Why are they having these random issues that other developers don't seem to be having?
No offense, but unless you can back that up with something other than a statement that starts with "While browsing the Android developer forums it's been my experience that..." I'll take anything you have to say on this subject with a large amount of salt.
Why are they walking users through failed installs instead of fixing the bugs in their installer?
Because they don't have device X with vendor modified version Y of Android on hand to test why the install is failing and until they add that device to their already substantial collection of, say, 100+ Android devices that they support, walking the user through the install is the only way to resolve his gripe.
With all due respect to Saint Google, it's not hard to believe that developing for a fragmented platform like Android involves more effort and cost than developing for iOS or any other platform that's less fragmented than Android has become.
1. That's a typical method of irrigation in the US only in the loosest sense of the word 'typical'. What you've managed to find is a picture of an antique.
The fact remains that in large regions of the USA (and other countries for that matter) ground water is being depleted so aggressively it is causing land subsidence. The symptoms, ground water levels lowered by tens and even hundreds of feet, speak for them selves:
I particularly liked the part about closing down runways at Edwards AF base because of fissures caused by ground water depletion. One should also keep in mind that farmers are far from being the only ones to contribute to this problem. Urban and industrial water wastage also plays a part.
Apple isn't "an electronics maker". They design electronics, buy a lot of Samsung components and have poor Chinese people work 18 hours a day to assemble them.
Apple and every other company that outsourced it's production and assembly to places where they can get lots of cheap labour and can rely upon the local government to ignore corporate abuses and crack down hard with riot police, teargas, water-cannon and gestapoesque security services every the workers decide they have had enough and stage a protest. No matter how you turn it you are supporting worker abuse somewhere every time you go to the supermarket and buy something. Even if you only buy those "Fair trade" politically correct products, the cargo ship that brought those goods to your country was built by abused shipyard workers who work 16 hour per day 7 days a week to churn out ship hull components under totally miserable conditions and is crewed by Russian and Philippine sailors who don't even enjoy the minimum in safe and proper working conditions and it goes on from there.
Now that you mention it, I haven't bought a computer from a brick and mortar store in over 10 years. Then again, I've never been able to buy one off the shelf, or willing to pay 300 bucks for a 50 dollar ram upgrade, so I have always bought the box from one company, and the upgrades from several others. Online since before 2000. I get better service from a website than any electronics store I have ever been in.
I'm the exact opposite, there are just some things I like to hold in my hands, feel and test-drive before I buy them. These are things like mobile phone cases, computer mice, keyboards, tablet computers, laptops... the list goes on. Half the time photographic coverage of an item on a webstore isn't good enough or you simply can't tell what you want to know from a photo. There is nothing more annoying than, say... buying a laptop computer online and finding out afterwards that you can't stand the keyboard layout or buying a Galaxy Tab and finding out after you bought it that every time you rotate the thing you accidentally press the capacitive buttons on the sides of the monitor, dunno about you but that drove me nuts. A tour of the local retail stores can save you quite a bit of hassle.
This is actually very insightful, female dating behavior was based to a large part on having an abundance of potential mates to choose from, they were essentially buyers, whereas men traditionally acted as sellers trying to impress women ( I know I'm oversimplifying). Now with online dating, the market has basically evened out somewhat for men as women are openly competing for mates, thus they have become more like sellers, allowing men to start behaving somewhat more like buyers.
