell cares? Does overhyping itself make a device bad or good? As for overpriced, that to is subjective, but the 3G seems pretty well in line with other ostensibly similar phones.
5) Built in expensive to replace battery.
This matters, but only to some, and only if you need to replace the battery. We've yet to see how long the iphone battery lasts before it starts to die. It may turn into an issue down the road, but so far a year's worth of public use has not revealed any major battery life issues. Personally speakin, I've never replaced a battery in any cell phone I've had. Perhaps I'm lucky.
6) No storage expansion.
Which matters if you need to consume more than 16 gigs of media. Most people don't, and certainly not between syncs. Some people would love to have a baggie full of sd cards to swap in and out, while other find that prospect nothing but a recipe for lost media. If you are the former, then no, the iPhone is probably not for you.
It's suppose to be stylish. For some anything that Steve Jobs does is considered stylish.
And for some it is considered stylish to bash apple as nothing but a style-driven company. For others, they actually like the iphone (check out the user ratings of iphone vs any other smartphone) for the capabilities it has, despite those it doesn't.
Is it really so hard to believe that your personal requirements for a smartphone are not what everyone else judges their technology by? Are you close-minded enough to really think that the only possible explanation for the success of a piece of ground-breaking (which is pretty hard to deny) consumer technology is sheep-like devotion to some dude?
Also it's not just that he's changing position, it's that he's rewriting history to sound like he never argued the surge would have the opposite effect it actually has.
I don't think that is a valid point. The change highlighted above says nothing about rewriting history at all, nor anything about the surge having the opposite effect it has (which, I *seriously* doubt obama claimed...please offer a counter-example if you have one).
What change in position (as opposed to wording) do you actually see? I am really curious.
In fact, if you look farther at the "changes" highlighted, you see in both versions Obama claims that the surge was supposed to reduce violence IN ORDER THAT political reconciliation could occur.
Old:Moreover, Iraq's political leaders have made no progress in resolving the political differences at the heart of their civil war. New:But the absence of genuine political accommodation in Iraq is a direct result of President Bush's failure to hold the Iraqi government accountable.
This is the great re-badging of the surge...violence did decrease due to lots more troops, lots more bribery (give guns & money to those groups who used to be shooting at you), and a shifting of Sunni behavior towards radicals. What did not happen, and what was the whole argument for a surge in total, was to allow reduced violence to produce meaningful political advances. The successful tactic of lessening violence through more troops (+other stuff) failed to achieve the strategic goal of a political solution to the major issues.
Man, reading through the rest of that page is amazing lacking in anything of real change aside from verbiage.
And actually, even the highlighted portions are often not very different at all, ie: Highlighted Old:Obama believes that America has a moral and security responsibility to confront Iraq's humanitarian crisis -- two million Iraqis are refugees; two million more Highlighted New:Barack Obama believes that America has both a moral obligation and a responsibility for security that demands we confront Iraq's humanitarian crisis--more than five million Iraqis are refugees or
And yet the enviro-nutjobs keep screaming for ethanol production and refuse to consider how wasteful it is. Actually, I think you'll find that politicians (Iowa caucus and all) and corn-growing farmers/agribusiness are the ones screaming for ethanol, *not* the green types. It's been clear for a while that ethanol, particularly from corn is not a environmental win (other cellulose-based crops that don't need to displace cropland might be).
Wind farms are INCREDIBLY noisy and disruptive, the power is intermittent at best with very minimal generating capacity for the land area used, and a major killer of endangered birds already. I'm sure the grazing cows are upset by noisy windmills. Most wind-farms are placed 1. on dual-use land (ie, ranching) 2. away from populated places (which is a downside, efficiency-wise). The land area used for wind is not then unavailable for other uses, *and* we have lots of land in this country...that is not our limiting factor. Bringing up the bird argument actually undermines your point, as it is known to be false. Nice point for a rant, but really divorced from reality.
Tidal power has the same problem, you can only do it on a shoreline, Fortunately, a large percent of the population lives relatively near a shoreline.
Your use of "enviro-nutjob" and somewhat ODDLY placed caps also tends to UNDERMINE your argument by casting your comment as just a plain, old, non-enviro nutjob with an axe to grind.
