And you can continue to use front-facing hot swap drive bays.
But as usual, you keep using a fucking obscure nerd example to try to prove a general point. Most people don't have front-facing hot swap drive bays. Even *most hardcore nerds* don't have them. But you have them, therefore Thunderbolt is pointless? WTF?
Thunderbolt solves the problem of being the only port you ever need for now and into the foreseeable future. Sure, you'll have USB and audio for convenience, as well as ethernet. But all the other ports? SATA, eSATA, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, PC Card, VGA, DVI, HDMI, PCIe? Now you don't have to spec out your computer based on what you currently need or use, or what you think you might need or use in the future. And when a new port comes out, you don't have to buy a whole new computer to use it.
But you've got front-facing hot swap drive bays, so Thunderbolt is pointless. What a fucking jackass.
They never agreed on a fixed price, which is what actually *is* illegal.
I left out a lot of the evidence listed in the criminal complaint because it was too verbose to retype here, and some of what I left out indicated that specific prices were discussed and set together by the publishers with Apple's consent. If the DOJ can actually back up what they've put in the complaint, this looks like a slam dunk for them.
That's not illegal. Price fixing is an agreement among multiple suppliers or sellers to sell their products at a fixed price. That's not what is happening. No one agreed to sell books for no less than $9.99, or whatever price you want to pick. There are only two "conspiracies" here. One is the "conspiracy" of the publishers making a deal with Apple. That fits the definition of conspiracy (i.e., two or more agents working together), but not what people mean by a conspiracy, and definitely nothing illegal. It's the definition of commerce.
The other "conspiracy" was that the publishers worked together to make sure that they weren't the only one going up against the *real* monopolizer, Amazon, alone. Again, not illegal.
Go read the actual criminal complaint and not just my excerpts. These companies are screwed. This is the kind of thing that leads to prison time for executives.
The DoJ has no case. It's pure smoke and mirrors. You didn't list any evidence because fundamentally you know it's nonsense, and can't type it up with a straight face.
Dazzle me with just *one* actual crime. No need to list multiple, just one will do. Pick the most damning. I look forward to seeing factual evidence and changing my mind accordingly.
The root issue is clauses in the terms publishers signed with Apple that prohibit books being sold on a competitors store cheaper than they are on the iBookstore.
That's not illegal nor is it price fixing.
What the DOJ is looking into is evidence that the publishers and Apple colluded to set up the pricing model (the so-called "Agency" model) in order to allow the publishers to dictate pricing for eBooks and ensure that no ebookstore can sell below what the publishers want.
Same, not illegal, not price fixing.
It's their books, of course they should be able to set the prices. Music companies do this with songs on iTunes. And there's nothing in the contract that stops other stores from selling books at discount prices. You are free to write your own book, sell it to some book site, and set a contract that allows them to set their own price to whatever they want.
This was such a blatant price-fixing scheme among the publishers that it's surprising to me that it took the DOJ this long to take action.
There is no price fixing going on here.
But if there's a paper trail mentioning Amazon, I think Apple is toast.
It's absurd to think there would be discussion about creating an ebook store without mentioning Amazon. Of course Amazon was mentioned. The publishers hated their deal with Amazon. They were looking for something that worked better for them, and they got it from Apple. It even had the effect of getting Amazon to relent on some of their practices which fucked over the publishers.
And regardless, I hope the publishers get crushed on this one.
What for? For selling their books? For setting a price for their books on one store? This is the very definition of a free market. I haven't seen a single aspect of this which is illegal.
Why is getting everyone to sign a similar deal illegal? Isn't that what Amazon already does? As well as other companies, like Wal-Mart?
They never agreed on a fixed price, which is what actually *is* illegal. This just sounds like none of them wanted to sign up with Apple alone, which would mean being fucked over on Amazon, but if they all did it, they would be free of Amazon's predatory practices.
This lawsuit is bizarro world, Amazon was the anti-competitive monopoly, the contracts with Apple busted it. But because all the publishers had to "collude" to fix a broken market, it shares superficial traits of a trust, and so the DoJ is prosecuting image over substance.
This shit's going to fail miserably in the courts, other than potentially leading to some sort of agreement in order to stop the lawsuit if it drags on, but there's no way the DoJ will actually win this one.
You lie about what people like Gruber have said. Please post a citation (should be easy, he doesn't delete or edit his posts to make him look right).
As for the goal posts, it's more like total units is Android getting past the fifty yard line, but profitability is the end zone. Total units is highly misleading, iOS is more than just iPhone, iOS has outsold Android to date, iPhone is regaining on Android, and phones are bought with a lot of external influences that have nothing to do with the hardware or software.