<rant type='male chauvinism'> But men usually had the advantage because traditionally men were earners and women were not. If you read 19th century novels like those by Jane Austen one of the things that strikes you is how utterly obsessed the women are by what a man earns: "I say Emily, look over there, that's Mr. Fimblebottom, I hear he has estates in Essex and is worth £10.000 a year!!" [intensive fan fluttering] Women competed for attention and men had the pick of the litter. The richer you were the better a mate you could pick and if you were really rich and unencumbered by a family urging you to marry for wealth/land/status you could indulge yourself and pick a relatively poor but beautiful woman to be your wife (within certain social class restrictions of course, a duke did not marry a chambermaid although he could set her up in a cottage and love her, treat her and think of her in every way as his wife in all but name and that often happened). Of course women weren't without their weapons, a woman also could bring money into a marriage. Such women could on occasion marry for love and poorer men certainly competed for the attention of such women but generally men had the advantage. The typical Jane Austen heroine seems to be a humble penniless girl who scores a man worth £10.000 a year or more and who into the bargain is dead handsome and loves her unconditionally. In modern times most women have become financially independent and like men they can pick. Modern women can hold out for Mr £10.000 a year who these days is a Rockstar/Moviestar/Millionaire, dead handsome and not influenced by a woman's looks when choosing a mate. Women no longer have to choose between settling for the best they can get or become a penniless spinster like they did in Jane Austen's time. The problem begins when both men and women are holding out for the pick of the litter and it does not help that modern popular culture has made the old time tested custom of compromising between the ideal mate you want and the mate you can realistically get a detestable concept. </rant>
You people need to get it through your thick-headed skulls, you can't compare movies, songs, software, etc. to anything else in the world. Nothing else can be duplicated and distributed as easily, and if someone uses a pirated copy of a movie, song, software, they haven't stolen anything, at worst the original producer has lost out on potential revenue, and even that's debatable.
Yes, precisely, it's like a factory in China manufacturing exact copies of your product. It's not as their activities are harming your business in any way. At worst you have lost out on potential revenue, and maybe you will get an undeserved reputation for lousy product quality but even that is debatable.
No, it's not in good condition, did I mention fragile?
Be specific. Is it a broken display? That's about the only complaint I have ever heard about iPads/iPhones being fragile and quite frankly if one buys a device that expensive and doesn't put it in a proper protective case, a broken screen is one's own fault. The only other complaints I have heard are the occasional flaky button and sometimes they'll stop charging and syncing with a PC but neither of those faults are that unusual with other mobile devices. I know a guy who repairs iPads so if you don't want it I'll join the queue of people who'd be happy to "dispose" of it for you.
Copyrighted music is different because you're actually creating an original sequence of sound, whereas with photography of public domain objects you're capturing something that's already there.
If you're going to mention music, a better analogy would be recording something musical that is already in nature, like the mating calls of birds. Somebody else going into the same forest to record the same birds shouldn't have to be blocked by copyright just because somebody else was there to record it first.
In this case it's not the "capturing of something that's already there" that is the issue. What the judge referred to was the post processing applied by Justin Fielder which in the judge's opinion made that photo:
...a 'photographic work,' as distinct from a simply a photograph...
Nick Houghton tried to create a derived work and he did not derive it enough to satisfy the judge. This does not mean that Justin Fielder now has the exclusive right to sue anybody who makes a grayscale picture with a colored element in it. Somebody could make a picture of a ruined Mosque in Grozy, grayscale it and highlight only the Russian tank driving by in color, for dramatic impact, without infringing on Mr Fielder's London bus picture. And contrary to what somebody else here said, anybody is free to color highlight an item in a grayscale photograph so long as they don't copy the exact setting, composition, lighting and processing of somebody else's photographic work. Mr Fielder has not patented the idea of color highlighting objects in grayscale photos and I'm sure he doesn't pretend to either. Cases like this are always contentious and difficult to judge and it gets even worse when you get artists like Andy Warhol who use copyrighted stuff to create pretty undeniably unique works of art. That falls under 'appropriation' which is a legitimate practice but that has not prevented artists from being sued over works of appropriation art.
I think any threat of copyright retribution on that one expired centuries ago when Snorri Sturluson's great, great grandson Throgrim the Skull Splitter died from a burst bladder after a particularly lively drinking binge with his berserkers in the local mead hall.
My friend gets by with one light bulb in the lounge. He's usually using 1-2kWh per month. I think he's about average for Nairobi suburbia. Some households might have a TV and fridge. And a few more light bulbs on at once.
If electricity is that expensive in Nariobi send him one of those energy efficient spiral shaped CF-bulbs or a LED-bulb. A 20W CF-bulb will give you the same amount of light as a 100W incandescent bulb and the CF-bulbs last longer. If he is using a 60W incandescent bulb now switching wold cut his electricity bill noticeably.
