So, logically, talking on a handheld device shouldn't be banned unless you also ban eating. And the risk from hands free devices is almost certainly substantially lower.
Of course, why not just cover all of these under "distracted driving"? If you swerve or are inattentive, you can get a ticket (with video evidence). If you have an accident while talking on the phone, the presumption is that you're at fault, all other things being equal. Why do we need additional laws?
Sure it's not horrible odds, but my cost/benefit still suggests I'd want to minimize distractions.
And a law against cell phone use is going to do that... how? I was almost killed by some bimbo in an SUV playing with her baby. Why not ban babies in cars? I think babies probably are a much bigger distraction than talking using a headset. Ditto for spouses, food, drinks, and makeup. Where is this insanity going to stop?
I think LaHood said that 3000 people a year die due to distracted driving. Out of 300 million. Or around 1 in 100,000
Furthermore, you can greatly reduce even that risk by taking public transportation: even if a bus or a train collides with a car, usually the passengers on the bus/train are not harmed significantly. You can reduce the risk even further by moving within walking distance of your job and shopping.
I find it arrogant and unacceptable for people to try to impose their personal phobias as taxes and restrictions on the rest of us.
This would be the start of a proper transportation infrastructure. Leave driving to professionals
You can have that: move to New York, Boston, Seattle, etc. and you can take your "proper transportation infrastructure" and never need to venture onto the road.
The rest of us will simply continue driving in our unprofessional ways on our unprofessional transportation infrastructure. The fact that we do pretty much doesn't affect you at all as long as you stick to your "professional" ways.
There are a lot of iOS apps that suck when ported to Android. They never pick up in terms of sales, someone just clones the app and develops a better implementation for Android. That's probably why your sales will never pick up.
Android uses Java, iOS uses Objective-C. They are both decades old technology. Android uses Eclipse, iOS uses XCode, both cumbersome and bloated IDEs. Google's Java APIs inherit the usual tedium of Java APIs, but at least you get runtime safety and JIT compilation. Objective-C has slightly nicer APIs and plays nicer with legacy C libraries, but the language is unsafe and dangerous in the usual ways. So, I really don't see much of a reason to prefer one over the other on technical grounds.
In the end, what matters is who owns and controls the platform, and there Android has a clear advantage: it is open source, so no matter how badly Google may screw up in the future, the platform will live on. On the other hand, with iOS, you are subject to whatever arbitrary decisions Apple makes, and they have a long history of screwing their users and their developers.
That's probably more a limitation of Microsoft's linker than of Firefox. Linking, at its heart, is a bit of sorting, filtering, and merging and can be done in fairly modest amounts of memory even for large programs.
As a Canadian... STOP DOING THAT. Look, you Americans have messed things up, stop trading on our good name
Well, hold the presses! What an impressive achievement! A nation that, for practical purposes, borders no other nation than the US, has a wealth of natural resources, and relies for much of its defense, wealth, culture, technology, trade, and security needs on the US. What a beacon of hope to the world! What a shining example of human superiority and triumph of the human intellect and spirit! Let the poor of the world eat maple syrup covered butter tarts like Canadians do and rejoice!
It's just getting really annoying when I go abroad, mention I'm Canadian, then have people assume I'm American.
Believe me, we don't want to be mistaken for Canadians either. But we'll both just have to live with geographic realities.
I lived through the "Unix wars", which is one reason why I like a certified UNIX
I see: you're still sticking with the failures and the badly designed commercial systems.
I wonder if Android manufacturers are unaware of the historical dangers of fragmentation - an interesting overview of Android fragmentation can be found here
You're exhibiting the same dumb checklist mentality that the UNIX vendors were using to try to peddle their overpriced wares last time.
As someone who actually uses a whole range of Android devices, from versions 2.1 to 3.2, I can assure you: these differences don't matter.
Fink is OK, but on the rare occasions that I need to run some old program that I, or someone else, have written I can compile it from source code.
"Old program"... as opposed to what? I run large scale numerical codes. I have to compile much of that stuff from source, and it is a bloody pain on OS X.
The only problem for them is that Apple has already moved on to dinner.
In what way? Since Android has been released, Apple has constantly been behind in terms of functionality and features. Pretty much all iOS 5 features were ripped off from Android.
Just about the only thing even remotely new is Siri, but it's just a small variation on voice control systems available for Android for a while, and Apple bought that feature externally too.