It's true that Android is doing very well in terms of units, and that's great. But it doesn't tell the whole story, does it? How many of those phones are just the "whatever phone" people pick? Or are the best phone available on their carrier? If this were a large portion of Android's success, you'd expect iPhone to regain ground when it has become both available on more carriers, and cheaper, both of which happened, which has led to the expected results.
The last two missing pieces for the iPhone is regional carriers and prepaid carriers. The first is in the process of changing, and the latter has been completely unaddressed. What would be more interesting, if you want to compare consumer preference between iPhone and Android, would be to compare when all the external factors are equalized, like they are in the US on AT&T and Verizon, and in those cases, you will find the iPhone trounces Android.
This article compares Apple, a hardware maker, with Google and Android, who provides software to hardware makers? How is that a fair comparison?
It's not, but Slashdotters do it all the time (as does the rest of the world that tracks technology). Here on Slashdot, whenever the comparison favors Google, it's touted, and when it favors Apple, it's labeled "unfair".
I'd much prefer a company which is motivated to make their products better, and the number one motivator for companies is profit.
And it gets even worse. Apple is motivated by sales to the user, which means they have to make things users want. Google gets their money from ads, which means they have to do things advertisers want.
The last line of your post shows you understand the first point (though you disregard it initially, probably due to tribalistic fan-ism, "go team!" and all that), but completely fail to see the second point (presumably for the same reason).
But it is being a dink when someone applies words in ways that aren't relevant. The opening has been solved, and he has proven the relevant outcomes. Not in a mathematic sense, but chess isn't math, it's a board game that can be mathematically modeled.
Chess is finite, but immense. You can't test every possible variation. Full stop.
Given that, it's unreasonable to use the words in a way that cannot apply. It's also unreasonable to pretend like the words only have one meaning, when you know damned well that they don't.
This is proof, and it has a high level of confidence. Call it by other words if it makes you feel better, but it's a wholly untenable position to say that these two words are not accurate.
It's not a proof in the mathematical sense, it's proof in the evidence sense. He has proven something with high confidence, but he has not created a mathematical proof.
Think of it like science. He has discovered something about a real-world phenomenon (an opening line in chess), through experimentation. Similarly, there's no mathematical proof that relativity works, but there is experimental proof, for example, in the GPS system.
Now, chess is somewhat unique in that it shares many attributes of mathematics, such that one might look for proof in math-like terms. But the type of problem posed by chess is not amenable to proper mathematic proofs (at least, not regarding such open-ended problems like this opening). So requiring proof take the form of an iron-clad mathematical form is improper, no matter how appealing that might be, given the current state of our understanding of chess and math.
Because they'll just get shot down or have an "accident".
So? Then make them shoot them down!
Just because someone *might* be able to thwart your plan doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. After all, from their point of view, what's better than having to shoot down a pirate blimp? Not having to shoot one down because the pirates were too coward to fly it!
Or take it back one notch, why put up the servers in more traditional locations, if the authorities would just confiscate them?
Fly the damned things. They *might* get shot down, but they probably won't. Either way, it's better to try and fail than to fail by default!
A vast amount of data is useless unless you can filter it and analyze it to pick out the important information. Your brain already does this as you live your life.
And our brains are notoriously easy to fool and otherwise miss important information. As someone else pointed out, if you were to realize how much time you've wasted watching television, most people would be shocked. Maybe even shocked enough to change.
2 hours a day, 5 days a week, is three weeks per year. That's more than most people get for vacation from their jobs!
Tracking other mundane shit is a pointless exercise in nerdsturbation.
Only if the optimizations it provides are trivial. Learning that eating that 1 free bagel on friday every week at the office equates to 5 lbs of body fat over the course of a year would be non-trivial. Finding a route to work that saves you 3 minutes on average will keep you from being late a few times a year. And so on.
But I enjoy my play time. A moment enjoyed is never a moment wasted.
Bullshit. If that were true, we'd all be heroin junkies.
"Wasted" time is about what you get out of the time compared to what you could have gotten out of it. Playing WoW is terribly unproductive. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't play games and have fun, etc., but it's nonsense to pretend like wasting your life in front of a computer screen is somehow noble.
The quote that you've bastardized is about living a full life, including taking time to smell the roses. It was never meant to promote squandering the precious little time we have on this earth.
Likewise, you shouldn't waste your time at the grindstone, working for someone else either.
It's all about balance, and spending multiple hours a day, every day, playing video games, is not a healthy balance. It's addiction, and addiction is rarely anything other than wasted time.
Psychiatry/psychology, to help all the people who feel that this sort of thing actually makes their lives relevant somehow (generally the same types of people who measure their self-worth by the numbe of "friends" they have on facebook or other anti-social media.
And what to do about the people who think putting down others somehow makes their lives relevant?