I'm not sure of your point in the first paragraph - are you suggesting that missile boats [wikipedia.org], fast attack craft [wikipedia.org] etc. don't exist, or are ineffective for some reason? As for the rest, are you assuming that the US air force can identify and sink the majority of a 1000+ strong small boat fleet spread around the Strait (and probably elsewhere in the Gulf)? These boats may be hidden amongst tens of thousands of fishing boats, trade ships, and other legitimate vessels, and some of these shipping lanes are the most heavily trafficked in the world. The Strait is very narrow and exposed to a long Iranian coastline, making it difficult to guard. And with missiles that have a range of 100+km Iran could probably hit any vessel in the Strait even from land. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Hormuz [wikipedia.org]
This sounds almost like a rerun of the naval phase of the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915, where an allied fleet tried to force the Dardanelles. That effort was abandoned after the allies lost three battleships sunk and another three severely damaged by mines that were laid by a single Turkish fleet auxiliary. This event happened almost a hundred years ago but it is still relevant. I don't think the US would put a carrier group anywhere where the current Iranian ASW assets could harm it but lesser vessels would have to be sent in to engage any Iranian force blocking the strait. The psychological shock of losing a string of destroyers and, say, an Aegis cruiser would be every bit as heavily felt in the US as the loss of those battleships was felt by the Allies in 1915. Mines are just as effective now as they were in 1915, costal artillery has been replaced by guided missiles that can be fired from highly mobile platforms that are hard to find and destroy if they are properly handled. The Iranians have an awful lot of coastline to hide attack boats and land based launch vehicles. Any attempt to force the Strait of Hormuz if the straits were sealed by the Iranians could prove to be costly both in ships that might be lost as well as in terms of the economic damage that such an Iranian blockade would cause. I'm guessing this pissing contest will be settled without any shooting since the last thing we need in the middle of a double dip recession is a serious disruption of oil deliveries through the Persian Gulf.
But to answer your rhetorical question, the first time we spent $4 for a latte probably wasn't unthinking. We stop thinking after it becomes a habit. And most of us probably don't have a habit of plunking down $1 every morning for an app.
Perhaps I'm an anomaly but the first time somebody asked me to pay $4 for a latte/frappe I noticed and thought the better of it. Then I went around the corner to a small family owned bakery where a little over $5 bought me bread roll with cheese, a king sized cookie and a juice box. Way better value for money. I'll never understand this mentality. Several friends of mine got their computers infected trying to get out of paying $10 for WinZip, Solitaire games or some such cheap ass shareware. In a number of cases data loss ensued. Why anybody would risk data loss and all the hassle that goes with fixing malware problems I'll never understand. Me? I just cough up the $10. For the average coffee drinker that's what? One day without lattes/frappes?
The irony is delicious. It would be as if we had sold Stinger missiles to Mujahedin or something like that.
You didn't sell them, you gave them to the Mujahedin. I will never understand why everybody is so worked up over those damn Stingers. The black arms market is awash with various types of Russian MANPADs ranging from Chinese/Paki/Egyptian made knockoffs of the SA-7/16/18 to cutting edge SA-24s looted from Libyan arsenals and that last missile in particular poses a much more serious danger in the hands of terrorists than a bunch of dusty 1980s vintage Stingers that probably won't even work any more. Any Reagan era Stingers are now time expired (IIRC the shelf life is about 10 years) and if they still exist they have been stored for 20 plus years under suboptimal conditions in mud brick huts in the Pakistani/Afghan hinterland which is not exactly the best way to extend their shelf life.
Likewise, when iOS4 came out, many iPhone 3g owners said it slowed down their devices horribly. I even know a couple people who said they upgraded to the iPhone 4s because iOS5 had slowed down their older iPhones to the point they felt it was worth a new phone.
I had an iPhone 3GS which I upgraded to iOS 5. I didn't even feel any slowdown to speak of until I had re-played Infinity Blade three times and started missing blocks and dodges, although I'm not even sure I can blame that on the iPhone's performance. The only reason I switched to an iPhone 4s was that I ran out of storage space for music and video so I shelled out for a 64GB model
No, no, no! Organic is NOT better for the environment. The manure used to fertilize the crops makes it take twice as much land to produce than food grown with modern techniques. This doubled land use is a disaster for the environment where every acre we can leave in as natural a state as possible matters. If everyone in the world only ate "organic" then all the rain forest (and all other forests) would have to be razed to provide enough land. Yes, organic farms have less groundwater contamination and less pesticide run off but it's a myth that they are better for the environment.