Looks to me like Apple hasn't "moved on" at all, they are falling behind, further and further.
First, Android 3.2 is a good tablet operating system, regardless of how many units are shipped. But devices like the EEE Transformer have been very successful.
You can tell how much of a threat Android tablets are to Apple by the "thermonuclear war" Apple has been fighting against them. Android tablets would have shipped a lot more if Apple hadn't used dirty tricks to keep devices like the Samsung tablets from market.
Good software for the Kindle Fire already exists: they just need to ship standard Android 3.2 on it. With that, it would be a great device at a great price.
The only reason the Kindle Fire fails as a tablet is because of the effort Amazon invested in messing up the OS.
Germany has elevated rent seeking to a form of government. Germany's quasi-governmental societies, guilds, and "rights organizations" impose vast fees on a wide range of devices that are ostensibly used for copying the content of German artists and then redistribute it to their members. Even German television is based on this principle, forcing people to pay for content many of them don't want and never watch. Of course, the vast majority of the content that is being delivered is either free or foreign. Other parts of German society function the same way: churches don't live off donations, they live off church taxes and general taxes, non-profits are almost exclusively government funded, even political parties and the education of the next generation of party leaders are almost largely funded by the government. And corporations also form very tight "partnerships" with the German government (a kind of proto-fascism).
I think there is something fundamentally wrong with German government and society to tolerate this. And the US should fight such tendencies here. A lot of the push behind more restrictive US copyright laws is really lobbying by large European, and in particular German, publishers.
but then I understand the major data passing mechanisms of OSX and of the GNU software I add
I couldn't care less about "major data passing mechanisms of OS X". I just want the standard software I use to work, without hassles and without problems. You just confirmed yourself that Fink on OS X doesn't do that, which is my point.
You can play this game until the cows come home. It doesn't change the fact that every aspect of the iPad design that Apple has tried to protect is utilitarian, and design patents on utilitarian aspects of devices are not valid.
Also, if you actually take Apple's design patent at face value, it does not depict the iPad: the device it shows is much thicker than the iPad, its bezels is thinner, and its edge and back are different. Apple's design patent is as different from its own iPad as the iPad is from the Samsung.
It doesn't follow in general, but in this case, it looks to me like it does. First, I think there is a good chance that he is mistaken and his software is actually not better; benchmarks for this kind of software are hard, and there are tricky tradeoffs involved. Second, even if it is better, implementing this kind of software is not a lot of work, it is mostly the idea that counts, and given that there seems to be a large and active community in that field, including many grad students and PhDs, chances someone is going to try his idea fairly soon as well.
Don't let the facts -- like the way "rectangular shape" was one of 7 design attributes that Samsung cloned -- get in the way of a good rant.
Most of those attributes are utilitarian, the rest are either trivial or attributes Apple ripped off themselves.
And if Apple wants to go down this road, they are going to be in big trouble themselves, because there are hundreds of attributes that the iPad and iPhone "cloned" from prior devices. Maybe one can't sue Apple over those retroactively anymore, but other manufacturers are now going to file the same kind of stupid patents that Apple has been beating them up with, and they are going to sue Apple over it. Apple is going to be tied up in knots until they stop engaging in this nonsense.
It is reasonable as part of FRAND portfolios to insist on patent cross-licensing. Apple, however, wanted to monopolize the market with their features but still get everybody else's patents licensed to them at a low cost. That is not reasonable. And it doesn't affect other companies, because they have cross-licensed their portfolios. If the same mechanism can be used to end Microsoft's patent trolling, all the better.
Because 1) they are supposed to fully and clearly describe an invention, so testing whether another machine uses a certain invention doesn't leave much grey area, and 2) they're based on international agreements.
Different societies make different choices as to what is patentable, what is obvious, and how long patents should run. That should be encouraged rather than discouraged, so that we at least get some data on how different kind of patent systems works, and to protect the system from the inevitable corruption and rent seeking.
Like now if Samsung and Apple (aka Germany and the other European countries) kill off each other, Google (aka US) maybe chipping in as secondary party getting hurt on the sidelines but not in their cores, parties like Google and of course all other manufacturers see two major competitors gone, opening up a huge market potential for them
Last I checked, both Google and Apple were primarily US companies. Granted, Apple hasn't been doing much for the US economy or US employment, but they are in no danger of disappearing soon because of patent lawsuits (although they will gradually fade as the fad surrounding their products fades).
