The Raptor has three internal weapons bays: a large bay on the bottom of the fuselage, and two smaller bays on the sides of the fuselage, aft of the engine intakes.[140] It can carry six medium range missiles in the center bay and one short–range missile in each side bay;[141] Four of the medium range missiles can be replaced with two bomb racks that can each carry one medium-size or four smaller bombs.
All true but the F-22 still wasted as a bomb truck. A couple of dozen of them would be of much more use stationed in Poland an Romania on a 'good will mission' along with a simlar number of Typhoons and Rafales to remind the Russians of what's going to buttfuck their air force if they make a play for Kiev. If you want to flatten ISIS in Syria take a look at what the French did in Mali. The frogs used liberal numbers of drones and Breguet Atlantic maratime patrol aircraft loaded to capacity with laser guided bombs to loiter over the battle field and zap anything that moved. Then they mopped up the immobilized islamists with ground forces. The US counterpart would be B-52s on 12 hour loiter missions with bomb bays full of JDAMs supported by drones. The Armée de l'Aire used Mirage 2Ks and F.1s in Mali, not exactly the latest and best in combat aircraft, so if fast movers are needed F-18s, F-15s and F-16s are plenty good enough to hammer ISIS. The real problem in Syria is that you can only do so much with air forces, you need ground troops. The only ground forces in the region that can be turned into something we in the West would recognize as a proper army in a short amount of time are the Kurds and you can't build their forces up without pissing off practically everybody from Iran through Iraq to Turkey (I'm pretty sure nobody gives a shit what Assad thinks except Putin) becasue they are all scared shitless of an independent Kurdistan.
I've seen people using a phone which looks around the size of my Nexus 7.
And using it as a phone almost looks like a sight-gag.
Kind of like when I got my first-gen iPad and a friend held it up to his head and started saying "can you hear me now?".
Some of these phones don't look like they'd be either easy to carry around, or actually use as a phone. Because it's like holding a paperback novel up to your head.
When I first bought my iPhone, what I wanted to do with it was things like browsing, rudimentary word processing, games, reading e-books whenever I was in no mood to drag a laptop with me. Today we may piss and moan about how small the iPhone 4/5 displays are but keep in mind that back when the iPhone first came out it had a huge display compared to most of the competition. The iPhone still turned out to be too small for doing a lot of what I wanted it to do. So I bought an iPad only to find that while a tablet does the aforementioned things pretty well it is still no laptop replacement and even if an iPad was capable of making phone calls a 10 inch tablet is simply to big. I wasn't a phablet fan when those things first hit the market and it took me a long time to warm up to the idea simply because of what you point out, the things are too big for a phone and to small for a tablet. But the more I think about it the more I like the idea, it seems to be a fair compromise. Phablets are big enough to do most of what I originally expected to be able to do with the iPhone but small enough to easily carry in my pocket when I leave the laptop at home. Yes phablets are big for a phone but I can work around that, use a combination bluetooth headset/headphones, carry the phone in my breast pocket rather than in my trouser pocket etc... It's not an unsolvable problem and best of all there is one fewer expensive device to drag around and that needs to be replaced every four or five years so I'm buying an iPhone 6 Plus. If I still want an iPad for reading e-books etc. I'll buy a cheap used one when my current model gives up it's ghost. All my real work will be done on a laptop (MacBook if you didn't guess already) and that isn't likely to change any time soon.
I would say that most of the people I know use iPhones. I have never heard any one of those iPhone users judging an Android phone user as an inferior person, less successful, or not as hip. I have, however, consistently hear all the usual judgements from Android users against iPhones users: lemmings, idiots with too much money, Steve Jobs worshippers, etc.
That is true for the most part and going out on a limb here, the most obnoxiously judgemental computer users I meet are usualy Linux geeks. I have met very, very few OS X or Windows users who go out of their way to heap scorn on Linux users the way some Linux do about Windows and Mac users.
Which is why boasting that Android is outselling iPhones is a bit like pointing out that the entire rest of the car industry is outselling BMW and therefore BMW must suck.
I love it on my iPhone 4S. I can't use ApplePay so I may upgrade to a six, but honestly, my nearly three year old 4S works great and has great battery life. I haven't noticed really anything negative. In fact, it prompted google to upgrade their bad Google Voice app, so that in and of itself is a plus. FaceTime audio is also pretty great.
Ditto, iPhone 4S, iPad 3 no issues so far and only the usual gripe: This is iOS 8 and they still haven't put a collapsable menu in the little 'add bookmark' wizard in Safari.
In UK he would be in jail until he gives the passcode to the police
Yeah, but I think he figured the punishment for denying the cops access was preferable to what he would have had to suffer if the cops had gotten at the content of that hard drive and they couldn't lock him up indefinitely for refusing to decrypt his hard drive. At least not in a modern European democracy.
Standard data forensics procedure is to write-protect any storage device which contains evidence, copy it bit-for-bit, and do all the decrypting and data analysis from the copy. The 10-try limit may protect your data from a random thief who lifts your phone, but the only way it's going to protect you from the government or any other technically-capable hacker is if Apple baked the limit into the flash memory-reading hardware.
1) Settings->Passcode, enter your 4 digit passcode. 2) Flip the "Simple Passcode" switch. 3) Set your new arbitrary length complex password. 4) Enable the "Erase Data" setting which wipes the device after 10 incorrect password inputs. 5) Enjoy entering your complex password every time you want to access the phone.
The encryption on these iDevices and the Macs is non trivial to crack. Combine this encryption with a properly strong password and that wipe feature and even the Police would be shit out of luck. I know of a case where a guy resolutely refused to provide police with the password and crypto-key for his MacBook. The cops shipped the laptop to Cupertino who sent it back after a few weeks having failed to crack the drive encryption. The cracking would take longer than the expected lifespan of the universe. Your only hope of getting into a properly password protected and encrypted device be it an iDevice, an Android device or a Windows phone is if there happens to be some software vulnerability that enables you to bypass the login screen.
