They essentially made overt racism illegal, at least in public.
Freedom of speech has nothing to do with public opinion.
Americans are allowed to hold and express wildly unpopular ideas without interference from the government. However, they may find themselves at the mercy of an unrelenting public. (Look up the Westboro Baptist Church for a modern-day example)
One is that Apple has done a good job of setting themselves up as the anti-MS underdog. Well, you get lots of geeks who hate MS. Thus if Apple is anti-MS, they like Apple. They never bother to examine if Apple's tactics are any better than MS's.
I don't purchase computers or operating systems based upon ideology. I choose the best tool for the job, as do most consumers.
Microsoft has historically made a crappy product, while Apple's products over the past decade or so have been technically, ergonomically, and aesthetically superior (and even price-competitive, provided that you fit into the right "niche")
Sometimes I just can't bring myself to be worked up about copyright law. Apple's done some bad things; Microsoft have done some bad things; RMS has done plenty that I disagree with. I suppose that BSD can claim the greatest ideological "purity" as the license can be summarized as:
"Here's some code. Do whatever the hell you want with it. Just don't sue us, and include a copy of this message if you decide to redistribute"
Why would GPS service be better on Verizon's network?
I won't contest that Verizon offers better coverage in many parts of the country, but the GPS network is mostly separate from the cell network. I honestly haven't heard this listed as a common complaint among iPhone users.
Also be warned that Verizon's customer support is among the worst on the planet, that Android's app ecosystem frankly sucks (and the platform isn't particularly pleasant to develop for), and that Verizon have continued their time-honored tradition of crippling their phones with the Droid (app storage limited to 256mb).
I'm not a huge fan of Apple or the iPhone. I just happen to really, really despise the effects that Verizon's business practices have on me as a consumer -- I've been with them for 4 years, and will switch the moment that another provider can provide both a good smartphone, and decent coverage around my house. The Droid is certainly a legitimate competitor to the iPhone, although it does have a few very notable shortcomings that have to be considered.
The Palm Pre also comes tantalizingly close to hitting the mark, although I fear that the Pre's hardware issues, and the tremendous (and possibly unjustified) hype surrounding Android may doom WebOS as a platform. There's simply not room for 3 competing mobile platforms.
Don't forget the stuff that doesn't reach the charts. This past decade has produced some absolutely incredible indie rock, as well as some legitimately good cinema. Although these titles might not have grossed hundreds of millions, they have often produced healthy profits for their makers.
Although the independent music scene seems to have fallen into a rut over the past year or two, as various motifs seem to be competing to become "the next big thing," there's some truly incredible stuff to be found.
You could easily test that hypothesis by comparing educational outcomes in states with teachers unions to those without.
In most cases, non-union states pay their teachers like sh*t, and educational outcomes are somewhat poorer.
I'm not going to argue that unions are perfect in their current form -- they can and often do start to act in their own interests rather than those of their members. In other cases (ie. the autoworkers) unions can become too powerful, and force their parent industry out of business.
However, there's plenty of evidence to show that teachers do have a legitimate need for protection. If the elderly taxpayers in my town had their way, teachers would be paid the same as the janitors (another pitfall of funding education at the local level).
It's funny how each thread on this discussion points to a single (and different) hot-button political issue as the cause of our educational failings. Can we maybe agree that the problem isn't quite so simple?
Single Window Mode isn't the answer. Photoshop on Mac OS doesn't use a single window interface (in fact, no Macintosh-native apps that I'm aware of have *ever* conformed to this paradigm since the birth of the platform in the 1980s)
Linux handles windows in a vaguely similar manner to MacOS... the way in which the GIMP handles windows makes reasonable enough sense in the context of the platform.
Pixelmator manages to have a successful UI, despite not copying Photoshop entirely.
Glenn Beck is not the problem; he merely is a symptom of it.
