I haven't found the iPhone's keyboard to be much worse than most physical cell phone keyboards, but that's not as much a function of the iPhone's brilliance as a function of how much most other cell phone keyboard suck. I didn't particularly like the Treo's, but it was amazing compared to most Blackberry keyboards, and particularly the keyboards that put multiple keys on each letter.
Having said that, though, tactile feedback would certainly be nice. I've heard from a couple people who prefer the iPhone's keyboard to the Treo's, but more who don't. I'm an iPhone owner now, but my previous phone for several years was the T-Mobile Sidekick, which has what I think is the best keyboard in the cell phone market. There are many things I prefer about the iPhone, but typing definitely ain't one of them.
I think PDAs are being replaced by UMPCs - Things like the Asus EEEPC will offer far better performance (along with other advantages like the bigger screen), for about double the size of a PDA - not to mention the same, if not cheaper, price. Ask the Newton team how that size is working out for them.
Seriously, one thing Palm got really, really right when they first hit market was an obsessive focus on the form factor. There will undoubtedly be a market for the UMPC, but that market will not consist of people who want to be able to slip the device into their shirt pocket, and that market is really important for broad adoption.
It's a good thing that Fox News exists, or there would be no conservative voices in the media at all. Absolutely! Other than maybe The Wall Street Journal, George Will, David Brooks, National Review,Commentary, Ben Stein, Dennis Miller, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Mona Charen, Tony Blankley, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, The American Spectator, NewsMax, WorldNetDaily, the Drudge Report, Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan, Ollie North, Charles Krauthammer, Brent Bozell and "Accuracy in Media," and frequently-quoted experts from the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute.
But other than that, no conservative voices at all --
Wait, did I mention Tucker Carlson? No? Sorry. And the Weekly Standard, American Conservative, Human Events, and National Interest. Oh, and Front Page.
And the New York Post, although it's okay if you don't want to count them.
But, yeah! Without Fox around, there'd be... uh... no conservative voices in the media at all. Other than these.
While Sheepweevil makes essentially the same point, you could make the argument that restricting industry on the moon is good from the perspective of preserving natural monuments. There are a lot of sites right here on Earth that have no direct economic value, but that, it could be argued, have their own intrinsic, non-economic value. That notion of intrinsic value tends to sit very poorly with those who define all external value as economic, but conservation and preservation on purely economic measures has always been dicey. (i.e., if you tried to make an argument for restricting whaling based on the grounds that if you killed all of them, there wouldn't be a whaling industry any more, the moment someone comes along with a paper demonstrating that a higher return on investment can be achieved by killing all the whales now and sinking part of the profits into something else, you're hosed. An argument for saving whales has to assign them intrinsic value separate from their economic use.)
Of course, if I take off the devil's advocate hat, I might make the more prosaic point that there are a whole frikkin' lot of technological issues that have to be solved to get to the point where having this argument even makes sense. It's easy to pile onto Andrew Smith, the author of the anti-plundering column, but I'm not giving any kudos to Mark Whittington, the guy who wrote the response and managed to get Slashdot to put this on the front page. Smith's column is actually very short and doesn't really talk about "saving the moon's environment." Whittington is by and large using this as an excuse to trot out hoary old libertarian-crank* nonsense about how environmentalists are all anti-technology luddites who won't be happy unless we return to the Dark Ages.
*Before the libertarians leap on this, I do distinguish between "libertarian" and "libertarian-crank." Drawing the distinction is beyond the scope of this footnote.
In the end, it's really up to the end-user to weed out bad information. That's really the root of the whole endless question cycle on Wikipedia (and wikis in general), though, isn't it? An end-user doesn't necessarily have the knowledge to weed out "bad information"; the most common usage scenario for an encyclopedia is, after all, to look up information you don't have. Vandalism will often be obvious and most of us will be suspicious of anything that's too badly written, but well-written, authoritative-sounding information on Wikipedia on a subject that you or I don't really know is likely to be taken at face value.