You do understand that the reason we are paying $4 a gallon is because we can't drill in this country Vast, incorrect, over-simplification.
Obama is the most left voting member of the Senate Which claim is absurd on the face of it, and should make you wonder about the methodology. Obama is more far left than, say, Bernie Sanders or Russ Feingold? Seriously?
the potential 400 billion, yes billion, barrels in North Dakota and Montana. I assume you are referring to the Bakkendeposit? The one the USGS claims to have 4 billion barrels of technologically recoverable oil (you know, about 9 months of US consumption) ? The one known about since the 50s? The one which has not been developed due to nothing more than economics? Please show me any evidence that Obama, Democrats, the Senate, or *anything* other than cost/feasibility has prevented this from being developed, until then, I call your claim bullshit. Also, note that the Senator who requested the USGS survey the area was a Democrat.
That is almost double the amount is Saudi Arabia, yet we can't use it. True, but that has *nothing* to do with politics at this point.
There are plenty of reasons to support one candidate or the other, but using an incorrect, illogical argument is not a good one.
Agreed that Alexa has issues, but...1. What better metric would you suggest that is less susceptible to such bias? and 2.I'd bet the slashdot/xkcd target audiences have a pretty substantial amount of overlap, so the uber-privacy types are likely under-reported for both sites.
Either way, I just find it interesting that xkcd has become as/more popular (or at least in the ballpark) as slashdot.
What I find really interesting is how slashdot, with it's eponymously named server-killing effect, compares to a thrice weekly web comic about stick figures being geeky.
experts such as Daniel Pipes Just so we're clear, this is the daniel pipes who started the Middle East Forum ("one of a number of hardline neoconservative think tanks devoted to promoting a broad war on terror focused on the Middle East.") and its offspring, Campus Watch (a group intended to monitor middle east studies on college campuses, in a rather mccarthy-like manner). The one who has been a consistent warmonger (from vietnam onward). The one who wrote in The National Review:
"Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene...All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most."
Who the New York Times referred to as the leader of an "organized movement to stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life"
Just so we know who we are labeling with the sterile description of "expert."
This is where I disagree. First off, I think that hypothesis and tests can be cited for intelligent design. I think statements to the nature of discovery of design patterns across species and various levels is just one good prediction for testing. No worse than Darwin's proposition that transitional forms should exist. Then please cite some hypotheses from intelligent design. Your half meta-statement is not useful as a hypothesis.
ID requires an designer of unknown power/motivation/sense of aesthetics. Thus you can always resort to the 'thats the way the designer wanted it' argument to explain anything. This has no predictive power, and can therefore not be the basis of a hypothesis.
The theory of evolution makes many testable (& tested) predictions, and has been shown to be as true as the theory of gravity.
Slashdot Mirror
Purdey's theory is that prions are an effect of environmental poisoning, not the cause of Mad-Cow-esque disease.
First off, those two statements are unrelated. Prions can cause TSEs regardless of if copper or manganese from the environment causes them. Secondly, it is pretty well accepted by the scientific community that prions are the cause of TSEs. You can infect animals with PrP-Sc (the misfolded form of the prion protein (PrP-C being the normally folded version) and cause TSE. If you knock out the PrP protein, mice are not susceptible to PrP-Sc.
What causes the first misfolding of PrP-C to PrP-Sc is unknown (unfortunately), and it is clear that PrP-C has copper-binding repeats, so an effect of Cu on the protein is a very likely possibility.
-Ted
So what the heck is Biden the attack dog going to attack? Suddenly, his blazing guns don't seem to be very effective.
Ok, just a wacky idea I'll toss out there. Perhaps he can attack McCain? Ya know, the candidate that really matters most.
-Ted
, including helping kill the Bridge to Nowhere,
Actually, she was for that before she was against it. Also she was against it only after it became apparent that the state would have to kick in serious $$$ that the feds weren't providing, *and* Alaska still got the federal dollars, just not earmarked specifically for that project anymore.
Not quite the maverick-y bucking the party line that McCain'd have you believe.
Also, she is anti-abortion (even in the case of rape), pro-creationism in science classes, a global warming denier, and has it out for polar bears.
-Ted
Nope, US & ATT.
-Ted
Works as normal on mine.
-Ted
It is about reducing "greenhouse gases", primarily CO2, which is an essential part of the atmosphere.