That said, Beck and his Fox News colleagues are indeed pouring gas on the fire. Other networks are helping by providing coverage to their non-stories. (The vaccine "controversy" being one such non-story that is touted by all networks, believed by liberals and conservatives alike, and has absolutely zero scientific evidence to back it up)
The problem here is with the very definition of what a corporation is. Corporations are simply companies owned by a great many human individuals. If legislation as you propose is enacted, we'll simply begin to see Steve Jobs making donations on Apple's behalf.*
What about privately owned companies? There are some huge companies that wouldn't be classified as corporations -- the largest have revenues over $100bn annually. Some of these companies regularly contract for the government (Bechtel) while others receive considerable subsidies (GMAC, Chrysler, HCA).
Also consider that corporations are aggregate representations of their employees and shareholders, which are (in theory) regular, average citizens. Granted, wealthy shareholders are overrepresented, although this does not necessarily give the corporation any more or less right to have its voice heard in congress. In fact, I would argue that corporations that employ tons of workers, or are engaged in cutting-edge research need to be heard by the government.
I'll concede that much corporate lobbying is categorically evil, although there needs to be a system by which legitimate and beneficial interests can be represented. Also note that there's a rather slippery slope by which any corporate lobbying regulations would likely apply to unions and nonprofits as well.
As long as you're traveling at the same speed and direction as the bulletlike flecks, you don't have to worry about damage. Given that space is a frictionless environment, it's actually fairly easy to accomplish this. We do it every time we dock with the ISS.
Cringley seems to be suggesting traveling slightly slower, as to absorb some kinetic energy in the impact, while preserving the integrity of the net. This sounds pretty cool in theory, although there are a few problems in practice, such as tracking all the tiny bits of debris, having enough fuel to maneuver, and ensuring that you don't get caught between two pieces of junk traveling in opposite directions.
It's a difficult problem to be sure, but I wouldn't write it off entirely.
As an alternate proposal, would it make sense to put huge blocks of aerogel (or a similar substance) into orbit? Junk that strikes the blocks would either get caught inside, or pass straight through (but lose some kinetic energy in the process, leading to its gradual orbital decay or capture). Aerogel itself has a low enough density that loose chunks of it would be relatively harmless to passing spacecraft.
You can get there from a basic Ubuntu install with a few extra steps. I used it on an old 450Mhz Apple G4 with less than 1gb of RAM a year or two ago, and it ran beautifully, where any vaguely recent version of Mac OS or GNOME used far too much memory to be usable.
Amazingly, Xfce's compositor worked flawlessly, and added a small speed boost, while making things very pretty. Xfce really is the perfect compromise between usability, features, and aesthetics. It doesn't get nearly enough credit in the open source community, as it is truly fantastic.
Also, if you're a part of the 'slow computer' demographic that Xfce targets, you probably don't want to be running Gentoo unless you have 2 weeks to spare, and never plan to install anything.
If you read more of Tufte's work, you'll find that he largely concurs with you. If you're making a vaguely important presentation to more than 3 or 4 people, it helps to have an outline of that presentation written down somewhere for the benefit of the audience.
However, printouts of powerpoint slides are a patently bad way of doing this. Powerpoint slides rarely provide an acceptable level of detail, are spread across dozens of slides (constrained only by the amount of information you can read off a screen at a distance, which is completely illogical for printed notes). Slides are nice for presenting an outline, although you could do the exact same thing with a chalkboard.
On the other hand, detailed lecture notes are almost always appreciated. Even just a page or two to comlpiment an hour-long lecture can be phenomenally helpful, especially when there is no printed reference that nicely accompanies the lecture. Tufte used to reference the Wall Street Journal (back when it was in a full broadsheet format) to prove this point -- the amount of text and information contained in a single page would require several hundred powerpoint slides to reproduce. If you've got a lot of data to present, print it out.
Obviously, you don't want to inundate your audience with too much data and information. However, a properly written handout is 100x more helpful than any slides ever will be.
Also, when was the last time you tried to visit Facebook and it was down? They're doing quite well for people who need to stop and actually think about their "implimentation".
You bring up an excellent point. I've been using Facebook since shortly after its launch in 2004, and can't remember any downtime over the course of its (very impressive) growth.
I don't know of any other site with a track record like that. Even GMail has had a few (fairly severe) outages over its history.
So in other words, they left every single user of the language to do it, over and over again, because it seemed like a lot of work for the team to do well, once. Sorry, but that just doesn't cut it.
