Money has nothing to do with it. It's illegal to deny people health care because they lack insurance in the US, and that's why everyone else's bills are so high.
As best I can tell the problem is that they created a "smart" spec for the cable then didn't force manufacturers to only put them on "smart" devices, or didn't make a certain degree of smartness and sensible fallbacks part of the spec. Consequently, we've got a bunch of idiot devices that think they're smart and do all kinds of dumb things that a "dumb" connection like VGA wouldn't allow.
Instead of "just work" we've got "just work IF your devices like each other and IF you turn them on in the correct order (note, not always the best or most intuitive order) and IF you have a shaman do the HDMI dance first." My guess is a bit tighter spec and better testing requirements tied to using the HDMI name/logo would have reduced these problem from nearly universal to occasional, at least.
If nothing else the devices all ought to have a "stop trying to be smart and FUCKING DO EXACTLY WHAT I TELL YOU TO DO" mode. You think your source isn't 5.1? BULLSHIT, yes it is. You think you ought to defer to another device for audio out? NO, you're the goddamn audio receiver and I want you to NEVER do that. You went to sleep, woke back up, and now you think there's no capable audio device connected to your HDMI port and you'll continue to think that until I restart you? NO, just send the goddamn bits, because you're wrong.
Actually, that's what the override mode should be called: "Just send the goddamn bits"
Crippling the secondhand market by requiring another purchase to unlock content and/or tying games to hardware cultural theft, and it is not in the spirit if copyright law.
IMO, this is one case where the companies engaging in it deserve no copyright protections whatsoever and people who crack these sorts of games to repair the damage for future generations actually are the kind of heroes of posterity that Slashdot stereotypically paints pirates as being.
If they don't want people to be able to play the game after they decide to (or have to, if the money runs out) stop permitting it, they shouldn't publish. If they want copyright protection, they better not keep control of a switch that can steal their works back from those who paid from them, and from society which permits them those protections primarily so that the works may enter the public record, indefinitely.
Think of it this way: if, say, Twain or Dickens or Dostoevsky some other major author had been able to lock out parts of their stories to those who bought them second hand, and as a consequence those parts had been lost, how would we look on someone who broke the law to preserve them if we discovered their illegal stash today?
They'd be fucking heroes of the arts and of humanity in general, and whoever dreamed up the scheme would be considered some degree of monster on par with book-burners and civilization-razing barbarians.
AFAI am concerned anything older than a decade or so is fair game.
I don't legally have permission to share those things freely, but I don't consider it ethically wrong to do so. Quite the opposite, actually; if not for piracy there's a ton of stuff from as recently as the 90s that would be lost forever or hopelessly hard to find already.
With the law so broken as to be no useful guide, I pay when I feel like I ought to and I don't when I don't; I'm not sure what else one can be expected to do. You only live once, and I'm not going to cut myself off from our shared cultural works just because media companies have been allowed to gain too much power and to write absurd laws. I could follow the law to the letter and boycott all big-corporation-owned media made since 1917, but I'd be doing far more harm to myself than to the media companies.
There's usually a minimum value attached to those sorts of laws, so you can pick up a nickel without having to report it. IIRC it's often something like $20.
online newspapers (which write *EVERYTHING* in the future tense, even stuff that happened in the past)
Really? I've never noticed this. A quick glance at Le Monde's website doesn't reveal this phenomenon, either. It's all compound ("perfect", IIRC) past (with avoir and être) and... bah, what's the other one called? With all the "ait" and such endings? Anyway, just both normal past tense forms. Not even any of the old-style, literary past tense (is that one called passé simple? The terminology's a bit hazy) let alone future-tense.
Couldn't it be argued that climate change would tend to increase the likelihood of military conflict, and thus the risk of nuclear war? That's what I assumed they meant when I saw that in the summary.
I'd say we can consider 11:59 to be reserved for two nuclear powers directly engaging in a (conventional) hot war with one another, or something equally risky in terms of chances of nukes flying. It's not like it only ever moves closer to midnight.