The same basic information came out on Ars Technica the other day. But the slant on that was not that Apple was locking out 3rd party credit card processors, but rather that the NFC hardware was not being used for anything else because Apple was not ready to say the whole stack was perfect yet, from a security standpoint. This is all new code and new hardware, for Apple, and they would rather not have stories about massive credit card theft come out next week. So, this is an example of slant driving angry diatribes in the comments; if it'd been presented in a more neutral tone people would have judged Apple's actions in a more balance way.
I agree with you completely except for the notion that it is physically possible for Apple to be discussed in a balanced way by a bunch of Android using Linux geeks on Slashdot.
But they're still selling more phones than ever before. Their share of the market has dropped, but the market has got bigger
...and it is amazing how hard it is for some people to understand the difference between losing market share in a saturated market and your market share growing slower than a still expanding market. In percentages your market share may be declining even though your sales are still growing. Apple's iPhone line has been uninspiring since the iPhone 5 came out so sales growth was also less than what it might have been. I for one skipped the iPhone 5 because I felt it didn't represent a sufficient upgrade over my iPhone 4S but the iPhone 6/6+ is a whole different story. I'm not going to write Apple stock off as an investment option because the pontifications of a few angry Android users on slashdot or some tech analyst's totally unrealistic predictions of Apple achieving world domination on the smartphone market haven't come true.
Don't knock it, the "I have no opinion" principle has gotten millions of men through their marriages with a minimum of trouble. Mind you some things you have to have an opinion on, like for example "Does my ass look big in these jeans", your little brain is saying "Yesssss, acres an acres of ass and it's all mine... I love it!", your rational brain prompted by your survival instinct modifies that to "No, dear!"
Long-time government contractor with a history of blowing budgets and under-delivering gets new, lucrative NASA contract. Newsflash: SpaceX was never going to get that contract.
You mean like Boeing bid for the KC-X deal, lost to EADS/Northrop-Grumman, then successfully lobbied for a restart of the bidding process and submitted a bid that secured them the contract leading to EADS deciding not to pursue the deal any further because they thought Boeing's winning bid was so low that Boeing would probably lose money on it? But fret not, I'm sure Uncle Sam will see to it that any losses suffered by Boeing will be made good through some form of kickback and I'm sure that John and Jane Q, Taxpayer will be only too happy to foot the bill. What is interesting about this story is that even US companies are now suffering the same fate as EADS did and falling victim to the Boeing lobby. I sincerely hope that Space X humiliates Boeing and their Washington cronies by somehow outdoing them in cost effectiveness with their private ventures. If there is any single player in the US Aerospace industry that seriously needs to be taught a lesson it's Boeing.
I do not want to buy my expensive Tesla from a smelly "genius" walking around with a corporate-logo polo shirt snug around the belly that hangs over his belt, which sports an iPhone holster. I'd rather just order the damn thing on-line and have USPS deliver it to my front door.
Same. Though assuming you were Musk and were putting some stores out there for people to look around... how would you structure it?
One thing that might be a reasonable compromise is if the Tesla franchise had to be exclusive. Consider fast food franchises... they're exclusive. You can't sell subway sandwiches and Quiznos sandwiches in the same restaurant.
What is more, the corporate office can set policy, set prices, etc. Do that and you can let dealerships sell the cars while at the same time controlling how it is done.
Putting the condescension aside that is positively dripping off of the GP post, why should there have to be a compromise? Where the hell do car dealers get off whining about this? As far as I can tell Tesla went for these Tesla stores because the good hard working folks of the car dealing industry put very little effort into selling their cars so it's the car dealers own bloody fault Tesla went for this solution in the first place and as far as I can tell Tesla is well within it's rights to do so. I don't see anybody legislating against Apple for selling their stuff directly in Apple stores owned by Apple, and the same goes for Sony and their Sony centers, I distinctly remember reading that Microsoft has Microsoft stores and now Samsung is starting to set up Samsung centers in Europe where this manufacturer owned or franchised retail store model is just as well known as in the US. You don't see electronics retailers whining about Apple, Sony and Samsung having their own retail stores, perhaps because they, unlike US car dealers, don't have any hangups about selling Apple, Sony and Samsung products with as much vigor as the rest of their inventory. Why can't there be a chain of Tesla centers without every car dealer in the USA whining about it like petulant child? We all know what the answer is, the car dealers are hopelessly corrupt and are into the bargain in the pockets of certain companies who feel threatened by Tesla.
Sounds like what you want is a Nexus 5, or wait a bit and get a Nexus 6. Consider this:
The PIN code weakness seems odd, as most phones have some kind of rate limit that makes it basically impractical to do before you notice someone has stolen your phone. As for everything else, the Nexus 5 does it pretty well, and costs less than half the price. In fact the 32GB model is 1/3rd the price of an equivalent iPhone 6+. With the massive saving you can easily replace any apps you paid for on iOS. Updates should keep coming for years, although realistically 5 years is a stretch. Apple tend to release crippling updates after a couple of years so that you either get stuck on an old version or are "encouraged" to upgrade your device.
Unless you are absolutely set on an iOS device it's hard to justify an iPhone 6.
My friend does it as a party trick, he checks where the fingerprints or slide marks are and surprisingly often he manages to guess the the pin or symbol on Android phones.
What they're focussing on now is different. CPU is obviously almost good enough, battery is more important.
This... I want a longer battery, lighter weight, etc...
It is already fast enough and it will be awhile before apps catch up.
They will, but not for a few years, then we'll need another jump.