Um. Did you read the text you just quoted? They didn't say anything of the sort!
To paraphrse: Go is still a work in progress. It is our opinion that exceptions are computationally inefficient, and interfere with concurrent programming. If we implement something similar, we want to do it right the first time around. We are currently considering various methods of accomplishing this, as well as the impact of not implementing it at all.
This, to me, sounds like an excellent way to design a programming language. Of course, there is going to be some backlash against any language that questions C's status as the "one true language," although most of the items in Go's feature list seem like they should have blindingly obvious in hindsight.
Also, consider that C++ doesn't implement strings, and leaves the programmer to do it himself. STRINGS!
(Go, by comparison acknowledges that a single, good string implementation will work for 99.99999% of programmers, while also doing nice things such as supporting UTF-8 out of the box)
If a plane can be brought down by a weak 2.4Ghz transmission, we have other *much* more serious issues to consider.
The planes should be tested against the most powerful transmission equipment that somebody could possibly smuggle on board the aircraft, not the other way around. RF shielding isn't exactly rocket science, and one would hope that any critical circuitry would already be shielded, given the crazy electromagnetic stuff that happens in the upper atmosphere where the planes happen to spend most of their time.
It's not so much the incompatibilities (although support for non x86-32 platforms has always been very poor on Linux), but the inefficiencies. There's *no* reason for a 320x240 web video to bring a modern system to its knees (GPU acceleration or not).
Even VLC's somewhat buggy FLV implementation plays flash videos with 1/10 the CPU cycles that the flash player does.
Flash's performance is borderline acceptable on Windows, although the mac version (PPC especially!) is appallingly bad.
(I was specifically referring to abortion-related procedures, which are not covered under the bill that passed the House, which conservatives are viewing as an important step toward overturning Roe v. Wade.)
I'll agree that Men's health issues certainly do need to be discussed more than they currently are, particularly because (like Breast cancer), prostate and testicular cancer are highly treatable when detected early.
Of course, part of this likely has to do with the typical man's attitude against talking about "stuff down there."
Contrast to Verizon, who are generally rather good at moving bits around, but have absolutely no idea about how to interact with their customers. I'm pretty sure Douglas Adams' description of the vogons is a good match for how customer service at Verizon works. It's simply horrendous.
Back when I used AT&T, their network was awful, but they were always absolute pros to deal with in person. In fact, I had an easier time cancelling my AT&T account than I did activating my Verizon account.
Since switching to Verizon 4 years ago, I've been overbilled about every 1 out of 4 months, have waited on hold for countless hours in an attempt to have this rectified, and have found their in-store support to be even more terrible.
Yesterday, I went into one of their stores to have my phone's firmware flashed updated, and to take a peek at their new Android phones. The firmware that my phone shipped with is notoriously buggy, and Verizon/LG finally owned up, and shipped a new version of the firmware, but only allowed upgrades to be done in-store. The tech in the store confirmed that there were numerous problems with my version of the firmware, but that they also end up bricking most of the phones that they upgrade, and that I'd be charged $100 and lose my contacts if they broke my phone.
Frustrated and angry, I took my phone back, shared a few expletives with the manager, and went to the sales portion of the store, cash in hand, ready to buy one of the Android phones they had on display. When I got there, I found that (despite extensive advertising all around the store), none of the sales reps knew anything about the phone, and that the only unit they were permitted to unbox as a display unit was already broken.
All of the sudden, AT&T's shitty network, and Apple's app screening policies don't seem all that bad.
Additionally, the insurance industry itselfpublished a study (pretty much shooting itself in the foot in the process) showing that the opportunity costs of not passing healthcare reform would greatly exceed that $1.2T figure.
I'm not particularly happy about the bill in its current form (little funding for women's health, too many remain uninsured), but it's a bloody huge step in the right direction, and hopefully one of many.
With a little luck, hopefully the legislative environment will remain conducive to working the kinks out of the system. It seems as though a series of small steps is much more palatable to the American people and government.