The drug companies, to sell them drugs so that they won't feel so bad about being so into something so stupid in the first place.
How is being social and interacting with people "stupid"? And what are you doing here, if not the same fucking thing, just with different trappings?
Except it's not. In every way, other than the meta aspect of patents, H.264 is superior to WebM. And there are a multitude of other meta aspects which H.264 is superior. Specifically, it's *far* more widely supported, both in existing video (which Mozilla has, in their infinite wisdom, decided their users do not ever need to view), and in existing hardware. H.264 is what has allowed Apple to support 1080p HD video from the iTunes Store while keeping file sizes down to damned close to their current 720p sizes while still maintaining respectable image quality.
Your choice: an iPad with 10 hours of video playback using the built-in H.264 hardware, or a "freedom" iPad which gets 1.5 hours of video playback using a software decoder.
That said, I see no reason why the browsers shouldn't use the decoding abilities of the OS they reside on. This just makes common sense?
Yes, it makes common sense, which is why Mozilla has decided against it so far. And even though it's an inscrutable fact that Mozilla could have done this from day one, there was no shortage of Slashdot nerds trying to claim that Mozilla could not legally support H.264.
Which is a load of bullshit.
If I already have a license/ability to decode for h.264, why shouldn't I be able to use it in my browser?
Because that would make you eeevillll. Somehow. I don't fucking know, just ask one of these freetards to explain it. I'm sure somehow they will be able to concoct an elaborate logical framework why using H.264 is no different from living in Soviet Russia multiplied by being an indentured servant to the power of Orwell, or some such nonsense.
> How is this "building an empire"? They are the underdog! All eBooks (from major publishers) have DRM before Apple started selling them. Cause and effect. No, *you* have this wrong. The Apple eBook format has proprietary extensions. Yes, it may be because they want to add extra stuff but it still makes it incompatible.
First off, you say I'm wrong, then make claims that I never claimed. They are straw men.
Second, you've again mistaken cause and effect. iBooks can be either ePub (fully compatible, except for the DRM) or the new iBook format (ePub with extensions required for additional functionality).
This is the same excuse used by Microsoft in it's "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics.
No. EEE is when you fuck up an existing standard so that anyone who targets that standard now has to target the proprietary variation. That's not what's happening here. Apple isn't circumventing ePub. ePub is still perfectly safe as an independent format, and Apple still perfectly supports ePub 100%.
This belies your faulty notion of cause and effect.
Microsoft even cited the same cause you did, "the freedom to innovate" when it was clear that the only "standards" they were really interested in where the standards (and extensions) they created.
Straw man. Everyone has the freedom to innovate. MS deliberately tried to break existing standards. Apple is not doing this at all.
It is you who are taking Apple's statements at surface value without understanding what is really being done in a subtle way.
My assessment agrees not only with Apple's public statements, but also the cause and effect relationship that completely agrees with their statements. You are the one lacking understanding. You are starting with the conclusion, and confusing cause and effect.
Yes, Apple is innovating, but that is not the only, or I would argue, the main reason why they choose to use (and add proprietary extensions to) the formats they do.
And when they do this, they are either putting those extensions back to the public standard (html), or not calling their new format that standard (iBooks). This undermines your baseless claims.
This is not getting causality backwards, but understanding how the corporate thinks and deducing cause and effect from that (without listening to the fanboi PR, which masquerades the corporate aims).
No, it's judging "fanboi PR" (shame on you for using such drivel) in the context of reality vs. just thinking it has to be lies, and making up nonsense in order to fit your prejudices (belied by using terms like "fanboi").
Reality fits my claims, not yours. Apple doesn't disallow cross-platform apps, they aren't trying to subvert ePub. They allow open formats like MP3 and ePub fully and without restriction. They even allow Amazon, B&N, etc. books on their store! You have to take a really perverted view of cause and effect to think this is some overarching conspiracy to lock users into only buying from Apple.
That is one reason, not the only reason. The ability to produce cross-platform applications that run on iOS and elsewhere has been disabled thanks to App Store policies.
That flies in the face of the facts. There are many cross-platform apps.
Then we can talk about formats used for lock-in. When AAC was first used by iTunes it could not be used elsewhere (thanks to the DRM, but the point is that it could not be used anywhere else).
This is a perfect example, I'm glad you brought it up (even though it has nothing to do with the App Store). AAC, when it was introduced, was (and still is) superior to MP3, and it was (and still is) an open standard. It was chosen for its superiority. Apple was the among the first to support it, but that doesn't make it proprietary to Apple. It just makes them a market leader.
DRM was required by the labels, and something Jobs publicly railed against (long before anyone else sold legal, major-label, DRM-free music--i.e., Apple had no competition, and still wanted to open it up).
