The reader's behavior doesn't really seem to match up to the specs. It feels pretty slow, and the screen response is extremely poor. Many of the applications that come with (such as crosswords) are not functional because the touchscreen response is inaccurate. Battery life is pretty good when you're using it, but if it's set aside for a couple of weeks and not used, the battery will drain in the meantime.
Free-market nutters are like health food loons who have decided any "natural" product is better than every man-made product, 100% of the time.
Or, maybe more accurately, the people who thought (think? I'm sure there are still some people laboring under this misunderstanding) that natural evolution leads to an ever-improving hierarchy of animals, and that each "level" is objectively better than the one before it, rather than simply more adapted for its particular circumstances, which may leave it proper fucked when those circumstances change, while "inferior" creatures without the misfortune of now-crippling adaptations thrive.
Huh, that actually turned out to be a pretty damn good analogy for the proper place, function, and balance of directed vs. laissez faire approaches to economic policy.
At any rate, these folks really need to read up on the economic policies of postwar Japan. Pretty much blows their "government intervention can only ever harm an economy" black-and-white model out of the water. Or post-reconquista Spain. Or a lot of examples, actually. They seem to have decided that because it can go horribly wrong, it must never be good/useful.
If they can accept that government is necessary for an economy, in any modern sense of the term, to exist, they might also to well to consider the question: why should we use our collective will to create an economy? To what end?
A fractured platform is hell for developers and hell for security. By all means, don't worry about it if you don't care about developer relations, having nice apps on your platform, having consistently-behaving apps on your platform, or not giving your CC info to Russian hackers.
Wait, let me back up: is it not that your views on the proper role of government differ much from the norm, but rather that you simply believe its legitimacy is based somewhere other than morality, since that was the specific thing under discussion?
Well, at least you're consistent, I guess. Good for you on that front.
Serious question: did you come to this ultra-individualist (I gather you'd accept that description) philosophy of government independently, and if not, what sources influenced your thinking?
The question was one of the moral right of the individual to demand something of society by way of the government, which is completely independent of the legality of a program providing for said demands in a specific country.
Oh thank god. A scrap of reason in a storm of stupid. The point about economies of scale really needed to be brought to this discussion.
Many of these efficiency-obsessed small-government types haven't thought their cunning plan all the way through. Actually, in many cases, I'd say you could end that sentence after the word "thought".
You know what organizations exists even farther outside the control of and with less support support from government than the mafia? Governments do!
At this point we're just talking about degrees of sovereignty, not whether corporations require a government structure to exist. Of course they goddamn do. If they're independent from an external legal structure, they are a government.
I'd further take issue with the assertion that he mafie exists "without any need for government". I don't think I need to articulate the reasons that this is a silly statement, especially when it's considered alongside what I've typed above.
I think you need to spend some more time considering your views on this matter. Maybe read a book or three on the topic. A couple of classics in political philosophy and economics (or even political economy) wouldn't hurt. I'm frankly not even sure you understand what a government is, beyond some vague understanding of what they seem to do, at a glance, from your perspective, with emphasis on seem, at a glance, and your perspective.
Don't feel too bad, though; lots of people haven't put a much thought (let alone study time) in to these topics, but are opinionated about them anyway.
Holy god, yes. FF needs to abandon the "fat browser with extensions" and move to a "thin browser with extensions" model. Maybe then they could make it not be a bloated piece of shit, and focus on things that are actually important, like improving JS performance and generally speeding things up.
Want to be sad? Go look up a screenshot of FF 1.0 or earlier (Phoenix or Firebird, too). What an awesome browser it used to be.
Perfect Dark remains, in many ways, the best local multiplayer console shooter yet produced. Bots (lots of them, with all kinds of configuration options), just about every kind of multiplayer mode there is, co-op campaign, AND that cool campaign mode where one player is Joanna and another plays a bot, hopping to another if that one's killed.
I'm not sure any other shooter's even come close to being as awesome at local multiplayer. It's the main reason I plan to get a used 360 when the non-"arcade" models get a bit cheaper, since the controls (which were good by N64 standards, to be fair) and screen resolution are pretty much the only flaws that game has, and from what I understand the 360 version fixes both.
Maybe it's generational and I'm just becoming an old fart, but to me consoles are for social, local multiplayer, and the PC is for online play. Why would I put up with shit controls, hogging a TV, and an all-around sub-optimal experience without the tradeoff of being able to play with a friend in the same room (without the hassle of a LAN party)?
The late 19th century as America's golden age, even in a strictly economic sense? Well, at least now I know you're trolling. Have fun with the rest of the fish.
How many people can't get health insurance for anything approaching an affordable price on the open market (that is, without joining a group plan provided by an employer)? How many of those would like to start a business?