Personally, this debate hasn't been about helping the uninsured, universal coverage, or the public option. Frankly, all three of those things got trashed by the legislature. On the other hand, spiraling costs and declining quality of care are huge issues that need to be addressed, and effect a majority of the population. I'm a bit upset that these aspects haven't been covered by the media. The rationalization of malpractice litigation in particular has barely received any coverage, despite being the darling of the conservatives, as well as a great many democrats.
As others have mentioned here, the accuracy of the GPS isn't even a factor in this case. Even if the GPS data is 100% accurate, it is still consistent with the data collected from the radar gun thanks to the painfully long sampling interval.
If the device reported a 45mph average over a 15 second intervals (as opposed to 30), one could possibly make the argument that the officer's claim is not consistent with the capabilities of the car (or any remotely sane driving practice for that matter), the scenario described by the attorney is completely plausible.
I'm very glad the kid got to defend himself in court. However, in the end, the math didn't bear him out.
I've heard this criticism (or something fairly similar) levied against virtually every CMS out there.
As an honest question: Are there any CMSes that buck this trend, or at the very least stand out from the crowd?
There's no doubt that things have greatly improved from 5 years ago, although it seems as though no clear leader has emerged as "the state of the art." Wordpress and Drupal seem to have the largest developer communities, although even their own users seem to view the systems as being somehow flawed.
1) It used to be much, much better. Whatever Apple's doing to incorporate new data is having an adverse effect on the quality of the results.
2) It doesn't work particularly well with large libraries. When I upgraded my hard drive, and merged my "archival" collection with the "everyday" music I carry around with me, I found that the quality of the genius results seems to have deteriorated, even though it doesn't necessarily choose any songs from the huge pile of jazz and classical that I added.
3) Genius seems to ignore album tags. If I have two copies of the same song (as happens sometimes, as I like collecting live recordings and radio sessions), Genius seems to pick whichever song is alphabetically first. This can be annoying, as it prevents certain songs from *ever* appearing.
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Racism won't be truly a thing of the past until we can make fun of black and white politicians alike.
Michelle Obama is not a politician. She's married to one.
They essentially made overt racism illegal, at least in public.
Freedom of speech has nothing to do with public opinion.
Americans are allowed to hold and express wildly unpopular ideas without interference from the government. However, they may find themselves at the mercy of an unrelenting public. (Look up the Westboro Baptist Church for a modern-day example)
The DOT would probably have a thing or two to say, given that the engine would probably tear itself loose the moment you stepped on the gas.
(Actually, selling cars in the US is apparently a regulatory nightmare, given the extensive emissions and safety testing each vehicle must go through)
And let me tell you. It's been an absolute disaster for the company.
One is that Apple has done a good job of setting themselves up as the anti-MS underdog. Well, you get lots of geeks who hate MS. Thus if Apple is anti-MS, they like Apple. They never bother to examine if Apple's tactics are any better than MS's.
I don't purchase computers or operating systems based upon ideology. I choose the best tool for the job, as do most consumers.
Microsoft has historically made a crappy product, while Apple's products over the past decade or so have been technically, ergonomically, and aesthetically superior (and even price-competitive, provided that you fit into the right "niche")
Sometimes I just can't bring myself to be worked up about copyright law. Apple's done some bad things; Microsoft have done some bad things; RMS has done plenty that I disagree with. I suppose that BSD can claim the greatest ideological "purity" as the license can be summarized as:
"Here's some code. Do whatever the hell you want with it. Just don't sue us, and include a copy of this message if you decide to redistribute"
In truth, the actual license isn't much longer.
Why would GPS service be better on Verizon's network?
I won't contest that Verizon offers better coverage in many parts of the country, but the GPS network is mostly separate from the cell network. I honestly haven't heard this listed as a common complaint among iPhone users.
Also be warned that Verizon's customer support is among the worst on the planet, that Android's app ecosystem frankly sucks (and the platform isn't particularly pleasant to develop for), and that Verizon have continued their time-honored tradition of crippling their phones with the Droid (app storage limited to 256mb).
I'm not a huge fan of Apple or the iPhone. I just happen to really, really despise the effects that Verizon's business practices have on me as a consumer -- I've been with them for 4 years, and will switch the moment that another provider can provide both a good smartphone, and decent coverage around my house. The Droid is certainly a legitimate competitor to the iPhone, although it does have a few very notable shortcomings that have to be considered.