You see one side-effect, and are confusing it with the cause. The cause was it was a superior format. The same thing happens all over Apple. In the case of the App Store, trying to limit the number of lowest common denominator ports is about *quality*. That's the cause. You are mistaking an effect for the cause.
That has now changed but at the time Apple was building its music empire that's how it was (music would only work with Apple software and gear).
Yet Apple fully supported (and still fully supports) MP3 on all their hardware. Consider how this applies to your view of cause and effect.
These days, try buying an Apple eBook through iTunes and see how far you get reading it with a Kindle. Again, building an empire.
How is this "building an empire"? They are the underdog! All eBooks (from major publishers) have DRM before Apple started selling them. Cause and effect.
Eventually the restrictions will be removed and everyone will forget what Apple did to get where it is.
Doubtful, but it would be nice if books (and video) no longer had DRM.
Now, I'm not bashing Apple specifically here.
Yes, you are.
Every big company does this, so Apple is not alone.
Except when they don't, like with the music store. Throws a wrench in your causality model.
But we can 'call a spade "a spade"' which means we can point out that Apple also practices these lock-in tactics (even if they do make good stuff).
Except these so-called "lock-in tactics" are more readily explained by quality and/or the needs of the content creators, and do not lock-in the content. Books, music, video, apps, are *all* allowed to be available outside of Apple's ecosystem, and in fact overwhelmingly are!
Not only do you have cause and effect inverted, you make claims which are contradicted countless times on a daily basis. Every time someone downloads Angry Birds for Android, every time someone reads a book on a Kindle, every time someone buys a song off of Amazon, every time someone watched a video on Netflix. Then there are stories like this one, where someone bitches about how hard it is to support Android, and you get causality so ass-backwards that you blame Apple!
No one *EVER* claims any one thing will solve everything. Calling it a "silver bullet" is just a straw man.
But that's really just a distraction from my point, which is that one guy trying to do something is worth more than all the naysayers in the world combined. At least that one guy is trying to add to the world.
> Apple isn't doing anything to "make you develop for their platform only" other than offering a product that people actually want to develop for.
Bullshit. That is exactly part if their strategy.
Care to clarify? The only thing remotely applicable is Apple's requirements for the SDKs used to develop for iOS (which allows for cross-platform kits like Unity). This limitation is primarily to make sure iOS doesn't get a bunch of shitty lowest-common-denominator ports, which is something they've been burned on in the past.
Your smartphone doesn't have wireless networking? You think people have a need to plug their calculators into their iPads? Or their keyboards and mice? Remote controls?
There are blood pressure meters (most people don't need, want, or have them, let alone have any desire to hook them up to a computer of any type, but they are available for those that do) for iOS, there are game (I assume that's what you meant) controllers for iOS, and the ones for current consoles are wireless anyway (i.e., wireless is normal now, not "OMFG, it adds cost and battery!!!", same goes for keyboards and mice).
Not sure what you mean by "calibrator" (looks like you just ate some alphabet soup and shit out a bunch of words, using anything that sounded technical), but if you mean screen calibrator, they also exist for iOS. And so do headphone amps (not that you need one, since, you know, all iOS devices come with one built in, but if you need an amp for *speakers*, they exist by the billions).
For your camera, there's the camera connection kit.
The only thing on your list that makes a damned bit of sense is the flash drive, which is unnecessary in the modern world of the "wireless internet", where you can just email a file, or dropbox it, or whatever, 99% of the time. But sure, you can have that one.
But hey if you want to add to the cost and complexity of every device, and reduce the battery life, as well as require an AP for them to work, sure let's go all 802.11.
ZeroConf/Bonjour, and there's no requirement for a separate AP (though these things are ubiquitous, and almost everyone has one in their homes now--you might as well decry DVD or game consoles because they "require a TV for them to work", lmfao). Battery life for WiFi devices is a non-issue, welcome to 2009.
But, of course, this is a deliberate distraction on your part anyway, because these things don't have to be WiFi to work with an iOS device. They can have (and many do have) an iPod dock connector, and/or bluetooth.
You're acting like this is some sort of problem. It's been solved for many years now. None of your old shit is going to stop working, keep using it if you want, but that's absolutely no reason to think there isn't a huge supply of devices that work just fine with iOS. Do you live under a rock? It's like your car comes with a cassette player, and you're bitching that CDs are worthless because *your device* can't play them.
Slashdot Mirror
And you can continue to use front-facing hot swap drive bays.
But as usual, you keep using a fucking obscure nerd example to try to prove a general point. Most people don't have front-facing hot swap drive bays. Even *most hardcore nerds* don't have them. But you have them, therefore Thunderbolt is pointless? WTF?