So, the choice is between agribusiness which poisons the ground water and creates dead oceans through fertilizer and pesticide runoff and organic which destroys habitat faster. The truth is that agribusiness and organic only wreck the environment in different ways and you can argue for a long time about which is the lesser evil. Farming of any kind brought us the problem of ecosystems begin devastated by feral species, and with agribusiness we now also have the wonderful new (and according to GM evangelist non existent) problem of GM cross pollination/fertilization causing genetic pollution in plants and animals. Another one of my favorite examples is how pesticides and the spread of parasites caused by careless management is causing the extinction of honeybees. Sounds trivial until you realize that many species of crops actually rely upon those critters for pollination. Without bees there would be very much fewer corps. Agribusiness people can be incredibly stupid. I actually witnessed a fish-farming industry pundit claim that GM salmon would not be a problem because the industry's new pen designs are so secure no salmon would escape... this guy had obviously never witnessed a North Atlantic storm. Then there is the fact that in fish farming it takes between 5-10kg of wild fish to produce 1 kg of farm fish. Perhaps industry pundits could explain to me how this makes ecological sense? (hint: they can't because it doesn't). Sometimes I think that the best thing that could happen to this planet is a second coming of the black plague, a strain with optimal incubation time that is antibiotics resistant, highly airborne and very contagious.
How about this: I am such an old fart that my.vi file is older than you and most of your friends you basement dwelling, tissue-mountain constructing, Twitter-tweeting, Facebook drone.
That policy has probably changed now since Apple has publicly acknowledged the threat and announced a fix, as well as publishing how to remove it. That's their M.O. : nobody gabs until word comes down from the mother-ship.
Mother ship? Word? Primitive voice communication went out a long time ago. These days Steve just remodulates the reality-distortion field slightly. If you were a Mac user you would know this.
Al Queda was and is a loose confederation of Islamic fundamentalist terror groups with a central core in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Killing Bin Laden has huge significance for US Americans due to 9/11 but it will do nothing to kill off Al Qaeda it self. You can think of Al Qaeda like a bot net except there is no administrator you can kill and neutralize the network. Al Qaeda just an umbrella term for a bunch of loosely connected self organizing terrorist cells that benefit from being able to communicate and cooperate with each other but will be relatively unaffected if you remove a few nodes from the network. Since there is no commander-in-chief the best you can hope for is to remove a cell from the network and assassination attacks against the leaders will just temporarily cripple parts of the network. Killing Bin Laden may be satisfying and I won't mourn his death but it also acted as a motivation to his followers to continue his struggle. That's how sainthood and militant religious fundamentalism works. It's kind of a loose/loose situation for the security forces because to the fundies a traditional victory is a success but if they get their ass kicked and you kill a bunch of them they win too because the dead fundies you killed become martyrs and that persuades other fundies to become recruits and replenish the ranks.
Android smartphones have overpowered the iPhone in market share, yet Android tablets barely register in sales versus the iPad. Android tablets are as competitive in most respects against the iPad as Android smartphones are against the iPhone. So why the difference in success?
Having tried both iPads and Android tablets I'd say the reason is simple. Android is a mobile phone OS that was hastily adapted for tablets and it shows. If they ever manage to come up with a good purpose designed tablet version of the Android UI that assessment may change. The Android system settings are also sometimes annoyingly unintuitive. For example, when the mail client told me I needed to approve access permissions before I cold connect to Exchange 2010 it took me about half an hour of clicking about in the system settings pane before I realized thats the wrong place to look. You have to pull down the curtain on the menu bar and click the task item in the list you get there to fix this. Another thing is that while iTunes store definitely contains a whole mess of crappy apps the Android market is even worse.
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Why are they having these random issues that other developers don't seem to be having?
No offense, but unless you can back that up with something other than a statement that starts with "While browsing the Android developer forums it's been my experience that..." I'll take anything you have to say on this subject with a large amount of salt.
Why are they walking users through failed installs instead of fixing the bugs in their installer?
Because they don't have device X with vendor modified version Y of Android on hand to test why the install is failing and until they add that device to their already substantial collection of, say, 100+ Android devices that they support, walking the user through the install is the only way to resolve his gripe.
With all due respect to Saint Google, it's not hard to believe that developing for a fragmented platform like Android involves more effort and cost than developing for iOS or any other platform that's less fragmented than Android has become.