Yes, longer battery life would be nice but it's the bigger screen size and the fingerprint sensor that are motivating me to trade my iPhone 4S in for an iPhone 6+, I've decided that I want a phablet. It takes more effort to crack the fingerprint sensor than it takes to just sitting in your couch and punching in four digit pin-codes until you unlock the phone. I could put a password on my phone but punching in a password every time I get an e-mail is way too bothersome and I can't read Google maps in landscape mode on my iPhone 4S anymore because the display is just too small. As long as the device has adequate processing power to run the latest apps and games for the next 5 years and gets OS updates (which previous experience with Apple devices tells me it will) I don't really care that much about whether it has benchmarks and a processing speed that trumps those of the latest offering from Samsung, LG, HTC et al. In fact the majority of the features that I really value the most are software features ranging from the 'Continuity' OS X integration, 'HealthKit', App services and Universal Touch ID authorization for all apps to the little stuff you almost don't notice like, the revamped keyboard, built in phone calls over wifi, an overview over which app is using the most power, reply notification for especially important messages,... the list goes on. Now if they'd only get around to putting a folding bookmarks menu in the little wizard you use when you add a bookmark in Mobile Safari... this is iOS version 8 for Christ's sake and Apple still hasn't gotten around to fixing it.
Climate change and the benefits of using renewables in place of fossil fuels are observable, measurable and given the volume of data we now have it is an irrefutable fact that renewables are preferable to fossil fuels.
Totally agree, but when people cite Germany as being well on their way to using 100% renewables they are missing the facts that Germany has increased its CO2 emissions in the last several years with its shift away from nuclear and they are increasing use of cheap dirty coal to balance the higher costs of renewables.
That is a much repeated statistic and in the short term... yes, that is true. What is less often pointed out, probably because it does not serve the propaganda purpose of the fossil fuel industry as well as the previous fact, is that their long term goal is 80% renewables by 2050.
Renewables alone are going to be insufficient for the world's energy needs. And industrial scale renewables have their own very negative effects on habitats and the environment. Just as shifting food production to biofuels caused food shortages and food riots, there are going to be negative effects if we have to blanket large areas of the planet with solar panels and wind "farms". Just as we found that the downstream effects of hydro-electric dams are often very negative to fisheries, estuaries and sometimes to agriculture.
And I've said it once and I will say it a million times, nuclear is a far better option with far less negative consequences and with even far less risk than even renewables.
I keep hearing people say this and never backing it up with facts. I know renewables have their own environmental issues but why should they be a show stopper?.... soooo: [Citation needed]
In environmentalist lala-land neither the end nor the means matters as long as your ideology is sitting in the drivers seat.
And how does that make them different from lala-landers of the politically incorrect christian conservative and occasionally coal rolling variety?
The environmentalists are incorrectly lauded for their beliefs while the other groups are dismissed off hand?
Climate change is not a belief, there is no faith involved, it is not an opinion that claim that ejecting vast amounts of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere is going to have very bad effects on the lives of our descendants and that using renewable energy sources is preferable to that. Climate change and the benefits of using renewables in place of fossil fuels are observable, measurable and given the volume of data we now have it is an irrefutable fact that renewables are preferable to fossil fuels.
Sure they are customers. They are paying with their personal data, which Google hords and then sells to third parties. Without the people who use Google's free services, Google wouldn't earn a cent.
Yeah and, how can that judge claim that German Google customers do not have a way to communicate with Google? German Google customers send mail to support-de@google.com and a Google bot tells them to F*** Off! Not only does that constitute communication but the message is pretty clear. Of course, traditionally it has not proven to be a particularly intelligent strategy to tell the Germans to F*** Off! since they tend to react badly to that (read: Invasions, panzers, stukas, u-boats, V-1 cruise missiles, V-2 rockets... etc) but If Google wants to take a shot at it they I say let them try.
In environmentalist lala-land neither the end nor the means matters as long as your ideology is sitting in the drivers seat.
And how does that make them different from lala-landers of the politically incorrect christian conservative and occasionally coal rolling variety? There are two things that are almost always true about zealots no matter what their political or religious convictions, firstly they think they're always right and that that gives them the right to walk all over everybody else and secondly they are all stupid idiots.
Someone called something that wasn't an iPad, an iPad! In other news, one announcer was overheard to say that the trainer was placing a Band-aid on an injured player, when in fact the bandage was a Curad! Shocking!
You're obviously not a nerd since you don't seem to understand why it is hilariously funny that a Microsoft tablet is consistently being called an 'iPad' by its users. Even nerds who were only a glint in their father's eye during the Microsoft v. Apple wars know why this is funny. Which brings us to the next question: What are you doing here?
I'm no archaeologist, but I doubt most archaeologists would claim this discovery ranks that highly. The person making the claim is an expert on the Franklin expedition, so he's bound to be a bit biased. It certainly sounds interesting, but we know a lot about Britain in the 1840s. I think the bigger archaeological discoveries involve civilizations we don't know much about.
True, I'd rate this wreck much higher. It told us a wealth of things about ancient trade routes, the nature of cargo, how it was stowed, ship design in 3400BP,... the list goes on, and they were all things that were mostly just make educated guesses at before. Then there is this a 1500 year old Roman transport just sitting there perfectly in tact. It makes you wonder what else is sitting there on the bottom of the Black Sea perfectly in tact: A Greek or Roman trireme, still sitting there with the oars in place and two Ballistas still standing on the deck? A Phoenician transport with it's cargo of perishables still in tact? A bronze, copper or even neolithic period merchant vessel? Something much, much older?
And yet no one believes in phlogiston anymore. Science did what it was supposed to do.