Thunderbolt solves the problem of being the only port you ever need for now and into the foreseeable future. Sure, you'll have USB and audio for convenience, as well as ethernet. But all the other ports? SATA, eSATA, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, PC Card, VGA, DVI, HDMI, PCIe? Now you don't have to spec out your computer based on what you currently need or use, or what you think you might need or use in the future. And when a new port comes out, you don't have to buy a whole new computer to use it.
But you've got front-facing hot swap drive bays, so Thunderbolt is pointless. What a fucking jackass.
They never agreed on a fixed price, which is what actually *is* illegal.
I left out a lot of the evidence listed in the criminal complaint because it was too verbose to retype here, and some of what I left out indicated that specific prices were discussed and set together by the publishers with Apple's consent. If the DOJ can actually back up what they've put in the complaint, this looks like a slam dunk for them.
That's not illegal. Price fixing is an agreement among multiple suppliers or sellers to sell their products at a fixed price. That's not what is happening. No one agreed to sell books for no less than $9.99, or whatever price you want to pick. There are only two "conspiracies" here. One is the "conspiracy" of the publishers making a deal with Apple. That fits the definition of conspiracy (i.e., two or more agents working together), but not what people mean by a conspiracy, and definitely nothing illegal. It's the definition of commerce.
The other "conspiracy" was that the publishers worked together to make sure that they weren't the only one going up against the *real* monopolizer, Amazon, alone. Again, not illegal.
Go read the actual criminal complaint and not just my excerpts. These companies are screwed. This is the kind of thing that leads to prison time for executives.
The DoJ has no case. It's pure smoke and mirrors. You didn't list any evidence because fundamentally you know it's nonsense, and can't type it up with a straight face.
Dazzle me with just *one* actual crime. No need to list multiple, just one will do. Pick the most damning. I look forward to seeing factual evidence and changing my mind accordingly.
The root issue is clauses in the terms publishers signed with Apple that prohibit books being sold on a competitors store cheaper than they are on the iBookstore.
That's not illegal nor is it price fixing.
What the DOJ is looking into is evidence that the publishers and Apple colluded to set up the pricing model (the so-called "Agency" model) in order to allow the publishers to dictate pricing for eBooks and ensure that no ebookstore can sell below what the publishers want.
Same, not illegal, not price fixing.
It's their books, of course they should be able to set the prices. Music companies do this with songs on iTunes. And there's nothing in the contract that stops other stores from selling books at discount prices. You are free to write your own book, sell it to some book site, and set a contract that allows them to set their own price to whatever they want.
This was such a blatant price-fixing scheme among the publishers that it's surprising to me that it took the DOJ this long to take action.
There is no price fixing going on here.
But if there's a paper trail mentioning Amazon, I think Apple is toast.
It's absurd to think there would be discussion about creating an ebook store without mentioning Amazon. Of course Amazon was mentioned. The publishers hated their deal with Amazon. They were looking for something that worked better for them, and they got it from Apple. It even had the effect of getting Amazon to relent on some of their practices which fucked over the publishers.
And regardless, I hope the publishers get crushed on this one.
What for? For selling their books? For setting a price for their books on one store? This is the very definition of a free market. I haven't seen a single aspect of this which is illegal.
Why is getting everyone to sign a similar deal illegal? Isn't that what Amazon already does? As well as other companies, like Wal-Mart?
They never agreed on a fixed price, which is what actually *is* illegal. This just sounds like none of them wanted to sign up with Apple alone, which would mean being fucked over on Amazon, but if they all did it, they would be free of Amazon's predatory practices.
This lawsuit is bizarro world, Amazon was the anti-competitive monopoly, the contracts with Apple busted it. But because all the publishers had to "collude" to fix a broken market, it shares superficial traits of a trust, and so the DoJ is prosecuting image over substance.
This shit's going to fail miserably in the courts, other than potentially leading to some sort of agreement in order to stop the lawsuit if it drags on, but there's no way the DoJ will actually win this one.
You lie about what people like Gruber have said. Please post a citation (should be easy, he doesn't delete or edit his posts to make him look right).
As for the goal posts, it's more like total units is Android getting past the fifty yard line, but profitability is the end zone. Total units is highly misleading, iOS is more than just iPhone, iOS has outsold Android to date, iPhone is regaining on Android, and phones are bought with a lot of external influences that have nothing to do with the hardware or software.
It's true that Android is doing very well in terms of units, and that's great. But it doesn't tell the whole story, does it? How many of those phones are just the "whatever phone" people pick? Or are the best phone available on their carrier? If this were a large portion of Android's success, you'd expect iPhone to regain ground when it has become both available on more carriers, and cheaper, both of which happened, which has led to the expected results.