The Palm Pre also comes tantalizingly close to hitting the mark, although I fear that the Pre's hardware issues, and the tremendous (and possibly unjustified) hype surrounding Android may doom WebOS as a platform. There's simply not room for 3 competing mobile platforms.
Don't forget the stuff that doesn't reach the charts. This past decade has produced some absolutely incredible indie rock, as well as some legitimately good cinema. Although these titles might not have grossed hundreds of millions, they have often produced healthy profits for their makers.
Although the independent music scene seems to have fallen into a rut over the past year or two, as various motifs seem to be competing to become "the next big thing," there's some truly incredible stuff to be found.
You could easily test that hypothesis by comparing educational outcomes in states with teachers unions to those without.
In most cases, non-union states pay their teachers like sh*t, and educational outcomes are somewhat poorer.
I'm not going to argue that unions are perfect in their current form -- they can and often do start to act in their own interests rather than those of their members. In other cases (ie. the autoworkers) unions can become too powerful, and force their parent industry out of business.
However, there's plenty of evidence to show that teachers do have a legitimate need for protection. If the elderly taxpayers in my town had their way, teachers would be paid the same as the janitors (another pitfall of funding education at the local level).
It's funny how each thread on this discussion points to a single (and different) hot-button political issue as the cause of our educational failings. Can we maybe agree that the problem isn't quite so simple?
Single Window Mode isn't the answer. Photoshop on Mac OS doesn't use a single window interface (in fact, no Macintosh-native apps that I'm aware of have *ever* conformed to this paradigm since the birth of the platform in the 1980s)
Linux handles windows in a vaguely similar manner to MacOS... the way in which the GIMP handles windows makes reasonable enough sense in the context of the platform.
Pixelmator manages to have a successful UI, despite not copying Photoshop entirely.
Glenn Beck is not the problem; he merely is a symptom of it.
That said, Beck and his Fox News colleagues are indeed pouring gas on the fire. Other networks are helping by providing coverage to their non-stories. (The vaccine "controversy" being one such non-story that is touted by all networks, believed by liberals and conservatives alike, and has absolutely zero scientific evidence to back it up)
The problem here is with the very definition of what a corporation is. Corporations are simply companies owned by a great many human individuals. If legislation as you propose is enacted, we'll simply begin to see Steve Jobs making donations on Apple's behalf.*
What about privately owned companies? There are some huge companies that wouldn't be classified as corporations -- the largest have revenues over $100bn annually. Some of these companies regularly contract for the government (Bechtel) while others receive considerable subsidies (GMAC, Chrysler, HCA).
Also consider that corporations are aggregate representations of their employees and shareholders, which are (in theory) regular, average citizens. Granted, wealthy shareholders are overrepresented, although this does not necessarily give the corporation any more or less right to have its voice heard in congress. In fact, I would argue that corporations that employ tons of workers, or are engaged in cutting-edge research need to be heard by the government.
I'll concede that much corporate lobbying is categorically evil, although there needs to be a system by which legitimate and beneficial interests can be represented. Also note that there's a rather slippery slope by which any corporate lobbying regulations would likely apply to unions and nonprofits as well.
*Nothing against Steve. Just a random example.
As long as you're traveling at the same speed and direction as the bulletlike flecks, you don't have to worry about damage. Given that space is a frictionless environment, it's actually fairly easy to accomplish this. We do it every time we dock with the ISS.
Cringley seems to be suggesting traveling slightly slower, as to absorb some kinetic energy in the impact, while preserving the integrity of the net. This sounds pretty cool in theory, although there are a few problems in practice, such as tracking all the tiny bits of debris, having enough fuel to maneuver, and ensuring that you don't get caught between two pieces of junk traveling in opposite directions.
It's a difficult problem to be sure, but I wouldn't write it off entirely.
As an alternate proposal, would it make sense to put huge blocks of aerogel (or a similar substance) into orbit? Junk that strikes the blocks would either get caught inside, or pass straight through (but lose some kinetic energy in the process, leading to its gradual orbital decay or capture). Aerogel itself has a low enough density that loose chunks of it would be relatively harmless to passing spacecraft.