I can think of plenty of examples of the old guard trying to hang on to discredited ideas. The Out of Africa theory of human origins, when it first came out, flew in the face of a general view among European experts that modern humanity had evolved in Eurasia. The old guard, to some extent, were more informed by racial biases (the very 16th-19th century idea that sub-Saharan Africans were somehow lower on the evolutionary chain), and indeed there were a few angry bastards, notably on the Continent, that clung to the idea of a Eurasian origin of H. sapiens even into the 1980s, when finally enough molecular data had been gained both from extant human populations and from the remains of ancient humans (including Neanderthals) that it became irrefutable that modern H. sapiens had a very recent origin (sometime between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago) in Africa.
And again, on the same general topic, for a long time the idea that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred was viewed as completely invalid. mtDNA studies were flung in the faces of researchers who insisted that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred in Eurasia. Those that insisted that the interbreeding had happened were tut-tutted, in some cases viewed almost as hippies. Indeed, even into the 1990s, the "consensus" view was that any interbreeding was so rare as to have had no impact on the genetic makeup of modern human populations.
Well, lo and behold, by the 21st century, better techniques for DNA extraction and genome mapping revealed that virtually all human populations outside of sub-Saharan Africa did have nuclear genes that came from Neanderthals.
So it strikes me that this, and numerous other examples, consensus that does not fit the evidence is always ultimately discarded. But that some consensus views are wrong does not mean all consensus views are wrong.
I can only agree with you for the most part, science did what it was supposed to do but how many times and for how long has the old guard held up progress? Of course one can't generalize about all consensuses being wrong but it still happens often enough that erroneous consensuses are imposed by force. Regarding the whole debate about Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon interbreeding I actually saw Ian Tattersall claim interbreeding was impossible (I'm using the non scientific term Cro-Magnon because it's less clumsy than early-modern-human). Tattersall also wrote an entire paper in 1999 find where he dismissed the Lagar Velho child as a hybrid and then admitted on film in a documentary in 2002 that he hadn't even seen the actual skeleton. This issue is a good example of a consensus being imposed on a community by the old guard, progress in the field was held back for years and the word of Tattersall and his peers would probably still be law if they hadn't been caught off guard by scientists from another discipline with irrefutable evidence. Tattersall is now quite busy eating crow. Science did what it was supposed to but with an agonizingly long hiatus of limited progress. One can say what one wants about the way Trinkaus and Zilhao reacted to Tattersall's 1999 paper but they have been proven right about interbreeding. The only thing that remains for them to be completely vindicated is if somebody actually manages sequence DNA from the Lagar Velho child and proves conclusively that it was a hybrid.
Science is verifiable and reproducible often in a variety of ways, or it is not "science."
I craft a theory according to the current state of knowledge, and to verify it I do a study on X and come out with results Y, which I use to come to conclusion Z. My article is peer reviewed and published in the relevant accepted journal of science.
Did I do science? By most measures, YES.
However, only steps 1-3 were done on the actual scientific process - it's missing verification until a 3rd party comes along and repeats my study, gathering the same results within an acceptable margin of error.
The problem is that doing my own study is 'sexy', repeating somebody else's, especially when their results are within mainstream theory, isn't.
It's not just that verifying somebody else's results in not sexy. There are other factors as well. There used to be a broad scientific consensus about phlogiston theory being the best explanation to explain processes like combustion and oxidation. Eventually it was discredited against fierce opposition from some of the big names in science at the time and there are many other examples of this from other scientific fields. Scientific consensus about some theory or other sometimes has a tendency to be imposed by big name scientists who have the clout to do that because they have built a career and a reputation that depends on their theory and their research remaining unchallenged long after it is starting to become clear that the theory and perhaps some of their research results are just plain wrong. There is politics in science like everything else and sometimes politics trumps science.
Much as I'm disliking the Hitlerian Russian government now, I can't believe a) anyone wouldn't have reported it (the pilot) or b) not talked about it loudly for 25+ years.
It doesn't add up.
It does if you know anything about Finnish history. Pissing off the Soviets was may have been an American national sport during the cold war period but for the Finns it was not at the top of their agenda. Finland spent the cold war balancing on a razor's edge they were bound by post WWII treaties to have a military of a fixed (and rather small) size and of course to remain neutral. For this reason the Finns painstakingly split their military procurement exactly down the middle. Half the air force jets, half the army's tanks and half the navy's ships were bought in the Soviet bloc and the other half in the West and it was a very successful strategy (which is why its now being suggested as a solution to the Ukraine crisis). The Finns may have wiped the floor with the Soviet army during the Winter War but it was still not an experience the Finns cared to repeat in the nuclear era. Since the aircraft wasn't actually harmed no purpose would have been served by deliberately embarrassing the bad tempered 16 foot tall, 3000 pound grizzly bear sitting on their eastern border by advertising the ineptitude of the Soviet air defenses so the sensible strategy was just to play it down.
No, that was exactly why I read TFA expecting to see that the Finnish government was the one who buried it. They weren't. Seems to...defy credulity that 2 ordinary citizens would be making a political decision like that. The government yes, 2 copilots no.
It is hard to believe that a near miss by a SAM would be given less attention by the captain than a malfunctioning coffee maker and even harder to believe that this incident was not reported. If a SAM exploded 20 seconds away from my DC-10 full of passengers whose lives I'm responsible for that would sure as shit get my attention if I was the captain and you can bet your bottom dollar I would report it to somebody. The original article simply says the captain refused to report the incident, it does not say he didn't try so it's entirely possible that he actually did try to report it and was told in no uncertain terms to shut the f*** up about it.
Slashdot Mirror
The Raptor has three internal weapons bays: a large bay on the bottom of the fuselage, and two smaller bays on the sides of the fuselage, aft of the engine intakes.[140] It can carry six medium range missiles in the center bay and one short–range missile in each side bay;[141] Four of the medium range missiles can be replaced with two bomb racks that can each carry one medium-size or four smaller bombs.