The last two missing pieces for the iPhone is regional carriers and prepaid carriers. The first is in the process of changing, and the latter has been completely unaddressed. What would be more interesting, if you want to compare consumer preference between iPhone and Android, would be to compare when all the external factors are equalized, like they are in the US on AT&T and Verizon, and in those cases, you will find the iPhone trounces Android.
This article compares Apple, a hardware maker, with Google and Android, who provides software to hardware makers? How is that a fair comparison?
It's not, but Slashdotters do it all the time (as does the rest of the world that tracks technology). Here on Slashdot, whenever the comparison favors Google, it's touted, and when it favors Apple, it's labeled "unfair".
So, which is it?
I'd much prefer a company which is motivated to make their products better, and the number one motivator for companies is profit.
And it gets even worse. Apple is motivated by sales to the user, which means they have to make things users want. Google gets their money from ads, which means they have to do things advertisers want.
The last line of your post shows you understand the first point (though you disregard it initially, probably due to tribalistic fan-ism, "go team!" and all that), but completely fail to see the second point (presumably for the same reason).
But it is being a dink when someone applies words in ways that aren't relevant. The opening has been solved, and he has proven the relevant outcomes. Not in a mathematic sense, but chess isn't math, it's a board game that can be mathematically modeled.
Chess is finite, but immense. You can't test every possible variation. Full stop.
Given that, it's unreasonable to use the words in a way that cannot apply. It's also unreasonable to pretend like the words only have one meaning, when you know damned well that they don't.
This is proof, and it has a high level of confidence. Call it by other words if it makes you feel better, but it's a wholly untenable position to say that these two words are not accurate.
How do you plagiarize open source software? Did he not abide by the license?
Not quite. It's solved, up to a high level of confidence. It's not solved with absolute certainty.
This isn't a mathematical proof, it's an analysis of a chess opening. Holding it up to absolute mathematical ideals is unwarranted.
It's not a proof in the mathematical sense, it's proof in the evidence sense. He has proven something with high confidence, but he has not created a mathematical proof.
Think of it like science. He has discovered something about a real-world phenomenon (an opening line in chess), through experimentation. Similarly, there's no mathematical proof that relativity works, but there is experimental proof, for example, in the GPS system.
Now, chess is somewhat unique in that it shares many attributes of mathematics, such that one might look for proof in math-like terms. But the type of problem posed by chess is not amenable to proper mathematic proofs (at least, not regarding such open-ended problems like this opening). So requiring proof take the form of an iron-clad mathematical form is improper, no matter how appealing that might be, given the current state of our understanding of chess and math.
Because they'll just get shot down or have an "accident".
So? Then make them shoot them down!
Just because someone *might* be able to thwart your plan doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. After all, from their point of view, what's better than having to shoot down a pirate blimp? Not having to shoot one down because the pirates were too coward to fly it!
Or take it back one notch, why put up the servers in more traditional locations, if the authorities would just confiscate them?
Fly the damned things. They *might* get shot down, but they probably won't. Either way, it's better to try and fail than to fail by default!
A vast amount of data is useless unless you can filter it and analyze it to pick out the important information.
Your brain already does this as you live your life.
And our brains are notoriously easy to fool and otherwise miss important information. As someone else pointed out, if you were to realize how much time you've wasted watching television, most people would be shocked. Maybe even shocked enough to change.
2 hours a day, 5 days a week, is three weeks per year. That's more than most people get for vacation from their jobs!
Tracking other mundane shit is a pointless exercise in nerdsturbation.
Only if the optimizations it provides are trivial. Learning that eating that 1 free bagel on friday every week at the office equates to 5 lbs of body fat over the course of a year would be non-trivial. Finding a route to work that saves you 3 minutes on average will keep you from being late a few times a year. And so on.
But I enjoy my play time. A moment enjoyed is never a moment wasted.
Bullshit. If that were true, we'd all be heroin junkies.
"Wasted" time is about what you get out of the time compared to what you could have gotten out of it. Playing WoW is terribly unproductive. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't play games and have fun, etc., but it's nonsense to pretend like wasting your life in front of a computer screen is somehow noble.
The quote that you've bastardized is about living a full life, including taking time to smell the roses. It was never meant to promote squandering the precious little time we have on this earth.
Likewise, you shouldn't waste your time at the grindstone, working for someone else either.
It's all about balance, and spending multiple hours a day, every day, playing video games, is not a healthy balance. It's addiction, and addiction is rarely anything other than wasted time.
Psychiatry/psychology, to help all the people who feel that this sort of thing actually makes their lives relevant somehow (generally the same types of people who measure their self-worth by the numbe of "friends" they have on facebook or other anti-social media.
And what to do about the people who think putting down others somehow makes their lives relevant?