How many more would-be entrepreneurs are fine themselves, but can't get insurance for a child or spouse without an employer's pool to join?
How many people are too responsible start a business when they know they'll need employees but won't be able to give them the basic stability of health care coverage?
Can one write off any or all of one's non-business-related rent on federal taxes?
All other things being equal, does a person paying $1,000/month in rent have a lower, higher, or equal tax bill at the end of the year than/as a person paying $1,000/month on a brand-new 30-year 4% mortgage?
Home ownership per se, maybe not. Paying mortgage interest rather than rent? I believe the second person's taxes would be lower.
Seriously, considering how big a boost single payer or similar would be to economic mobility and entrepreneurship Free Market(tm) loving Republicans should be clambering for it. Trading a shitty "freedom" like picking which insurance company rapes you for a better one like dramatically improved job mobility is a no-brainer, and pretty much the exact kind of thing we have government in the first place.
Any Free Market worshipper who wouldn't support something like single payer is almost certainly a hopeless ideologue ("who cares that the end is closer to my proclaimed goal, the means to get there are technically counter to my idea of how things should work so screw the whole thing!"), a lying douchebag shill, or a complete dumbass. Maybe all three.
Want to help the "job creators" hire people? Enact a "socialist" health care law modeled on any of a couple dozen successful systems tomorrow and watch as 50,000 new businesses show up seemingly out of no-where, wages rise, health care costs drop, and offshoring slows.
I've got a lot of books that would suck if they were squeezed down to 7". The Landmark series of the ancient historians, anything with extensive footnotes, anything with lots of images. Hell, just about anything but mass-market, recent fiction is kind of crappy that small. Lots of works that make use of the two-pages-at-a-time format of paper books would do far better with a larger screen, maybe turned to landscape mode (e.g., parallel dual-language texts). I'd guess that maybe 1/3 of my 1000ish books would suffer significantly from having to fit on a single 7" screen.
Comic books. Those are even bigger than the 10.1" screens on many Android tablets, and that's just for a single page--again, they often take advantage of the bound print format to do two-page spreads.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to Android.
The Law of Truly Large Numbers
Free-market nutters are like health food loons who have decided any "natural" product is better than every man-made product, 100% of the time.
Or, maybe more accurately, the people who thought (think? I'm sure there are still some people laboring under this misunderstanding) that natural evolution leads to an ever-improving hierarchy of animals, and that each "level" is objectively better than the one before it, rather than simply more adapted for its particular circumstances, which may leave it proper fucked when those circumstances change, while "inferior" creatures without the misfortune of now-crippling adaptations thrive.
Huh, that actually turned out to be a pretty damn good analogy for the proper place, function, and balance of directed vs. laissez faire approaches to economic policy.
At any rate, these folks really need to read up on the economic policies of postwar Japan. Pretty much blows their "government intervention can only ever harm an economy" black-and-white model out of the water. Or post-reconquista Spain. Or a lot of examples, actually. They seem to have decided that because it can go horribly wrong, it must never be good/useful.
If they can accept that government is necessary for an economy, in any modern sense of the term, to exist, they might also to well to consider the question: why should we use our collective will to create an economy? To what end?
Just read a fair bit of that article.
Author must be a migrant worker--he's supremely skilled at picking cherries.
My just-purchased Galaxy S 4G (T-Mobile) is a version behind (but only in N. America--Europe has apparently had 2.3 for months)
A fractured platform is hell for developers and hell for security. By all means, don't worry about it if you don't care about developer relations, having nice apps on your platform, having consistently-behaving apps on your platform, or not giving your CC info to Russian hackers.
It does, thanks.
Interesting, thanks.
Wait, let me back up: is it not that your views on the proper role of government differ much from the norm, but rather that you simply believe its legitimacy is based somewhere other than morality, since that was the specific thing under discussion?
Well, at least you're consistent, I guess. Good for you on that front.
Serious question: did you come to this ultra-individualist (I gather you'd accept that description) philosophy of government independently, and if not, what sources influenced your thinking?
The question was one of the moral right of the individual to demand something of society by way of the government, which is completely independent of the legality of a program providing for said demands in a specific country.
Oh thank god. A scrap of reason in a storm of stupid. The point about economies of scale really needed to be brought to this discussion.
Many of these efficiency-obsessed small-government types haven't thought their cunning plan all the way through. Actually, in many cases, I'd say you could end that sentence after the word "thought".
I think one of the big problems is people deliberately taking the word "free" out of context in order to beat up a straw-man.
But that's just me.
You know what organizations exists even farther outside the control of and with less support support from government than the mafia? Governments do!
At this point we're just talking about degrees of sovereignty, not whether corporations require a government structure to exist. Of course they goddamn do. If they're independent from an external legal structure, they are a government.