All true but the F-22 still wasted as a bomb truck. A couple of dozen of them would be of much more use stationed in Poland an Romania on a 'good will mission' along with a simlar number of Typhoons and Rafales to remind the Russians of what's going to buttfuck their air force if they make a play for Kiev. If you want to flatten ISIS in Syria take a look at what the French did in Mali. The frogs used liberal numbers of drones and Breguet Atlantic maratime patrol aircraft loaded to capacity with laser guided bombs to loiter over the battle field and zap anything that moved. Then they mopped up the immobilized islamists with ground forces. The US counterpart would be B-52s on 12 hour loiter missions with bomb bays full of JDAMs supported by drones. The Armée de l'Aire used Mirage 2Ks and F.1s in Mali, not exactly the latest and best in combat aircraft, so if fast movers are needed F-18s, F-15s and F-16s are plenty good enough to hammer ISIS. The real problem in Syria is that you can only do so much with air forces, you need ground troops. The only ground forces in the region that can be turned into something we in the West would recognize as a proper army in a short amount of time are the Kurds and you can't build their forces up without pissing off practically everybody from Iran through Iraq to Turkey (I'm pretty sure nobody gives a shit what Assad thinks except Putin) becasue they are all scared shitless of an independent Kurdistan.
Some of those phones are enormous.
I've seen people using a phone which looks around the size of my Nexus 7.
And using it as a phone almost looks like a sight-gag.
Kind of like when I got my first-gen iPad and a friend held it up to his head and started saying "can you hear me now?".
Some of these phones don't look like they'd be either easy to carry around, or actually use as a phone. Because it's like holding a paperback novel up to your head.
When I first bought my iPhone, what I wanted to do with it was things like browsing, rudimentary word processing, games, reading e-books whenever I was in no mood to drag a laptop with me. Today we may piss and moan about how small the iPhone 4/5 displays are but keep in mind that back when the iPhone first came out it had a huge display compared to most of the competition. The iPhone still turned out to be too small for doing a lot of what I wanted it to do. So I bought an iPad only to find that while a tablet does the aforementioned things pretty well it is still no laptop replacement and even if an iPad was capable of making phone calls a 10 inch tablet is simply to big. I wasn't a phablet fan when those things first hit the market and it took me a long time to warm up to the idea simply because of what you point out, the things are too big for a phone and to small for a tablet. But the more I think about it the more I like the idea, it seems to be a fair compromise. Phablets are big enough to do most of what I originally expected to be able to do with the iPhone but small enough to easily carry in my pocket when I leave the laptop at home. Yes phablets are big for a phone but I can work around that, use a combination bluetooth headset/headphones, carry the phone in my breast pocket rather than in my trouser pocket etc... It's not an unsolvable problem and best of all there is one fewer expensive device to drag around and that needs to be replaced every four or five years so I'm buying an iPhone 6 Plus. If I still want an iPad for reading e-books etc. I'll buy a cheap used one when my current model gives up it's ghost. All my real work will be done on a laptop (MacBook if you didn't guess already) and that isn't likely to change any time soon.
I would say that most of the people I know use iPhones. I have never heard any one of those iPhone users judging an Android phone user as an inferior person, less successful, or not as hip. I have, however, consistently hear all the usual judgements from Android users against iPhones users: lemmings, idiots with too much money, Steve Jobs worshippers, etc.
That is true for the most part and going out on a limb here, the most obnoxiously judgemental computer users I meet are usualy Linux geeks. I have met very, very few OS X or Windows users who go out of their way to heap scorn on Linux users the way some Linux do about Windows and Mac users.
iPhone is a product, android is an industry.
Which is why boasting that Android is outselling iPhones is a bit like pointing out that the entire rest of the car industry is outselling BMW and therefore BMW must suck.
I love it on my iPhone 4S. I can't use ApplePay so I may upgrade to a six, but honestly, my nearly three year old 4S works great and has great battery life. I haven't noticed really anything negative. In fact, it prompted google to upgrade their bad Google Voice app, so that in and of itself is a plus. FaceTime audio is also pretty great.
Ditto, iPhone 4S, iPad 3 no issues so far and only the usual gripe: This is iOS 8 and they still haven't put a collapsable menu in the little 'add bookmark' wizard in Safari.
In UK he would be in jail until he gives the passcode to the police
Yeah, but I think he figured the punishment for denying the cops access was preferable to what he would have had to suffer if the cops had gotten at the content of that hard drive and they couldn't lock him up indefinitely for refusing to decrypt his hard drive. At least not in a modern European democracy.
Standard data forensics procedure is to write-protect any storage device which contains evidence, copy it bit-for-bit, and do all the decrypting and data analysis from the copy. The 10-try limit may protect your data from a random thief who lifts your phone, but the only way it's going to protect you from the government or any other technically-capable hacker is if Apple baked the limit into the flash memory-reading hardware.
And there's always this.
You can put a complex password on your iPhone:
1) Settings->Passcode, enter your 4 digit passcode.
2) Flip the "Simple Passcode" switch.
3) Set your new arbitrary length complex password.
4) Enable the "Erase Data" setting which wipes the device after 10 incorrect password inputs.
5) Enjoy entering your complex password every time you want to access the phone.
The encryption on these iDevices and the Macs is non trivial to crack. Combine this encryption with a properly strong password and that wipe feature and even the Police would be shit out of luck. I know of a case where a guy resolutely refused to provide police with the password and crypto-key for his MacBook. The cops shipped the laptop to Cupertino who sent it back after a few weeks having failed to crack the drive encryption. The cracking would take longer than the expected lifespan of the universe. Your only hope of getting into a properly password protected and encrypted device be it an iDevice, an Android device or a Windows phone is if there happens to be some software vulnerability that enables you to bypass the login screen.