I get a kick out of all kinds of writers and works that others consider dry or painful to read--Faulkner, Forster, Hemingway, James, Butler, and various non-fiction that many might consider painfully dull (the ancient historians like Herodotus--though that may be better classed as fiction--,a whole bunch of books by and/or about philosophers, E.T. Bell's Men of Mathematics, etc). I do enjoy fantasy, though. The point being:
I was unable to finish Fellowship. I got to somewhere under 100 pages from the end, realized that I'd only enjoyed maybe 50 pages of what I'd already read, and quit. I'd class it as among the most awful reading experiences I've had. Given its popularity I must just be missing something, but despite my toleration (and even taste) for some pretty damn dry stuff, I couldn't stand it.
A creationist would probably argue about this being proof against macroevolution, since such increasing complexity violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Which--as I hope you know but I feel should be pointed out for others who might read this and think it has some merit--is complete nonsense.
The markets seem to create such bottlenecks. Hell, regional specialization in certain types of production is one of the supposed benefits of global free-trade.
This effect is behind one of the arguments for using government to create less "efficient" but safer, more distributed production for certain things, especially food and products vital to national defense; e.g. the market may dictate that 100% of your farmland would be better used for mining, housing, factories, basically anything but farmland, but it might still be a good idea to live with a slightly lower GDP while forcing (one way or another) some of it to remain farmland so your people don't face severe food shortages when a major port gets knocked out by a storm, or you get blockaded by an adversary.
One of the complaints I've seen leveled against organizations like the World Bank (though I admit I've not looked in to their validity) is that their policies tend to make it very difficult for states receiving aid to side with security over market efficiency in cases similar to that example.
Pascal's wager, as commonly used and understood, is that belief in any god may be considered better than disbelief in all gods since a given god may exist and may reward you for belief, and/or for fulfilling a variety of other requirements which you will presumably strive to achieve if you are a believer.
The trouble is that it's every bit as possible that a deity exists that rewards any given set of behavior, including disbelief in all gods. The Wager isn't a useful guide, for that reason. The choice remains a wager, yes, but one for which every possible bet is equally likely to pay out in an equal amount, rather than one (or a set) possibly paying out and another (or another set) paying out under no circumstances, which is the crux of the Wager.
If we take the Wager to be a more specific statement about belief in the God of Abraham (any any particular god) as you suggest then it is, if anything, even weaker. The argument above is against the strongest form of the Wager, and demonstrates that even at its most inclusive and generalized it is still unhelpful.
What if the real god is judging us on how rationally we behave in a godless, toy universe he created?
A silly assertion. What if we really aren't having this conversation of our free will, but it's being predicated by a supreme being? I could come up with any number of alternative universes in which we might be having said conversation.
It's not silly at all; a fundamental flaw in Pascal's Wager is the assumption that we can know that any given God values and rewards belief, when the converse is every bit as possible. Thus, non-belief--or indeed any behavior or state of mind--becomes a valid reaction to the "wager", rendering it entirely useless as a guide.
The API. There's a ton of shit you can one-line in iOS that you'll have to write yourself in Android, or drag in 3rd party libraries.
Once you get past development, every stage after that's easier too. Testing? Easier. Putting it in the store? Easier (only one to worry about rather than several). Push messaging? Well-supported through a single vendor (Apple) rather than poorly supported through several. Want to add in-app purchasing? No problem.
For professional developers Android is, frankly, a pain in the ass. The only way it's better is if you're a hobbyist, and even then... I think I'd rather pay the $100.
Is there something inherently better with iOS development? Is the API better written? Is there some technological inferiority to Android? Is it cheaper to buy the development tools for iOS?
Others have already answered this, but I feel it needs to be said again:
YES.
Maybe not exactly yes to the last bit, but it is cheaper to develop non-trivial commercial apps for iOS than Android, more often than not. The Apple developer fee is so tiny as not to be worth considering when compared with developer time. The extra testing necessary for Android would alone pay the developer fee many times over, and that's if development itself didn't generally take longer (and it most certainly does).
It's a combination of non-GPU-accelerated interfaces on many Android devices and the fact that Android doesn't provide as robust or helpful a GUI API (transitions, effects, widgets, events, GUI management in general) as iOS.
It simply takes more work to make an app look good on Android, and even then it'll still "feel" worse because everything's being rendered in the CPU.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me guess... you buy Monster cables?