The incorrect implication being that we risk reducing CO2 too much, as it is 'essential.' It is unlikely that we even *could* do this, and we are certainly not at risk of doing so.
So, it does matter if "global warming" is true, because people like Al Gore are asking us to cripple our economies to reduce CO2 emissions, which are only a problem if global warming is a problem.
The cripple our economies claim is so non-sensical, I wonder if people actually believe it. Reducing carbon emissions != economic disaster. It will mean an adjustment that more accurately prices the use of carbon-heavy items (fossil fuels in particular) by accounting for the huge negative externalities they cause. So yes, oil will get more expensive, but cleaner technology will get cheaper. Capital investment will funnel towards greener technology at the cost of high-carbon-output technology. Rather than there being tons of profit in, say, mining coal, there will profit in, say, developing high efficiency refrigeration or higher temperature superconductors.
The crippling-the-economy baloney assumes that our economy can not change and adapt to a different set of value models, something that is just clearly not true.
If Global Warming is true, is it really a problem?
If you care to believe science, climate change is true. If you think adapting 6 billion people to new shorelines, climates, and weather patterns is not a problem, then no..it might not be such a big deal. Seems to me, though, it probably will be.
-Ted
I'm no fan of RyanAir but largely because they have the ruthless attitudes necessary to prosper in a free market, inspired by the American example of SouthWest airlines.
It should be noted, though, that Southwest has had the highest passenger satisfaction ratings for a decade and a half.
-Ted
The problem with Al Gore is that his dire predictions don't match his behavior, and that makes him look the hypocrite, rightly or wrongly.
Unfortunately you are correct, and this particular circumstance always comes under heavy criticism (particularly by those who disagree to begin with). I'm not sure, though, what kind of solution there could reasonably be, given what gore already does (ie drive a hybrid, flies commercially when possible, buys green power, & buys carbon offsets when he does fly private jets).
However, when one looks at solar in particular, photovalic cells have been on the market for well over 20 years and still aren't as efficient as fossil fuels when measured by cost per KwHour.
True. Yet that does not factor in the major negative externalities that fossil fuels produce. Think pollution (& related health issues), think political discomfort & wars in oil-rich regions, think climate change. All of those things *do* cost us, just not in a easily quantifiable ways. If we could price in the effects of such things, I think you'd see alternative sources of energy start to be a much more common option simply due to economics.
like Gore does with claiming the superiority of alternative energy.
I would suggest that alternative energey is superior, just not cheaper.
-Ted
What with the selling carbon credits like they were indulgences from the middle ages? How about just cutting some emissions and avoiding creating fake industries...
Assuming you are actually interested, and not just being flip about something you don't like, there is a good reason for it. To reduce emissions, you need to make carbon more expensive for business to produce. You can either do that with regulations and fines, with a straight carbon tax, or with a cap and trade policy. The latter is generally better as it allows for the marketplace to figure out where and how to reduce emissions best, rather than an external source (gov't) dictating what each industry needs to do.
Let's say I run a coal-plant and you run a water purification plant. It may be very easy for you to reduce your carbon footprint, but very hard for me, so you sell me your extra credits. Together we've still reduced our carbon output by x%. At some point it will behoove me to spend the $$ to actually reduce my footprint, but until then I can just buy my way out of it while still allowing the overall system to effectively lower carbon output.
Why sell the credits? Because they are valuable due to the 'cap' part. If we just gave away as many as business wanted, there would be no need for anyone to reduce their carbon output at all. Additionally, reducing emissions will cost money, and that money is likely to end up raising prices for everything. We can now use the money earned by selling credits to assist the population in dealing with increasing prices. There will inevitably be some loss in the churn, so things will be more expensive, but this is something we as a society seem to be agreeing is more important than the price (like, say seat belts and safety ratings).
-Ted
This is very typical of Al Gore and many of his ilk. While he is busy flying around in private jets and having his Lincoln idle for 20 minutes,
This one always gets me. Do you think it would be better for Gore to drive a Prius around, thereby reducing the number of truly influential people he can meet and motivate? I'd rather he expand his carbon footprint if the upshot is that big corporations, governments, industries start reducing theirs. I'll trade an extra few tons of CO2 for Gore's jet, as I bet it will help push GM or Turkey or the construction industry to reducing theirs by thousands of tons.