Alternatively, install Xubuntu.
You can get there from a basic Ubuntu install with a few extra steps. I used it on an old 450Mhz Apple G4 with less than 1gb of RAM a year or two ago, and it ran beautifully, where any vaguely recent version of Mac OS or GNOME used far too much memory to be usable.
Amazingly, Xfce's compositor worked flawlessly, and added a small speed boost, while making things very pretty. Xfce really is the perfect compromise between usability, features, and aesthetics. It doesn't get nearly enough credit in the open source community, as it is truly fantastic.
Also, if you're a part of the 'slow computer' demographic that Xfce targets, you probably don't want to be running Gentoo unless you have 2 weeks to spare, and never plan to install anything.
If you read more of Tufte's work, you'll find that he largely concurs with you. If you're making a vaguely important presentation to more than 3 or 4 people, it helps to have an outline of that presentation written down somewhere for the benefit of the audience.
However, printouts of powerpoint slides are a patently bad way of doing this. Powerpoint slides rarely provide an acceptable level of detail, are spread across dozens of slides (constrained only by the amount of information you can read off a screen at a distance, which is completely illogical for printed notes). Slides are nice for presenting an outline, although you could do the exact same thing with a chalkboard.
On the other hand, detailed lecture notes are almost always appreciated. Even just a page or two to comlpiment an hour-long lecture can be phenomenally helpful, especially when there is no printed reference that nicely accompanies the lecture. Tufte used to reference the Wall Street Journal (back when it was in a full broadsheet format) to prove this point -- the amount of text and information contained in a single page would require several hundred powerpoint slides to reproduce. If you've got a lot of data to present, print it out.
Obviously, you don't want to inundate your audience with too much data and information. However, a properly written handout is 100x more helpful than any slides ever will be.
Also, when was the last time you tried to visit Facebook and it was down? They're doing quite well for people who need to stop and actually think about their "implimentation".
You bring up an excellent point. I've been using Facebook since shortly after its launch in 2004, and can't remember any downtime over the course of its (very impressive) growth.
I don't know of any other site with a track record like that. Even GMail has had a few (fairly severe) outages over its history.
So in other words, they left every single user of the language to do it, over and over again, because it seemed like a lot of work for the team to do well, once. Sorry, but that just doesn't cut it.
Um. Did you read the text you just quoted? They didn't say anything of the sort!
To paraphrse: Go is still a work in progress. It is our opinion that exceptions are computationally inefficient, and interfere with concurrent programming. If we implement something similar, we want to do it right the first time around. We are currently considering various methods of accomplishing this, as well as the impact of not implementing it at all.
This, to me, sounds like an excellent way to design a programming language. Of course, there is going to be some backlash against any language that questions C's status as the "one true language," although most of the items in Go's feature list seem like they should have blindingly obvious in hindsight.
Also, consider that C++ doesn't implement strings, and leaves the programmer to do it himself. STRINGS!
(Go, by comparison acknowledges that a single, good string implementation will work for 99.99999% of programmers, while also doing nice things such as supporting UTF-8 out of the box)
If a plane can be brought down by a weak 2.4Ghz transmission, we have other *much* more serious issues to consider.
The planes should be tested against the most powerful transmission equipment that somebody could possibly smuggle on board the aircraft, not the other way around. RF shielding isn't exactly rocket science, and one would hope that any critical circuitry would already be shielded, given the crazy electromagnetic stuff that happens in the upper atmosphere where the planes happen to spend most of their time.
It's not so much the incompatibilities (although support for non x86-32 platforms has always been very poor on Linux), but the inefficiencies. There's *no* reason for a 320x240 web video to bring a modern system to its knees (GPU acceleration or not).
Even VLC's somewhat buggy FLV implementation plays flash videos with 1/10 the CPU cycles that the flash player does.
Flash's performance is borderline acceptable on Windows, although the mac version (PPC especially!) is appallingly bad.
I'm not even touching that can of worms.
(I was specifically referring to abortion-related procedures, which are not covered under the bill that passed the House, which conservatives are viewing as an important step toward overturning Roe v. Wade.)