Samsung's design wasn't the first such design, there were many similar designs before, including other tablets and photo frames.
Furthermore, you're comparing apples and oranges. Either you need to compare product release dates, or you need to compare design patent filing dates. You can't compare Apple's design patent filing with Samsung's product release date and draw any conclusions.
Slashdot Mirror
So, logically, talking on a handheld device shouldn't be banned unless you also ban eating. And the risk from hands free devices is almost certainly substantially lower.
Of course, why not just cover all of these under "distracted driving"? If you swerve or are inattentive, you can get a ticket (with video evidence). If you have an accident while talking on the phone, the presumption is that you're at fault, all other things being equal. Why do we need additional laws?
And a law against cell phone use is going to do that... how? I was almost killed by some bimbo in an SUV playing with her baby. Why not ban babies in cars? I think babies probably are a much bigger distraction than talking using a headset. Ditto for spouses, food, drinks, and makeup. Where is this insanity going to stop?
Furthermore, you can greatly reduce even that risk by taking public transportation: even if a bus or a train collides with a car, usually the passengers on the bus/train are not harmed significantly. You can reduce the risk even further by moving within walking distance of your job and shopping.
I find it arrogant and unacceptable for people to try to impose their personal phobias as taxes and restrictions on the rest of us.
You can have that: move to New York, Boston, Seattle, etc. and you can take your "proper transportation infrastructure" and never need to venture onto the road.
The rest of us will simply continue driving in our unprofessional ways on our unprofessional transportation infrastructure. The fact that we do pretty much doesn't affect you at all as long as you stick to your "professional" ways.
There are a lot of iOS apps that suck when ported to Android. They never pick up in terms of sales, someone just clones the app and develops a better implementation for Android. That's probably why your sales will never pick up.
Android uses Java, iOS uses Objective-C. They are both decades old technology. Android uses Eclipse, iOS uses XCode, both cumbersome and bloated IDEs. Google's Java APIs inherit the usual tedium of Java APIs, but at least you get runtime safety and JIT compilation. Objective-C has slightly nicer APIs and plays nicer with legacy C libraries, but the language is unsafe and dangerous in the usual ways. So, I really don't see much of a reason to prefer one over the other on technical grounds.
In the end, what matters is who owns and controls the platform, and there Android has a clear advantage: it is open source, so no matter how badly Google may screw up in the future, the platform will live on. On the other hand, with iOS, you are subject to whatever arbitrary decisions Apple makes, and they have a long history of screwing their users and their developers.
That's probably more a limitation of Microsoft's linker than of Firefox. Linking, at its heart, is a bit of sorting, filtering, and merging and can be done in fairly modest amounts of memory even for large programs.
Well, hold the presses! What an impressive achievement! A nation that, for practical purposes, borders no other nation than the US, has a wealth of natural resources, and relies for much of its defense, wealth, culture, technology, trade, and security needs on the US. What a beacon of hope to the world! What a shining example of human superiority and triumph of the human intellect and spirit! Let the poor of the world eat maple syrup covered butter tarts like Canadians do and rejoice!
Believe me, we don't want to be mistaken for Canadians either. But we'll both just have to live with geographic realities.
You say that as if the US did something wrong. I don't have a problem with the US flying spy planes over other nations.
The real question is why the drone didn't have a self-destruct. It seems stupid to develop a spy drone without it.
I see: you're still sticking with the failures and the badly designed commercial systems.
You're exhibiting the same dumb checklist mentality that the UNIX vendors were using to try to peddle their overpriced wares last time.
As someone who actually uses a whole range of Android devices, from versions 2.1 to 3.2, I can assure you: these differences don't matter.
"Old program"... as opposed to what? I run large scale numerical codes. I have to compile much of that stuff from source, and it is a bloody pain on OS X.
In what way? Since Android has been released, Apple has constantly been behind in terms of functionality and features. Pretty much all iOS 5 features were ripped off from Android.
Just about the only thing even remotely new is Siri, but it's just a small variation on voice control systems available for Android for a while, and Apple bought that feature externally too.
Looks to me like Apple hasn't "moved on" at all, they are falling behind, further and further.
First, Android 3.2 is a good tablet operating system, regardless of how many units are shipped. But devices like the EEE Transformer have been very successful.