I read a great series of pieces on how much many of these "green" technologies really cost.
Looking through that site a bit, I actually don't see too much of great note, basically it is arguing that newer technology is often times more expensive and less robust than old technology. No shit, sherlock. If there were no negative externalities to our current system, there would be little need to change. There are, however, pretty big negative externalities to fossil fuel dependence. Reducing or eliminating those are quite valuable, and that makes a strict current-economic-state analysis rather simple-minded and short-sighted.
-Ted
I would submit that prices move against supply/demand only when their are breakthroughs in production or material constraints.
How about economies of scale? Bulk pricing? Or the fact that breakthroughs in production tend to happen more quickly when there is, ya know, more production?
The problem is that these 37% cells are already being produced on the best equipment. So those gains in cost are already priced in...
Um, until some better equipment appears...like when demand for volume production increases. Unless, that is, you are suggesting that we already have the perfect equipment?
-Ted
But shouldn't one be able to get a phone on a pay-as-you-go plan?
At least with 1st gen ones you could. Wasn't advertised or particularly easy, but you could. With 3G's the price is subsidized, so that's why (at least in the US).
The iPod battery issues don't show up in large numbers until 18 months after a new model comes out, which is still a few months short of the 24-month minimum commitment for iPhone service.
For which ipod versions? Is it possible that the iphone has a newer, better battery? The brief googling has turned up battery problems for ipods of the 2004 and before era.
Going from other comments on Slashdot, it would appear that a lot of people have similar requirements. I have chosen not to buy an iPhone either.
True, amongst a rather selective subset of a rather geeky population who actually knows what ogg vorbis means, a lot of people aren't going to buy an iphone. At the same time, it would seem that a shitload of the rest of the population has and will. Apple clearly has chosen not to aim at the ubergeek market segment...their loss.
That being said, the GP was trying to argue that it requires a certain level of stupidity and sheep-like behavior for one to buy an iphone, and that is just ignorant, egotistical bullshit. I don't want a kindle for any number of reasons, but I am not going to assume that my opinion is the only valid one on the topic...for lots of people such a product works great and provides value for the money.
-Ted
Watch me get modded into oblivion for daring to criticise the thing. C'est la slashdot.
Or watch you get modded into oblivion for posting the same old boring trollish tripe.
Honestly, I don't understand why so many intelligent people love the iPhone.
Because it proves very useful for many intelligent people. Duh. That it does not for you matters to absolutely no one beyond yourself.
From what I understand (and I'm happy to be corrected) here are some of the big drawbacks:
So you are not only regurgitating the same stupid comments we've heard for a year, you are doing so _without having used one_?! Seriously? You do realize how that undermines your argument don't you?
1) Heavily restricted and requires "jailbreak"
Heavily restricted is in the eye of the beholder, and particularly with the App Store now up, I don't think very many people (outside the hardcore jailbreak community) consider it so. It *never* requires jailbreak, period....*millions* of people have used one for a year without jailbreak, and with tremendous success.
2) I read that in Australia at least must be hooked up to iTunes before it can make anything other than emergency calls! WTF????
Not entirely sure what you are talking about, but it is true that an iPhone with a SIM that isn't attached to a cell plan won't make anything but emergency calls. I assume is actually pretty standard practice for an phone with a unattached SIM. That isn't a WTF????, but how a cell provider makes money...duh.
3) Doesn't play as many different types of media as other devices?
True. Some other devices play more types of media. This will be true of every device, pretty much ever. All that matters is if it plays the types of media you use. Clearly iPod & iPhone users are happy with support for the dominant music format, and one of the few (only?) video formats that you can actually buy very many mainstream videos/TVshows/movies in.
4) Overhyped and overpriced
Subjective on the overhyped thing. Even so, who the hell cares? Does overhyping itself make a device bad or good? As for overpriced, that to is subjective, but the 3G seems pretty well in line with other ostensibly similar phones.
5) Built in expensive to replace battery.
This matters, but only to some, and only if you need to replace the battery. We've yet to see how long the iphone battery lasts before it starts to die. It may turn into an issue down the road, but so far a year's worth of public use has not revealed any major battery life issues. Personally speakin, I've never replaced a battery in any cell phone I've had. Perhaps I'm lucky.