So what are you saying: that republicans and creationists are still at the intellectual level of cavemen ?
Please stop insulting cavemen.
This article is assuming we shouldn't have been boycotting Sony already.
Silly people... why do they need so much time to learn?
Sony are a bunch of vultures, what's there to learn? Everybody knows how vultures behave.
1. That's a typical method of irrigation in the US only in the loosest sense of the word 'typical'. What you've managed to find is a picture of an antique.
The fact remains that in large regions of the USA (and other countries for that matter) ground water is being depleted so aggressively it is causing land subsidence. The symptoms, ground water levels lowered by tens and even hundreds of feet, speak for them selves:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-103-03/
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/gwdepletion.html
I particularly liked the part about closing down runways at Edwards AF base because of fissures caused by ground water depletion. One should also keep in mind that farmers are far from being the only ones to contribute to this problem. Urban and industrial water wastage also plays a part.
Apple isn't "an electronics maker". They design electronics, buy a lot of Samsung components and have poor Chinese people work 18 hours a day to assemble them.
Apple and every other company that outsourced it's production and assembly to places where they can get lots of cheap labour and can rely upon the local government to ignore corporate abuses and crack down hard with riot police, teargas, water-cannon and gestapoesque security services every the workers decide they have had enough and stage a protest. No matter how you turn it you are supporting worker abuse somewhere every time you go to the supermarket and buy something. Even if you only buy those "Fair trade" politically correct products, the cargo ship that brought those goods to your country was built by abused shipyard workers who work 16 hour per day 7 days a week to churn out ship hull components under totally miserable conditions and is crewed by Russian and Philippine sailors who don't even enjoy the minimum in safe and proper working conditions and it goes on from there.
Now that you mention it, I haven't bought a computer from a brick and mortar store in over 10 years. Then again, I've never been able to buy one off the shelf, or willing to pay 300 bucks for a 50 dollar ram upgrade, so I have always bought the box from one company, and the upgrades from several others. Online since before 2000. I get better service from a website than any electronics store I have ever been in.
I'm the exact opposite, there are just some things I like to hold in my hands, feel and test-drive before I buy them. These are things like mobile phone cases, computer mice, keyboards, tablet computers, laptops... the list goes on. Half the time photographic coverage of an item on a webstore isn't good enough or you simply can't tell what you want to know from a photo. There is nothing more annoying than, say... buying a laptop computer online and finding out afterwards that you can't stand the keyboard layout or buying a Galaxy Tab and finding out after you bought it that every time you rotate the thing you accidentally press the capacitive buttons on the sides of the monitor, dunno about you but that drove me nuts. A tour of the local retail stores can save you quite a bit of hassle.
This is actually very insightful, female dating behavior was based to a large part on having an abundance of potential mates to choose from, they were essentially buyers, whereas men traditionally acted as sellers trying to impress women ( I know I'm oversimplifying). Now with online dating, the market has basically evened out somewhat for men as women are openly competing for mates, thus they have become more like sellers, allowing men to start behaving somewhat more like buyers.
<rant type='male chauvinism'>
But men usually had the advantage because traditionally men were earners and women were not. If you read 19th century novels like those by Jane Austen one of the things that strikes you is how utterly obsessed the women are by what a man earns: "I say Emily, look over there, that's Mr. Fimblebottom, I hear he has estates in Essex and is worth £10.000 a year!!" [intensive fan fluttering] Women competed for attention and men had the pick of the litter. The richer you were the better a mate you could pick and if you were really rich and unencumbered by a family urging you to marry for wealth/land/status you could indulge yourself and pick a relatively poor but beautiful woman to be your wife (within certain social class restrictions of course, a duke did not marry a chambermaid although he could set her up in a cottage and love her, treat her and think of her in every way as his wife in all but name and that often happened). Of course women weren't without their weapons, a woman also could bring money into a marriage. Such women could on occasion marry for love and poorer men certainly competed for the attention of such women but generally men had the advantage. The typical Jane Austen heroine seems to be a humble penniless girl who scores a man worth £10.000 a year or more and who into the bargain is dead handsome and loves her unconditionally. In modern times most women have become financially independent and like men they can pick. Modern women can hold out for Mr £10.000 a year who these days is a Rockstar/Moviestar/Millionaire, dead handsome and not influenced by a woman's looks when choosing a mate. Women no longer have to choose between settling for the best they can get or become a penniless spinster like they did in Jane Austen's time. The problem begins when both men and women are holding out for the pick of the litter and it does not help that modern popular culture has made the old time tested custom of compromising between the ideal mate you want and the mate you can realistically get a detestable concept.