You can tell how much of a threat Android tablets are to Apple by the "thermonuclear war" Apple has been fighting against them. Android tablets would have shipped a lot more if Apple hadn't used dirty tricks to keep devices like the Samsung tablets from market.
I'm pretty sure they know, that's why they designed the UI with books and newspapers in the first two positions.
Good software for the Kindle Fire already exists: they just need to ship standard Android 3.2 on it. With that, it would be a great device at a great price.
The only reason the Kindle Fire fails as a tablet is because of the effort Amazon invested in messing up the OS.
Book reading. And it is quite good for that purpose. It replaces the similarly priced e-ink readers Amazon had before.
All the other functions of the Kindle Fire are secondary and are gravy.
You can get the Acer A100 for $260 and it's a much better device: Android 3.2, two cameras, Bluetooth, standard Android market, etc.
Germany has elevated rent seeking to a form of government. Germany's quasi-governmental societies, guilds, and "rights organizations" impose vast fees on a wide range of devices that are ostensibly used for copying the content of German artists and then redistribute it to their members. Even German television is based on this principle, forcing people to pay for content many of them don't want and never watch. Of course, the vast majority of the content that is being delivered is either free or foreign. Other parts of German society function the same way: churches don't live off donations, they live off church taxes and general taxes, non-profits are almost exclusively government funded, even political parties and the education of the next generation of party leaders are almost largely funded by the government. And corporations also form very tight "partnerships" with the German government (a kind of proto-fascism).
I think there is something fundamentally wrong with German government and society to tolerate this. And the US should fight such tendencies here. A lot of the push behind more restrictive US copyright laws is really lobbying by large European, and in particular German, publishers.
Why put this stuff on YouTube at all? Why not post it to the Internet Archive and other archival sites?
(Of course, false copyright claims should be prosecuted as fraudulent and punished accordingly.)
I couldn't care less about "major data passing mechanisms of OS X". I just want the standard software I use to work, without hassles and without problems. You just confirmed yourself that Fink on OS X doesn't do that, which is my point.
You can play this game until the cows come home. It doesn't change the fact that every aspect of the iPad design that Apple has tried to protect is utilitarian, and design patents on utilitarian aspects of devices are not valid.
Also, if you actually take Apple's design patent at face value, it does not depict the iPad: the device it shows is much thicker than the iPad, its bezels is thinner, and its edge and back are different. Apple's design patent is as different from its own iPad as the iPad is from the Samsung.
It doesn't follow in general, but in this case, it looks to me like it does. First, I think there is a good chance that he is mistaken and his software is actually not better; benchmarks for this kind of software are hard, and there are tricky tradeoffs involved. Second, even if it is better, implementing this kind of software is not a lot of work, it is mostly the idea that counts, and given that there seems to be a large and active community in that field, including many grad students and PhDs, chances someone is going to try his idea fairly soon as well.
Most of those attributes are utilitarian, the rest are either trivial or attributes Apple ripped off themselves.
And if Apple wants to go down this road, they are going to be in big trouble themselves, because there are hundreds of attributes that the iPad and iPhone "cloned" from prior devices. Maybe one can't sue Apple over those retroactively anymore, but other manufacturers are now going to file the same kind of stupid patents that Apple has been beating them up with, and they are going to sue Apple over it. Apple is going to be tied up in knots until they stop engaging in this nonsense.
It is reasonable as part of FRAND portfolios to insist on patent cross-licensing. Apple, however, wanted to monopolize the market with their features but still get everybody else's patents licensed to them at a low cost. That is not reasonable. And it doesn't affect other companies, because they have cross-licensed their portfolios. If the same mechanism can be used to end Microsoft's patent trolling, all the better.
Different societies make different choices as to what is patentable, what is obvious, and how long patents should run. That should be encouraged rather than discouraged, so that we at least get some data on how different kind of patent systems works, and to protect the system from the inevitable corruption and rent seeking.
Last I checked, both Google and Apple were primarily US companies. Granted, Apple hasn't been doing much for the US economy or US employment, but they are in no danger of disappearing soon because of patent lawsuits (although they will gradually fade as the fad surrounding their products fades).
Samsung's design wasn't the first such design, there were many similar designs before, including other tablets and photo frames.
Furthermore, you're comparing apples and oranges. Either you need to compare product release dates, or you need to compare design patent filing dates. You can't compare Apple's design patent filing with Samsung's product release date and draw any conclusions.