Firing hundreds of thousands of other government workers during even the worst parts of the recession hasn't been politically untenable so far.
Granted, IIRC, those are mostly state and local jobs.
False.
Yep.
As best I can tell the problem is that they created a "smart" spec for the cable then didn't force manufacturers to only put them on "smart" devices, or didn't make a certain degree of smartness and sensible fallbacks part of the spec. Consequently, we've got a bunch of idiot devices that think they're smart and do all kinds of dumb things that a "dumb" connection like VGA wouldn't allow.
Instead of "just work" we've got "just work IF your devices like each other and IF you turn them on in the correct order (note, not always the best or most intuitive order) and IF you have a shaman do the HDMI dance first." My guess is a bit tighter spec and better testing requirements tied to using the HDMI name/logo would have reduced these problem from nearly universal to occasional, at least.
If nothing else the devices all ought to have a "stop trying to be smart and FUCKING DO EXACTLY WHAT I TELL YOU TO DO" mode. You think your source isn't 5.1? BULLSHIT, yes it is. You think you ought to defer to another device for audio out? NO, you're the goddamn audio receiver and I want you to NEVER do that. You went to sleep, woke back up, and now you think there's no capable audio device connected to your HDMI port and you'll continue to think that until I restart you? NO, just send the goddamn bits, because you're wrong.
Actually, that's what the override mode should be called: "Just send the goddamn bits"
Crippling the secondhand market by requiring another purchase to unlock content and/or tying games to hardware cultural theft, and it is not in the spirit if copyright law.
IMO, this is one case where the companies engaging in it deserve no copyright protections whatsoever and people who crack these sorts of games to repair the damage for future generations actually are the kind of heroes of posterity that Slashdot stereotypically paints pirates as being.
If they don't want people to be able to play the game after they decide to (or have to, if the money runs out) stop permitting it, they shouldn't publish. If they want copyright protection, they better not keep control of a switch that can steal their works back from those who paid from them, and from society which permits them those protections primarily so that the works may enter the public record, indefinitely.
Think of it this way: if, say, Twain or Dickens or Dostoevsky some other major author had been able to lock out parts of their stories to those who bought them second hand, and as a consequence those parts had been lost, how would we look on someone who broke the law to preserve them if we discovered their illegal stash today?
They'd be fucking heroes of the arts and of humanity in general, and whoever dreamed up the scheme would be considered some degree of monster on par with book-burners and civilization-razing barbarians.
Says you.
AFAI am concerned anything older than a decade or so is fair game.
I don't legally have permission to share those things freely, but I don't consider it ethically wrong to do so. Quite the opposite, actually; if not for piracy there's a ton of stuff from as recently as the 90s that would be lost forever or hopelessly hard to find already.
With the law so broken as to be no useful guide, I pay when I feel like I ought to and I don't when I don't; I'm not sure what else one can be expected to do. You only live once, and I'm not going to cut myself off from our shared cultural works just because media companies have been allowed to gain too much power and to write absurd laws. I could follow the law to the letter and boycott all big-corporation-owned media made since 1917, but I'd be doing far more harm to myself than to the media companies.
There's usually a minimum value attached to those sorts of laws, so you can pick up a nickel without having to report it. IIRC it's often something like $20.
There's got to be a DOS, ASCII-based clone of minesweeper out there...
Fedora doesn't let you upgrade with a couple clicks or a quick shell command?
Don't forget a little IDKFA.
Really? I've never noticed this. A quick glance at Le Monde's website doesn't reveal this phenomenon, either. It's all compound ("perfect", IIRC) past (with avoir and être) and... bah, what's the other one called? With all the "ait" and such endings? Anyway, just both normal past tense forms. Not even any of the old-style, literary past tense (is that one called passé simple? The terminology's a bit hazy) let alone future-tense.
Couldn't it be argued that climate change would tend to increase the likelihood of military conflict, and thus the risk of nuclear war? That's what I assumed they meant when I saw that in the summary.
I'd say we can consider 11:59 to be reserved for two nuclear powers directly engaging in a (conventional) hot war with one another, or something equally risky in terms of chances of nukes flying. It's not like it only ever moves closer to midnight.