</rant>
You people need to get it through your thick-headed skulls, you can't compare movies, songs, software, etc. to anything else in the world. Nothing else can be duplicated and distributed as easily, and if someone uses a pirated copy of a movie, song, software, they haven't stolen anything, at worst the original producer has lost out on potential revenue, and even that's debatable.
Yes, precisely, it's like a factory in China manufacturing exact copies of your product. It's not as their activities are harming your business in any way. At worst you have lost out on potential revenue, and maybe you will get an undeserved reputation for lousy product quality but even that is debatable.
No, it's not in good condition, did I mention fragile?
Be specific. Is it a broken display? That's about the only complaint I have ever heard about iPads/iPhones being fragile and quite frankly if one buys a device that expensive and doesn't put it in a proper protective case, a broken screen is one's own fault. The only other complaints I have heard are the occasional flaky button and sometimes they'll stop charging and syncing with a PC but neither of those faults are that unusual with other mobile devices. I know a guy who repairs iPads so if you don't want it I'll join the queue of people who'd be happy to "dispose" of it for you.
Thank you, Mr. Murdoch. We can always count on you for honest journalism. (/sarcasm)
What are you complaining about... is there anything more honest in the world of journalism than a creatively written summary of a wiretap?
Copyrighted music is different because you're actually creating an original sequence of sound, whereas with photography of public domain objects you're capturing something that's already there.
If you're going to mention music, a better analogy would be recording something musical that is already in nature, like the mating calls of birds. Somebody else going into the same forest to record the same birds shouldn't have to be blocked by copyright just because somebody else was there to record it first.
In this case it's not the "capturing of something that's already there" that is the issue. What the judge referred to was the post processing applied by Justin Fielder which in the judge's opinion made that photo:
...a 'photographic work,' as distinct from a simply a photograph...
Nick Houghton tried to create a derived work and he did not derive it enough to satisfy the judge. This does not mean that Justin Fielder now has the exclusive right to sue anybody who makes a grayscale picture with a colored element in it. Somebody could make a picture of a ruined Mosque in Grozy, grayscale it and highlight only the Russian tank driving by in color, for dramatic impact, without infringing on Mr Fielder's London bus picture. And contrary to what somebody else here said, anybody is free to color highlight an item in a grayscale photograph so long as they don't copy the exact setting, composition, lighting and processing of somebody else's photographic work. Mr Fielder has not patented the idea of color highlighting objects in grayscale photos and I'm sure he doesn't pretend to either. Cases like this are always contentious and difficult to judge and it gets even worse when you get artists like Andy Warhol who use copyrighted stuff to create pretty undeniably unique works of art. That falls under 'appropriation' which is a legitimate practice but that has not prevented artists from being sued over works of appropriation art.
Lord of the Rings is [based off] the Norse Eddas.
I think any threat of copyright retribution on that one expired centuries ago when Snorri Sturluson's great, great grandson Throgrim the Skull Splitter died from a burst bladder after a particularly lively drinking binge with his berserkers in the local mead hall.
Apple makes more money from its smartphone than every other smartphone manufacturer in the world combined.
The top-selling smartphones in the US last quarter were, in order: iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS.
And the tablet market? Let's call it what it is - the iPad market.
Sure, but Android has 100 models where Apple has 3.
If you add them all up it's outselling the iPhone.
You changed the subject. All Android smartphone manufacturers may out sell Apple is not the same as all of them out earning Apple.
Then you'd be an idiot, because WWII largely was Germans and Russians killing each other.
let's not forget the Japanese murdering millions of Chinese.
My friend gets by with one light bulb in the lounge. He's usually using 1-2kWh per month. I think he's about average for Nairobi suburbia. Some households might have a TV and fridge. And a few more light bulbs on at once.
If electricity is that expensive in Nariobi send him one of those energy efficient spiral shaped CF-bulbs or a LED-bulb. A 20W CF-bulb will give you the same amount of light as a 100W incandescent bulb and the CF-bulbs last longer. If he is using a 60W incandescent bulb now switching wold cut his electricity bill noticeably.