The drug companies, to sell them drugs so that they won't feel so bad about being so into something so stupid in the first place.
How is being social and interacting with people "stupid"? And what are you doing here, if not the same fucking thing, just with different trappings?
Webm is just as good as h.264 imho.
Except it's not. In every way, other than the meta aspect of patents, H.264 is superior to WebM. And there are a multitude of other meta aspects which H.264 is superior. Specifically, it's *far* more widely supported, both in existing video (which Mozilla has, in their infinite wisdom, decided their users do not ever need to view), and in existing hardware. H.264 is what has allowed Apple to support 1080p HD video from the iTunes Store while keeping file sizes down to damned close to their current 720p sizes while still maintaining respectable image quality.
Your choice: an iPad with 10 hours of video playback using the built-in H.264 hardware, or a "freedom" iPad which gets 1.5 hours of video playback using a software decoder.
That said, I see no reason why the browsers shouldn't use the decoding abilities of the OS they reside on. This just makes common sense?
Yes, it makes common sense, which is why Mozilla has decided against it so far. And even though it's an inscrutable fact that Mozilla could have done this from day one, there was no shortage of Slashdot nerds trying to claim that Mozilla could not legally support H.264.
Which is a load of bullshit.
If I already have a license/ability to decode for h.264, why shouldn't I be able to use it in my browser?
Because that would make you eeevillll. Somehow. I don't fucking know, just ask one of these freetards to explain it. I'm sure somehow they will be able to concoct an elaborate logical framework why using H.264 is no different from living in Soviet Russia multiplied by being an indentured servant to the power of Orwell, or some such nonsense.
> How is this "building an empire"? They are the underdog! All eBooks (from major publishers) have DRM before Apple started selling them. Cause and effect.
No, *you* have this wrong. The Apple eBook format has proprietary extensions. Yes, it may be because they want to add extra stuff but it still makes it incompatible.
First off, you say I'm wrong, then make claims that I never claimed. They are straw men.
Second, you've again mistaken cause and effect. iBooks can be either ePub (fully compatible, except for the DRM) or the new iBook format (ePub with extensions required for additional functionality).
This is the same excuse used by Microsoft in it's "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics.
No. EEE is when you fuck up an existing standard so that anyone who targets that standard now has to target the proprietary variation. That's not what's happening here. Apple isn't circumventing ePub. ePub is still perfectly safe as an independent format, and Apple still perfectly supports ePub 100%.
This belies your faulty notion of cause and effect.
Microsoft even cited the same cause you did, "the freedom to innovate" when it was clear that the only "standards" they were really interested in where the standards (and extensions) they created.
Straw man. Everyone has the freedom to innovate. MS deliberately tried to break existing standards. Apple is not doing this at all.
It is you who are taking Apple's statements at surface value without understanding what is really being done in a subtle way.
My assessment agrees not only with Apple's public statements, but also the cause and effect relationship that completely agrees with their statements. You are the one lacking understanding. You are starting with the conclusion, and confusing cause and effect.
Yes, Apple is innovating, but that is not the only, or I would argue, the main reason why they choose to use (and add proprietary extensions to) the formats they do.
And when they do this, they are either putting those extensions back to the public standard (html), or not calling their new format that standard (iBooks). This undermines your baseless claims.
This is not getting causality backwards, but understanding how the corporate thinks and deducing cause and effect from that (without listening to the fanboi PR, which masquerades the corporate aims).
No, it's judging "fanboi PR" (shame on you for using such drivel) in the context of reality vs. just thinking it has to be lies, and making up nonsense in order to fit your prejudices (belied by using terms like "fanboi").
Reality fits my claims, not yours. Apple doesn't disallow cross-platform apps, they aren't trying to subvert ePub. They allow open formats like MP3 and ePub fully and without restriction. They even allow Amazon, B&N, etc. books on their store! You have to take a really perverted view of cause and effect to think this is some overarching conspiracy to lock users into only buying from Apple.
That is one reason, not the only reason. The ability to produce cross-platform applications that run on iOS and elsewhere has been disabled thanks to App Store policies.
That flies in the face of the facts. There are many cross-platform apps.
Then we can talk about formats used for lock-in. When AAC was first used by iTunes it could not be used elsewhere (thanks to the DRM, but the point is that it could not be used anywhere else).
This is a perfect example, I'm glad you brought it up (even though it has nothing to do with the App Store). AAC, when it was introduced, was (and still is) superior to MP3, and it was (and still is) an open standard. It was chosen for its superiority. Apple was the among the first to support it, but that doesn't make it proprietary to Apple. It just makes them a market leader.
DRM was required by the labels, and something Jobs publicly railed against (long before anyone else sold legal, major-label, DRM-free music--i.e., Apple had no competition, and still wanted to open it up).