I'd further take issue with the assertion that he mafie exists "without any need for government". I don't think I need to articulate the reasons that this is a silly statement, especially when it's considered alongside what I've typed above.
I think you need to spend some more time considering your views on this matter. Maybe read a book or three on the topic. A couple of classics in political philosophy and economics (or even political economy) wouldn't hurt. I'm frankly not even sure you understand what a government is, beyond some vague understanding of what they seem to do, at a glance, from your perspective, with emphasis on seem, at a glance, and your perspective.
Don't feel too bad, though; lots of people haven't put a much thought (let alone study time) in to these topics, but are opinionated about them anyway.
Why should "society" pay for your defense?
By what moral right can one demand that others give up some of the fruit of their labor for the benefit of your safety?
Holy god, yes. FF needs to abandon the "fat browser with extensions" and move to a "thin browser with extensions" model. Maybe then they could make it not be a bloated piece of shit, and focus on things that are actually important, like improving JS performance and generally speeding things up.
Want to be sad? Go look up a screenshot of FF 1.0 or earlier (Phoenix or Firebird, too). What an awesome browser it used to be.
Perfect Dark remains, in many ways, the best local multiplayer console shooter yet produced. Bots (lots of them, with all kinds of configuration options), just about every kind of multiplayer mode there is, co-op campaign, AND that cool campaign mode where one player is Joanna and another plays a bot, hopping to another if that one's killed.
I'm not sure any other shooter's even come close to being as awesome at local multiplayer. It's the main reason I plan to get a used 360 when the non-"arcade" models get a bit cheaper, since the controls (which were good by N64 standards, to be fair) and screen resolution are pretty much the only flaws that game has, and from what I understand the 360 version fixes both.
Maybe it's generational and I'm just becoming an old fart, but to me consoles are for social, local multiplayer, and the PC is for online play. Why would I put up with shit controls, hogging a TV, and an all-around sub-optimal experience without the tradeoff of being able to play with a friend in the same room (without the hassle of a LAN party)?
The new Stop Menu?
The late 19th century as America's golden age, even in a strictly economic sense? Well, at least now I know you're trolling. Have fun with the rest of the fish.
Is sometimes better than the alternatives does not mean is always the greatest thing ever and is always perfect.
Also, protip: history is more than the last 10-20 years.
Looks like someone hasn't read up on the economic history of post-war Japan.
Or, say, Norway.
Or Germany.
Or... etc. etc.
It's easy to say government is never the answer--simple, clean, fits on a bumper sticker. It's also wrong.
How many people can't get health insurance for anything approaching an affordable price on the open market (that is, without joining a group plan provided by an employer)? How many of those would like to start a business?
How many more would-be entrepreneurs are fine themselves, but can't get insurance for a child or spouse without an employer's pool to join?
How many people are too responsible start a business when they know they'll need employees but won't be able to give them the basic stability of health care coverage?
I'd call 50,000 a conservative estimate.
Can one write off any or all of one's non-business-related rent on federal taxes?
All other things being equal, does a person paying $1,000/month in rent have a lower, higher, or equal tax bill at the end of the year than/as a person paying $1,000/month on a brand-new 30-year 4% mortgage?
Home ownership per se, maybe not. Paying mortgage interest rather than rent? I believe the second person's taxes would be lower.
Seriously, considering how big a boost single payer or similar would be to economic mobility and entrepreneurship Free Market(tm) loving Republicans should be clambering for it. Trading a shitty "freedom" like picking which insurance company rapes you for a better one like dramatically improved job mobility is a no-brainer, and pretty much the exact kind of thing we have government in the first place.
Any Free Market worshipper who wouldn't support something like single payer is almost certainly a hopeless ideologue ("who cares that the end is closer to my proclaimed goal, the means to get there are technically counter to my idea of how things should work so screw the whole thing!"), a lying douchebag shill, or a complete dumbass. Maybe all three.
Want to help the "job creators" hire people? Enact a "socialist" health care law modeled on any of a couple dozen successful systems tomorrow and watch as 50,000 new businesses show up seemingly out of no-where, wages rise, health care costs drop, and offshoring slows.
I've got a lot of books that would suck if they were squeezed down to 7". The Landmark series of the ancient historians, anything with extensive footnotes, anything with lots of images. Hell, just about anything but mass-market, recent fiction is kind of crappy that small. Lots of works that make use of the two-pages-at-a-time format of paper books would do far better with a larger screen, maybe turned to landscape mode (e.g., parallel dual-language texts). I'd guess that maybe 1/3 of my 1000ish books would suffer significantly from having to fit on a single 7" screen.
Comic books. Those are even bigger than the 10.1" screens on many Android tablets, and that's just for a single page--again, they often take advantage of the bound print format to do two-page spreads.
Children's books, for the same reasons.