I'm not sure of your point in the first paragraph - are you suggesting that missile boats [wikipedia.org], fast attack craft [wikipedia.org] etc. don't exist, or are ineffective for some reason? As for the rest, are you assuming that the US air force can identify and sink the majority of a 1000+ strong small boat fleet spread around the Strait (and probably elsewhere in the Gulf)? These boats may be hidden amongst tens of thousands of fishing boats, trade ships, and other legitimate vessels, and some of these shipping lanes are the most heavily trafficked in the world. The Strait is very narrow and exposed to a long Iranian coastline, making it difficult to guard. And with missiles that have a range of 100+km Iran could probably hit any vessel in the Strait even from land. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Hormuz [wikipedia.org]
This sounds almost like a rerun of the naval phase of the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915, where an allied fleet tried to force the Dardanelles. That effort was abandoned after the allies lost three battleships sunk and another three severely damaged by mines that were laid by a single Turkish fleet auxiliary. This event happened almost a hundred years ago but it is still relevant. I don't think the US would put a carrier group anywhere where the current Iranian ASW assets could harm it but lesser vessels would have to be sent in to engage any Iranian force blocking the strait. The psychological shock of losing a string of destroyers and, say, an Aegis cruiser would be every bit as heavily felt in the US as the loss of those battleships was felt by the Allies in 1915. Mines are just as effective now as they were in 1915, costal artillery has been replaced by guided missiles that can be fired from highly mobile platforms that are hard to find and destroy if they are properly handled. The Iranians have an awful lot of coastline to hide attack boats and land based launch vehicles. Any attempt to force the Strait of Hormuz if the straits were sealed by the Iranians could prove to be costly both in ships that might be lost as well as in terms of the economic damage that such an Iranian blockade would cause. I'm guessing this pissing contest will be settled without any shooting since the last thing we need in the middle of a double dip recession is a serious disruption of oil deliveries through the Persian Gulf.
But to answer your rhetorical question, the first time we spent $4 for a latte probably wasn't unthinking. We stop thinking after it becomes a habit. And most of us probably don't have a habit of plunking down $1 every morning for an app.
Perhaps I'm an anomaly but the first time somebody asked me to pay $4 for a latte/frappe I noticed and thought the better of it. Then I went around the corner to a small family owned bakery where a little over $5 bought me bread roll with cheese, a king sized cookie and a juice box. Way better value for money. I'll never understand this mentality. Several friends of mine got their computers infected trying to get out of paying $10 for WinZip, Solitaire games or some such cheap ass shareware. In a number of cases data loss ensued. Why anybody would risk data loss and all the hassle that goes with fixing malware problems I'll never understand. Me? I just cough up the $10. For the average coffee drinker that's what? One day without lattes/frappes?
The irony is delicious. It would be as if we had sold Stinger missiles to Mujahedin or something like that.
You didn't sell them, you gave them to the Mujahedin. I will never understand why everybody is so worked up over those damn Stingers. The black arms market is awash with various types of Russian MANPADs ranging from Chinese/Paki/Egyptian made knockoffs of the SA-7/16/18 to cutting edge SA-24s looted from Libyan arsenals and that last missile in particular poses a much more serious danger in the hands of terrorists than a bunch of dusty 1980s vintage Stingers that probably won't even work any more. Any Reagan era Stingers are now time expired (IIRC the shelf life is about 10 years) and if they still exist they have been stored for 20 plus years under suboptimal conditions in mud brick huts in the Pakistani/Afghan hinterland which is not exactly the best way to extend their shelf life.
It's an Internet mob, remember? You should be selling them herbal V1agr4 instead.
It's bad enough that these people have network access, don't encourage them to breed.
Likewise, when iOS4 came out, many iPhone 3g owners said it slowed down their devices horribly. I even know a couple people who said they upgraded to the iPhone 4s because iOS5 had slowed down their older iPhones to the point they felt it was worth a new phone.