You see one side-effect, and are confusing it with the cause. The cause was it was a superior format. The same thing happens all over Apple. In the case of the App Store, trying to limit the number of lowest common denominator ports is about *quality*. That's the cause. You are mistaking an effect for the cause.
That has now changed but at the time Apple was building its music empire that's how it was (music would only work with Apple software and gear).
Yet Apple fully supported (and still fully supports) MP3 on all their hardware. Consider how this applies to your view of cause and effect.
These days, try buying an Apple eBook through iTunes and see how far you get reading it with a Kindle. Again, building an empire.
How is this "building an empire"? They are the underdog! All eBooks (from major publishers) have DRM before Apple started selling them. Cause and effect.
Eventually the restrictions will be removed and everyone will forget what Apple did to get where it is.
Doubtful, but it would be nice if books (and video) no longer had DRM.
Now, I'm not bashing Apple specifically here.
Yes, you are.
Every big company does this, so Apple is not alone.
Except when they don't, like with the music store. Throws a wrench in your causality model.
But we can 'call a spade "a spade"' which means we can point out that Apple also practices these lock-in tactics (even if they do make good stuff).
Except these so-called "lock-in tactics" are more readily explained by quality and/or the needs of the content creators, and do not lock-in the content. Books, music, video, apps, are *all* allowed to be available outside of Apple's ecosystem, and in fact overwhelmingly are!
Not only do you have cause and effect inverted, you make claims which are contradicted countless times on a daily basis. Every time someone downloads Angry Birds for Android, every time someone reads a book on a Kindle, every time someone buys a song off of Amazon, every time someone watched a video on Netflix. Then there are stories like this one, where someone bitches about how hard it is to support Android, and you get causality so ass-backwards that you blame Apple!
No one *EVER* claims any one thing will solve everything. Calling it a "silver bullet" is just a straw man.
But that's really just a distraction from my point, which is that one guy trying to do something is worth more than all the naysayers in the world combined. At least that one guy is trying to add to the world.
I'll take one guy trying to come up with new ways to do things over a dozen anonymous internet nerds saying it's not going to work any day.
> Apple isn't doing anything to "make you develop for their platform only" other than offering a product that people actually want to develop for.
Bullshit. That is exactly part if their strategy.
Care to clarify? The only thing remotely applicable is Apple's requirements for the SDKs used to develop for iOS (which allows for cross-platform kits like Unity). This limitation is primarily to make sure iOS doesn't get a bunch of shitty lowest-common-denominator ports, which is something they've been burned on in the past.
You don't get free markets with 800lb gorillas like Apple and Google in the room. Stop kidding yourself.
I think you meant to say to Apple and Google, 4+ years ago, "you don't get free markets with 800lb gorillas like Nokia and Blackberry in the room."
Your smartphone doesn't have wireless networking? You think people have a need to plug their calculators into their iPads? Or their keyboards and mice? Remote controls?
There are blood pressure meters (most people don't need, want, or have them, let alone have any desire to hook them up to a computer of any type, but they are available for those that do) for iOS, there are game (I assume that's what you meant) controllers for iOS, and the ones for current consoles are wireless anyway (i.e., wireless is normal now, not "OMFG, it adds cost and battery!!!", same goes for keyboards and mice).
Not sure what you mean by "calibrator" (looks like you just ate some alphabet soup and shit out a bunch of words, using anything that sounded technical), but if you mean screen calibrator, they also exist for iOS. And so do headphone amps (not that you need one, since, you know, all iOS devices come with one built in, but if you need an amp for *speakers*, they exist by the billions).
For your camera, there's the camera connection kit.
The only thing on your list that makes a damned bit of sense is the flash drive, which is unnecessary in the modern world of the "wireless internet", where you can just email a file, or dropbox it, or whatever, 99% of the time. But sure, you can have that one.
But hey if you want to add to the cost and complexity of every device, and reduce the battery life, as well as require an AP for them to work, sure let's go all 802.11.
ZeroConf/Bonjour, and there's no requirement for a separate AP (though these things are ubiquitous, and almost everyone has one in their homes now--you might as well decry DVD or game consoles because they "require a TV for them to work", lmfao). Battery life for WiFi devices is a non-issue, welcome to 2009.
But, of course, this is a deliberate distraction on your part anyway, because these things don't have to be WiFi to work with an iOS device. They can have (and many do have) an iPod dock connector, and/or bluetooth.
You're acting like this is some sort of problem. It's been solved for many years now. None of your old shit is going to stop working, keep using it if you want, but that's absolutely no reason to think there isn't a huge supply of devices that work just fine with iOS. Do you live under a rock? It's like your car comes with a cassette player, and you're bitching that CDs are worthless because *your device* can't play them.