I get a kick out of all kinds of writers and works that others consider dry or painful to read--Faulkner, Forster, Hemingway, James, Butler, and various non-fiction that many might consider painfully dull (the ancient historians like Herodotus--though that may be better classed as fiction--,a whole bunch of books by and/or about philosophers, E.T. Bell's Men of Mathematics, etc). I do enjoy fantasy, though. The point being:
I was unable to finish Fellowship. I got to somewhere under 100 pages from the end, realized that I'd only enjoyed maybe 50 pages of what I'd already read, and quit. I'd class it as among the most awful reading experiences I've had. Given its popularity I must just be missing something, but despite my toleration (and even taste) for some pretty damn dry stuff, I couldn't stand it.
Agreed, though I find the complexity and mystery that unavoidably surrounds a hypothetical creator-intelligence to be significantly more baffling.
Which--as I hope you know but I feel should be pointed out for others who might read this and think it has some merit--is complete nonsense.
Second Law of Thermodynamics
The key word in the first sentence is "isolated".
The markets seem to create such bottlenecks. Hell, regional specialization in certain types of production is one of the supposed benefits of global free-trade.
This effect is behind one of the arguments for using government to create less "efficient" but safer, more distributed production for certain things, especially food and products vital to national defense; e.g. the market may dictate that 100% of your farmland would be better used for mining, housing, factories, basically anything but farmland, but it might still be a good idea to live with a slightly lower GDP while forcing (one way or another) some of it to remain farmland so your people don't face severe food shortages when a major port gets knocked out by a storm, or you get blockaded by an adversary.
One of the complaints I've seen leveled against organizations like the World Bank (though I admit I've not looked in to their validity) is that their policies tend to make it very difficult for states receiving aid to side with security over market efficiency in cases similar to that example.
...plenty of wine would make a Linux-centric LAN party tolerable, and perhaps even enjoyable.
No.
Pascal's wager, as commonly used and understood, is that belief in any god may be considered better than disbelief in all gods since a given god may exist and may reward you for belief, and/or for fulfilling a variety of other requirements which you will presumably strive to achieve if you are a believer.
The trouble is that it's every bit as possible that a deity exists that rewards any given set of behavior, including disbelief in all gods. The Wager isn't a useful guide, for that reason. The choice remains a wager, yes, but one for which every possible bet is equally likely to pay out in an equal amount, rather than one (or a set) possibly paying out and another (or another set) paying out under no circumstances, which is the crux of the Wager.
If we take the Wager to be a more specific statement about belief in the God of Abraham (any any particular god) as you suggest then it is, if anything, even weaker. The argument above is against the strongest form of the Wager, and demonstrates that even at its most inclusive and generalized it is still unhelpful.
My hobby is not-collecting stamps.
It's not silly at all; a fundamental flaw in Pascal's Wager is the assumption that we can know that any given God values and rewards belief, when the converse is every bit as possible. Thus, non-belief--or indeed any behavior or state of mind--becomes a valid reaction to the "wager", rendering it entirely useless as a guide.
The API. There's a ton of shit you can one-line in iOS that you'll have to write yourself in Android, or drag in 3rd party libraries.
Once you get past development, every stage after that's easier too. Testing? Easier. Putting it in the store? Easier (only one to worry about rather than several). Push messaging? Well-supported through a single vendor (Apple) rather than poorly supported through several. Want to add in-app purchasing? No problem.
For professional developers Android is, frankly, a pain in the ass. The only way it's better is if you're a hobbyist, and even then... I think I'd rather pay the $100.
Others have already answered this, but I feel it needs to be said again:
YES.
Maybe not exactly yes to the last bit, but it is cheaper to develop non-trivial commercial apps for iOS than Android, more often than not. The Apple developer fee is so tiny as not to be worth considering when compared with developer time. The extra testing necessary for Android would alone pay the developer fee many times over, and that's if development itself didn't generally take longer (and it most certainly does).
It's a combination of non-GPU-accelerated interfaces on many Android devices and the fact that Android doesn't provide as robust or helpful a GUI API (transitions, effects, widgets, events, GUI management in general) as iOS.
It simply takes more work to make an app look good on Android, and even then it'll still "feel" worse because everything's being rendered in the CPU.
Well....
Shit.