The same basic information came out on Ars Technica the other day. But the slant on that was not that Apple was locking out 3rd party credit card processors, but rather that the NFC hardware was not being used for anything else because Apple was not ready to say the whole stack was perfect yet, from a security standpoint. This is all new code and new hardware, for Apple, and they would rather not have stories about massive credit card theft come out next week. So, this is an example of slant driving angry diatribes in the comments; if it'd been presented in a more neutral tone people would have judged Apple's actions in a more balance way.
I agree with you completely except for the notion that it is physically possible for Apple to be discussed in a balanced way by a bunch of Android using Linux geeks on Slashdot.
But they're still selling more phones than ever before. Their share of the market has dropped, but the market has got bigger
...and it is amazing how hard it is for some people to understand the difference between losing market share in a saturated market and your market share growing slower than a still expanding market. In percentages your market share may be declining even though your sales are still growing. Apple's iPhone line has been uninspiring since the iPhone 5 came out so sales growth was also less than what it might have been. I for one skipped the iPhone 5 because I felt it didn't represent a sufficient upgrade over my iPhone 4S but the iPhone 6/6+ is a whole different story. I'm not going to write Apple stock off as an investment option because the pontifications of a few angry Android users on slashdot or some tech analyst's totally unrealistic predictions of Apple achieving world domination on the smartphone market haven't come true.
This may be the best endorsement for systemd yet.
Don't knock it, the "I have no opinion" principle has gotten millions of men through their marriages with a minimum of trouble. Mind you some things you have to have an opinion on, like for example "Does my ass look big in these jeans", your little brain is saying "Yesssss, acres an acres of ass and it's all mine... I love it!", your rational brain prompted by your survival instinct modifies that to "No, dear!"
Long-time government contractor with a history of blowing budgets and under-delivering gets new, lucrative NASA contract. Newsflash: SpaceX was never going to get that contract.
You mean like Boeing bid for the KC-X deal, lost to EADS/Northrop-Grumman, then successfully lobbied for a restart of the bidding process and submitted a bid that secured them the contract leading to EADS deciding not to pursue the deal any further because they thought Boeing's winning bid was so low that Boeing would probably lose money on it? But fret not, I'm sure Uncle Sam will see to it that any losses suffered by Boeing will be made good through some form of kickback and I'm sure that John and Jane Q, Taxpayer will be only too happy to foot the bill. What is interesting about this story is that even US companies are now suffering the same fate as EADS did and falling victim to the Boeing lobby. I sincerely hope that Space X humiliates Boeing and their Washington cronies by somehow outdoing them in cost effectiveness with their private ventures. If there is any single player in the US Aerospace industry that seriously needs to be taught a lesson it's Boeing.
I do not want to buy my expensive Tesla from a smelly "genius" walking around with a corporate-logo polo shirt snug around the belly that hangs over his belt, which sports an iPhone holster. I'd rather just order the damn thing on-line and have USPS deliver it to my front door.
Same. Though assuming you were Musk and were putting some stores out there for people to look around... how would you structure it?
One thing that might be a reasonable compromise is if the Tesla franchise had to be exclusive. Consider fast food franchises... they're exclusive. You can't sell subway sandwiches and Quiznos sandwiches in the same restaurant.
What is more, the corporate office can set policy, set prices, etc. Do that and you can let dealerships sell the cars while at the same time controlling how it is done.
Putting the condescension aside that is positively dripping off of the GP post, why should there have to be a compromise? Where the hell do car dealers get off whining about this? As far as I can tell Tesla went for these Tesla stores because the good hard working folks of the car dealing industry put very little effort into selling their cars so it's the car dealers own bloody fault Tesla went for this solution in the first place and as far as I can tell Tesla is well within it's rights to do so. I don't see anybody legislating against Apple for selling their stuff directly in Apple stores owned by Apple, and the same goes for Sony and their Sony centers, I distinctly remember reading that Microsoft has Microsoft stores and now Samsung is starting to set up Samsung centers in Europe where this manufacturer owned or franchised retail store model is just as well known as in the US. You don't see electronics retailers whining about Apple, Sony and Samsung having their own retail stores, perhaps because they, unlike US car dealers, don't have any hangups about selling Apple, Sony and Samsung products with as much vigor as the rest of their inventory. Why can't there be a chain of Tesla centers without every car dealer in the USA whining about it like petulant child? We all know what the answer is, the car dealers are hopelessly corrupt and are into the bargain in the pockets of certain companies who feel threatened by Tesla.
Who will you blame for what the PLO did in Lebanon, along with Syria?
Why did you leave Israel out of that list?
Sounds like what you want is a Nexus 5, or wait a bit and get a Nexus 6. Consider this:
The PIN code weakness seems odd, as most phones have some kind of rate limit that makes it basically impractical to do before you notice someone has stolen your phone. As for everything else, the Nexus 5 does it pretty well, and costs less than half the price. In fact the 32GB model is 1/3rd the price of an equivalent iPhone 6+. With the massive saving you can easily replace any apps you paid for on iOS. Updates should keep coming for years, although realistically 5 years is a stretch. Apple tend to release crippling updates after a couple of years so that you either get stuck on an old version or are "encouraged" to upgrade your device.
Unless you are absolutely set on an iOS device it's hard to justify an iPhone 6.
My friend does it as a party trick, he checks where the fingerprints or slide marks are and surprisingly often he manages to guess the the pin or symbol on Android phones.
What they're focussing on now is different. CPU is obviously almost good enough, battery is more important.
This... I want a longer battery, lighter weight, etc...