I'll agree that Men's health issues certainly do need to be discussed more than they currently are, particularly because (like Breast cancer), prostate and testicular cancer are highly treatable when detected early.
Of course, part of this likely has to do with the typical man's attitude against talking about "stuff down there."
Contrast to Verizon, who are generally rather good at moving bits around, but have absolutely no idea about how to interact with their customers. I'm pretty sure Douglas Adams' description of the vogons is a good match for how customer service at Verizon works. It's simply horrendous.
Back when I used AT&T, their network was awful, but they were always absolute pros to deal with in person. In fact, I had an easier time cancelling my AT&T account than I did activating my Verizon account.
Since switching to Verizon 4 years ago, I've been overbilled about every 1 out of 4 months, have waited on hold for countless hours in an attempt to have this rectified, and have found their in-store support to be even more terrible.
Yesterday, I went into one of their stores to have my phone's firmware flashed updated, and to take a peek at their new Android phones. The firmware that my phone shipped with is notoriously buggy, and Verizon/LG finally owned up, and shipped a new version of the firmware, but only allowed upgrades to be done in-store. The tech in the store confirmed that there were numerous problems with my version of the firmware, but that they also end up bricking most of the phones that they upgrade, and that I'd be charged $100 and lose my contacts if they broke my phone.
Frustrated and angry, I took my phone back, shared a few expletives with the manager, and went to the sales portion of the store, cash in hand, ready to buy one of the Android phones they had on display. When I got there, I found that (despite extensive advertising all around the store), none of the sales reps knew anything about the phone, and that the only unit they were permitted to unbox as a display unit was already broken.
All of the sudden, AT&T's shitty network, and Apple's app screening policies don't seem all that bad.
Additionally, the insurance industry itself published a study (pretty much shooting itself in the foot in the process) showing that the opportunity costs of not passing healthcare reform would greatly exceed that $1.2T figure.
I'm not particularly happy about the bill in its current form (little funding for women's health, too many remain uninsured), but it's a bloody huge step in the right direction, and hopefully one of many.
With a little luck, hopefully the legislative environment will remain conducive to working the kinks out of the system. It seems as though a series of small steps is much more palatable to the American people and government.
Personally, this debate hasn't been about helping the uninsured, universal coverage, or the public option. Frankly, all three of those things got trashed by the legislature. On the other hand, spiraling costs and declining quality of care are huge issues that need to be addressed, and effect a majority of the population. I'm a bit upset that these aspects haven't been covered by the media. The rationalization of malpractice litigation in particular has barely received any coverage, despite being the darling of the conservatives, as well as a great many democrats.
As others have mentioned here, the accuracy of the GPS isn't even a factor in this case. Even if the GPS data is 100% accurate, it is still consistent with the data collected from the radar gun thanks to the painfully long sampling interval.
If the device reported a 45mph average over a 15 second intervals (as opposed to 30), one could possibly make the argument that the officer's claim is not consistent with the capabilities of the car (or any remotely sane driving practice for that matter), the scenario described by the attorney is completely plausible.
I'm very glad the kid got to defend himself in court. However, in the end, the math didn't bear him out.
I've heard this criticism (or something fairly similar) levied against virtually every CMS out there.
As an honest question: Are there any CMSes that buck this trend, or at the very least stand out from the crowd?
There's no doubt that things have greatly improved from 5 years ago, although it seems as though no clear leader has emerged as "the state of the art." Wordpress and Drupal seem to have the largest developer communities, although even their own users seem to view the systems as being somehow flawed.
I've made three observations with Genius:
1) It used to be much, much better. Whatever Apple's doing to incorporate new data is having an adverse effect on the quality of the results.
2) It doesn't work particularly well with large libraries. When I upgraded my hard drive, and merged my "archival" collection with the "everyday" music I carry around with me, I found that the quality of the genius results seems to have deteriorated, even though it doesn't necessarily choose any songs from the huge pile of jazz and classical that I added.
3) Genius seems to ignore album tags. If I have two copies of the same song (as happens sometimes, as I like collecting live recordings and radio sessions), Genius seems to pick whichever song is alphabetically first. This can be annoying, as it prevents certain songs from *ever* appearing.