6) No storage expansion.
Which matters if you need to consume more than 16 gigs of media. Most people don't, and certainly not between syncs. Some people would love to have a baggie full of sd cards to swap in and out, while other find that prospect nothing but a recipe for lost media. If you are the former, then no, the iPhone is probably not for you.
It's suppose to be stylish. For some anything that Steve Jobs does is considered stylish.
And for some it is considered stylish to bash apple as nothing but a style-driven company. For others, they actually like the iphone (check out the user ratings of iphone vs any other smartphone) for the capabilities it has, despite those it doesn't.
Is it really so hard to believe that your personal requirements for a smartphone are not what everyone else judges their technology by? Are you close-minded enough to really think that the only possible explanation for the success of a piece of ground-breaking (which is pretty hard to deny) consumer technology is sheep-like devotion to some dude?
You have no fuckin' idea how much people loathe all-in-one computers.
I know, that's why people pretty much never buy iMacs or laptops.
-Ted
Worked only for some version of worked.
Violence down? Sure.
Political accommodation? Nope.
Now go look up the justification for the surge from the debate about it. See which one of those points is the major motivating argument.
-Ted
Also it's not just that he's changing position, it's that he's rewriting history to sound like he never argued the surge would have the opposite effect it actually has.
I don't think that is a valid point. The change highlighted above says nothing about rewriting history at all, nor anything about the surge having the opposite effect it has (which, I *seriously* doubt obama claimed...please offer a counter-example if you have one).
What change in position (as opposed to wording) do you actually see? I am really curious.
In fact, if you look farther at the "changes" highlighted, you see in both versions Obama claims that the surge was supposed to reduce violence IN ORDER THAT political reconciliation could occur.
Old:Moreover, Iraq's political leaders have made no progress in resolving the political differences at the heart of their civil war.
New:But the absence of genuine political accommodation in Iraq is a direct result of President Bush's failure to hold the Iraqi government accountable.
This is the great re-badging of the surge...violence did decrease due to lots more troops, lots more bribery (give guns & money to those groups who used to be shooting at you), and a shifting of Sunni behavior towards radicals. What did not happen, and what was the whole argument for a surge in total, was to allow reduced violence to produce meaningful political advances. The successful tactic of lessening violence through more troops (+other stuff) failed to achieve the strategic goal of a political solution to the major issues.
Man, reading through the rest of that page is amazing lacking in anything of real change aside from verbiage.
And actually, even the highlighted portions are often not very different at all, ie:
Highlighted Old:Obama believes that America has a moral and security responsibility to confront Iraq's humanitarian crisis -- two million Iraqis are refugees; two million more
Highlighted New:Barack Obama believes that America has both a moral obligation and a responsibility for security that demands we confront Iraq's humanitarian crisis--more than five million Iraqis are refugees or
-Ted
Depends on the Dell model. By the same token, I can change the HD on a macbook in 4 minutes.
-Ted
Your use of "enviro-nutjob" and somewhat ODDLY placed caps also tends to UNDERMINE your argument by casting your comment as just a plain, old, non-enviro nutjob with an axe to grind.
-Ted
This is a pretty interesting & relevant graphic.
-Ted
There are plenty of reasons to support one candidate or the other, but using an incorrect, illogical argument is not a good one.
-Ted
Agreed that Alexa has issues, but...1. What better metric would you suggest that is less susceptible to such bias? and 2.I'd bet the slashdot/xkcd target audiences have a pretty substantial amount of overlap, so the uber-privacy types are likely under-reported for both sites.
Either way, I just find it interesting that xkcd has become as/more popular (or at least in the ballpark) as slashdot.
-Ted
What I find really interesting is how slashdot, with it's eponymously named server-killing effect, compares to a thrice weekly web comic about stick figures being geeky.
-Ted
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Just so we know who we are labeling with the sterile description of "expert."
-Ted
ID requires an designer of unknown power/motivation/sense of aesthetics. Thus you can always resort to the 'thats the way the designer wanted it' argument to explain anything. This has no predictive power, and can therefore not be the basis of a hypothesis.
The theory of evolution makes many testable (& tested) predictions, and has been shown to be as true as the theory of gravity.
-Ted