It is already fast enough and it will be awhile before apps catch up.
They will, but not for a few years, then we'll need another jump.
Yes, longer battery life would be nice but it's the bigger screen size and the fingerprint sensor that are motivating me to trade my iPhone 4S in for an iPhone 6+, I've decided that I want a phablet. It takes more effort to crack the fingerprint sensor than it takes to just sitting in your couch and punching in four digit pin-codes until you unlock the phone. I could put a password on my phone but punching in a password every time I get an e-mail is way too bothersome and I can't read Google maps in landscape mode on my iPhone 4S anymore because the display is just too small. As long as the device has adequate processing power to run the latest apps and games for the next 5 years and gets OS updates (which previous experience with Apple devices tells me it will) I don't really care that much about whether it has benchmarks and a processing speed that trumps those of the latest offering from Samsung, LG, HTC et al. In fact the majority of the features that I really value the most are software features ranging from the 'Continuity' OS X integration, 'HealthKit', App services and Universal Touch ID authorization for all apps to the little stuff you almost don't notice like, the revamped keyboard, built in phone calls over wifi, an overview over which app is using the most power, reply notification for especially important messages, ... the list goes on. Now if they'd only get around to putting a folding bookmarks menu in the little wizard you use when you add a bookmark in Mobile Safari... this is iOS version 8 for Christ's sake and Apple still hasn't gotten around to fixing it.
Climate change and the benefits of using renewables in place of fossil fuels are observable, measurable and given the volume of data we now have it is an irrefutable fact that renewables are preferable to fossil fuels.
Totally agree, but when people cite Germany as being well on their way to using 100% renewables they are missing the facts that Germany has increased its CO2 emissions in the last several years with its shift away from nuclear and they are increasing use of cheap dirty coal to balance the higher costs of renewables.
That is a much repeated statistic and in the short term ... yes, that is true. What is less often pointed out, probably because it does not serve the propaganda purpose of the fossil fuel industry as well as the previous fact, is that their long term goal is 80% renewables by 2050.
Renewables alone are going to be insufficient for the world's energy needs. And industrial scale renewables have their own very negative effects on habitats and the environment. Just as shifting food production to biofuels caused food shortages and food riots, there are going to be negative effects if we have to blanket large areas of the planet with solar panels and wind "farms". Just as we found that the downstream effects of hydro-electric dams are often very negative to fisheries, estuaries and sometimes to agriculture.
And I've said it once and I will say it a million times, nuclear is a far better option with far less negative consequences and with even far less risk than even renewables.
I keep hearing people say this and never backing it up with facts. I know renewables have their own environmental issues but why should they be a show stopper? .... soooo: [Citation needed]
Was there a reason you omitted nuclear?
Yes, the thread was about Tesla using renewables for it's new factory.
In environmentalist lala-land neither the end nor the means matters as long as your ideology is sitting in the drivers seat.
And how does that make them different from lala-landers of the politically incorrect christian conservative and occasionally coal rolling variety?
The environmentalists are incorrectly lauded for their beliefs while the other groups are dismissed off hand?
Climate change is not a belief, there is no faith involved, it is not an opinion that claim that ejecting vast amounts of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere is going to have very bad effects on the lives of our descendants and that using renewable energy sources is preferable to that. Climate change and the benefits of using renewables in place of fossil fuels are observable, measurable and given the volume of data we now have it is an irrefutable fact that renewables are preferable to fossil fuels.
Sure they are customers. They are paying with their personal data, which Google hords and then sells to third parties. Without the people who use Google's free services, Google wouldn't earn a cent.
Yeah and, how can that judge claim that German Google customers do not have a way to communicate with Google? German Google customers send mail to support-de@google.com and a Google bot tells them to F*** Off! Not only does that constitute communication but the message is pretty clear. Of course, traditionally it has not proven to be a particularly intelligent strategy to tell the Germans to F*** Off! since they tend to react badly to that (read: Invasions, panzers, stukas, u-boats, V-1 cruise missiles, V-2 rockets... etc) but If Google wants to take a shot at it they I say let them try.
In environmentalist lala-land neither the end nor the means matters as long as your ideology is sitting in the drivers seat.
And how does that make them different from lala-landers of the politically incorrect christian conservative and occasionally coal rolling variety? There are two things that are almost always true about zealots no matter what their political or religious convictions, firstly they think they're always right and that that gives them the right to walk all over everybody else and secondly they are all stupid idiots.
Someone called something that wasn't an iPad, an iPad! In other news, one announcer was overheard to say that the trainer was placing a Band-aid on an injured player, when in fact the bandage was a Curad! Shocking!
You're obviously not a nerd since you don't seem to understand why it is hilariously funny that a Microsoft tablet is consistently being called an 'iPad' by its users. Even nerds who were only a glint in their father's eye during the Microsoft v. Apple wars know why this is funny. Which brings us to the next question: What are you doing here?
I'm no archaeologist, but I doubt most archaeologists would claim this discovery ranks that highly. The person making the claim is an expert on the Franklin expedition, so he's bound to be a bit biased. It certainly sounds interesting, but we know a lot about Britain in the 1840s. I think the bigger archaeological discoveries involve civilizations we don't know much about.
True, I'd rate this wreck much higher. It told us a wealth of things about ancient trade routes, the nature of cargo, how it was stowed, ship design in 3400BP, ... the list goes on, and they were all things that were mostly just make educated guesses at before. Then there is this a 1500 year old Roman transport just sitting there perfectly in tact. It makes you wonder what else is sitting there on the bottom of the Black Sea perfectly in tact: A Greek or Roman trireme, still sitting there with the oars in place and two Ballistas still standing on the deck? A Phoenician transport with it's cargo of perishables still in tact? A bronze, copper or even neolithic period merchant vessel? Something much, much older?