I had an iPhone 3GS which I upgraded to iOS 5. I didn't even feel any slowdown to speak of until I had re-played Infinity Blade three times and started missing blocks and dodges, although I'm not even sure I can blame that on the iPhone's performance. The only reason I switched to an iPhone 4s was that I ran out of storage space for music and video so I shelled out for a 64GB model
No, no, no! Organic is NOT better for the environment. The manure used to fertilize the crops makes it take twice as much land to produce than food grown with modern techniques. This doubled land use is a disaster for the environment where every acre we can leave in as natural a state as possible matters. If everyone in the world only ate "organic" then all the rain forest (and all other forests) would have to be razed to provide enough land. Yes, organic farms have less groundwater contamination and less pesticide run off but it's a myth that they are better for the environment.
So, the choice is between agribusiness which poisons the ground water and creates dead oceans through fertilizer and pesticide runoff and organic which destroys habitat faster. The truth is that agribusiness and organic only wreck the environment in different ways and you can argue for a long time about which is the lesser evil. Farming of any kind brought us the problem of ecosystems begin devastated by feral species, and with agribusiness we now also have the wonderful new (and according to GM evangelist non existent) problem of GM cross pollination/fertilization causing genetic pollution in plants and animals. Another one of my favorite examples is how pesticides and the spread of parasites caused by careless management is causing the extinction of honeybees. Sounds trivial until you realize that many species of crops actually rely upon those critters for pollination. Without bees there would be very much fewer corps. Agribusiness people can be incredibly stupid. I actually witnessed a fish-farming industry pundit claim that GM salmon would not be a problem because the industry's new pen designs are so secure no salmon would escape... this guy had obviously never witnessed a North Atlantic storm. Then there is the fact that in fish farming it takes between 5-10kg of wild fish to produce 1 kg of farm fish. Perhaps industry pundits could explain to me how this makes ecological sense? (hint: they can't because it doesn't). Sometimes I think that the best thing that could happen to this planet is a second coming of the black plague, a strain with optimal incubation time that is antibiotics resistant, highly airborne and very contagious.
They're so old, their Slashdot IDs are negative.
Negative??? Is that the best you can do?
How about this: I am such an old fart that my .vi file is older than you and most of your friends you basement dwelling, tissue-mountain constructing, Twitter-tweeting, Facebook drone.
That policy has probably changed now since Apple has publicly acknowledged the threat and announced a fix, as well as publishing how to remove it. That's their M.O. : nobody gabs until word comes down from the mother-ship.
Mother ship? Word? Primitive voice communication went out a long time ago. These days Steve just remodulates the reality-distortion field slightly. If you were a Mac user you would know this.
Al Queda was and is a loose confederation of Islamic fundamentalist terror groups with a central core in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Killing Bin Laden has huge significance for US Americans due to 9/11 but it will do nothing to kill off Al Qaeda it self. You can think of Al Qaeda like a bot net except there is no administrator you can kill and neutralize the network. Al Qaeda just an umbrella term for a bunch of loosely connected self organizing terrorist cells that benefit from being able to communicate and cooperate with each other but will be relatively unaffected if you remove a few nodes from the network. Since there is no commander-in-chief the best you can hope for is to remove a cell from the network and assassination attacks against the leaders will just temporarily cripple parts of the network. Killing Bin Laden may be satisfying and I won't mourn his death but it also acted as a motivation to his followers to continue his struggle. That's how sainthood and militant religious fundamentalism works. It's kind of a loose/loose situation for the security forces because to the fundies a traditional victory is a success but if they get their ass kicked and you kill a bunch of them they win too because the dead fundies you killed become martyrs and that persuades other fundies to become recruits and replenish the ranks.
Android smartphones have overpowered the iPhone in market share, yet Android tablets barely register in sales versus the iPad. Android tablets are as competitive in most respects against the iPad as Android smartphones are against the iPhone. So why the difference in success?
Having tried both iPads and Android tablets I'd say the reason is simple. Android is a mobile phone OS that was hastily adapted for tablets and it shows. If they ever manage to come up with a good purpose designed tablet version of the Android UI that assessment may change. The Android system settings are also sometimes annoyingly unintuitive. For example, when the mail client told me I needed to approve access permissions before I cold connect to Exchange 2010 it took me about half an hour of clicking about in the system settings pane before I realized thats the wrong place to look. You have to pull down the curtain on the menu bar and click the task item in the list you get there to fix this. Another thing is that while iTunes store definitely contains a whole mess of crappy apps the Android market is even worse.