And yet no one believes in phlogiston anymore. Science did what it was supposed to do.
I can think of plenty of examples of the old guard trying to hang on to discredited ideas. The Out of Africa theory of human origins, when it first came out, flew in the face of a general view among European experts that modern humanity had evolved in Eurasia. The old guard, to some extent, were more informed by racial biases (the very 16th-19th century idea that sub-Saharan Africans were somehow lower on the evolutionary chain), and indeed there were a few angry bastards, notably on the Continent, that clung to the idea of a Eurasian origin of H. sapiens even into the 1980s, when finally enough molecular data had been gained both from extant human populations and from the remains of ancient humans (including Neanderthals) that it became irrefutable that modern H. sapiens had a very recent origin (sometime between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago) in Africa.
And again, on the same general topic, for a long time the idea that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred was viewed as completely invalid. mtDNA studies were flung in the faces of researchers who insisted that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred in Eurasia. Those that insisted that the interbreeding had happened were tut-tutted, in some cases viewed almost as hippies. Indeed, even into the 1990s, the "consensus" view was that any interbreeding was so rare as to have had no impact on the genetic makeup of modern human populations.
Well, lo and behold, by the 21st century, better techniques for DNA extraction and genome mapping revealed that virtually all human populations outside of sub-Saharan Africa did have nuclear genes that came from Neanderthals.
So it strikes me that this, and numerous other examples, consensus that does not fit the evidence is always ultimately discarded. But that some consensus views are wrong does not mean all consensus views are wrong.
I can only agree with you for the most part, science did what it was supposed to do but how many times and for how long has the old guard held up progress? Of course one can't generalize about all consensuses being wrong but it still happens often enough that erroneous consensuses are imposed by force. Regarding the whole debate about Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon interbreeding I actually saw Ian Tattersall claim interbreeding was impossible (I'm using the non scientific term Cro-Magnon because it's less clumsy than early-modern-human). Tattersall also wrote an entire paper in 1999 find where he dismissed the Lagar Velho child as a hybrid and then admitted on film in a documentary in 2002 that he hadn't even seen the actual skeleton. This issue is a good example of a consensus being imposed on a community by the old guard, progress in the field was held back for years and the word of Tattersall and his peers would probably still be law if they hadn't been caught off guard by scientists from another discipline with irrefutable evidence. Tattersall is now quite busy eating crow. Science did what it was supposed to but with an agonizingly long hiatus of limited progress. One can say what one wants about the way Trinkaus and Zilhao reacted to Tattersall's 1999 paper but they have been proven right about interbreeding. The only thing that remains for them to be completely vindicated is if somebody actually manages sequence DNA from the Lagar Velho child and proves conclusively that it was a hybrid.
Science is verifiable and reproducible often in a variety of ways, or it is not "science."
I craft a theory according to the current state of knowledge, and to verify it I do a study on X and come out with results Y, which I use to come to conclusion Z. My article is peer reviewed and published in the relevant accepted journal of science.
Did I do science? By most measures, YES.
However, only steps 1-3 were done on the actual scientific process - it's missing verification until a 3rd party comes along and repeats my study, gathering the same results within an acceptable margin of error.
The problem is that doing my own study is 'sexy', repeating somebody else's, especially when their results are within mainstream theory, isn't.
It's not just that verifying somebody else's results in not sexy. There are other factors as well. There used to be a broad scientific consensus about phlogiston theory being the best explanation to explain processes like combustion and oxidation. Eventually it was discredited against fierce opposition from some of the big names in science at the time and there are many other examples of this from other scientific fields. Scientific consensus about some theory or other sometimes has a tendency to be imposed by big name scientists who have the clout to do that because they have built a career and a reputation that depends on their theory and their research remaining unchallenged long after it is starting to become clear that the theory and perhaps some of their research results are just plain wrong. There is politics in science like everything else and sometimes politics trumps science.
Much as I'm disliking the Hitlerian Russian government now, I can't believe a) anyone wouldn't have reported it (the pilot) or b) not talked about it loudly for 25+ years.
It doesn't add up.
It does if you know anything about Finnish history. Pissing off the Soviets was may have been an American national sport during the cold war period but for the Finns it was not at the top of their agenda. Finland spent the cold war balancing on a razor's edge they were bound by post WWII treaties to have a military of a fixed (and rather small) size and of course to remain neutral. For this reason the Finns painstakingly split their military procurement exactly down the middle. Half the air force jets, half the army's tanks and half the navy's ships were bought in the Soviet bloc and the other half in the West and it was a very successful strategy (which is why its now being suggested as a solution to the Ukraine crisis). The Finns may have wiped the floor with the Soviet army during the Winter War but it was still not an experience the Finns cared to repeat in the nuclear era. Since the aircraft wasn't actually harmed no purpose would have been served by deliberately embarrassing the bad tempered 16 foot tall, 3000 pound grizzly bear sitting on their eastern border by advertising the ineptitude of the Soviet air defenses so the sensible strategy was just to play it down.
No, that was exactly why I read TFA expecting to see that the Finnish government was the one who buried it. They weren't. Seems to...defy credulity that 2 ordinary citizens would be making a political decision like that. The government yes, 2 copilots no.
It is hard to believe that a near miss by a SAM would be given less attention by the captain than a malfunctioning coffee maker and even harder to believe that this incident was not reported. If a SAM exploded 20 seconds away from my DC-10 full of passengers whose lives I'm responsible for that would sure as shit get my attention if I was the captain and you can bet your bottom dollar I would report it to somebody. The original article simply says the captain refused to report the incident, it does not say he didn't try so it's entirely possible that he actually did try to report it and was told in no uncertain terms to shut the f*** up about it.