Furthermore, the problem with bias is more a problem of psychology. There's been a few studies recently (some linked on Slashdot, I believe) showing that someone actually has to have a certain depth of understanding in a subject to evaluate their own competency correctly: people who know nothing, or moderate to significant amounts, about a subject usually accurately rate their own knowledge, but people who know a little about a subject tend to overestimate their knowledge. Couple that with the ability in modern times to read a whole lot of articles that each show a surface understanding of something people get passionate over -- Marxist theory, the gold standard, 9/11 -- and it's easy for people to become absolutely sure about the "truth" of talking points that they've come across time and time again without really understanding that they're hearing one half-truth that's undergone intense amplification in an echo chamber. And Wikipedia's system makes it hard to identify these and even harder to remove them: why, of course this is true, because there are multiple independent links I can give as reference! Well, if all those links are alarmist articles that, if you dig far enough, come from the same source whose understanding of what they're raising the alarm over is incorrect (or just incomplete), maybe they really shouldn't be given that much weight.
I use Wikipedia and I don't know that Citizendium is going to solve these potential pitfalls. But I think it's important to understand that "harnessing the collective intelligence of the masses" really does have potential pitfalls. It's good to profess question authority, but the problem with it -- and this is something I see outside Wikipedia, of course -- is that it often fails to distinguish between authority that's been granted (ilisten to him, he's a CEO!) and authority that's been earned (listen to him, he's been studying this field for two decades and is a recognized expert). At the extreme, this gets a little perverse: I have more than one friend who seems less likely to trust someone who's presented as an authority than someone who's just an interested layman.
While I've been trying to avoid giving examples that would cause arguments in and of themselves, I think this is really important when it comes to "controversial" issues, and those are probably precisely the issues where Wikipedia's style can lead to the most confusion. When push comes to shove, I would rather have articles on evolution vetted by evolutionary scientists, on the gold standard vetted by economists, and on climate change vetted by climate scientists. This doesn't mean that there's no place in an encyclopedia to talk about drawbacks to "fiat currency" and criticisms of prevailing climate models, but it does mean that you don't get equal time just because you're a contrarian. When the overwhelming bulk of study on a given topic supports one viewpoint, that's the viewpoint that an encyclopedia article -- which is, after all, meant as a quick overview of the topic in the first place -- logically should spend the bulk of its time on.
Wikipedia isn't as bad for this as its critics make it out to be, but ultimately, its distrust, and sometimes active snubbing, of experts is probably its most serious drawback, and there's no way to address that without doing a lot of re-examination of the Wikipedia "culture" -- and from what I understand, self-appointed editors there are very, very resistant to that notion. I think Citizendium is an interesting experiment with a different organizational model.
If being an audiophile means having the sort of mindset to remotely accept that as plausible... It really doesn't. "Audiophile" is one of those terms that catches a lot more crap than it deserves because of the high visiblity of the easily mockable minority (like, say, people who would spend $5K on interconnect cables). There are also the audiophiles on forums like Audioholics, who devote borderline-obsessive amounts of time to debunking audio snake oil. Unfortunately, I see a lot of the opposite extreme in (comments on) articles like this on Slashdot: people trip all over themselves to proclaim how cheap the components in their system are and they can't tell any difference, until you get down to the "I have tin cans connected to a $14.99 FM radio and if you think you can hear anything better with a more expensive system you're a complete fucking moron!" types.
The money you spend on a system can be put into a lot of different components, many of them substantially less silly than arguments about wiring and cables -- the kinds and numbers of connections, support for different kinds of switching and related enhancements (i.e., HDMI 1.3? Analog to digital conversion? Upscaling?), and all the stuff that actually affects the audio signal like the number and class of amplification circuits, D/A-A/D converters, and so on. What makes someone an "audiophile," to my mind, is that they're more concerned with the audio signal stuff than the other features. You don't have to spend $50,000 or even $5,000 on stereo equipment to be an audiophile; the difference is that for whatever the budget you're setting yourself may be, you're going with a product that you believe is going to sound really great. I may spend (gasp) $800 on a product from Rotel or Outlaw Audio that does a lot less in terms of Great Lists of Features than something from Yamaha or Pioneer; the difference -- at least hopefully -- is that Rotel and Outlaw have put all that money into the audio signal rather than video switching between the 10 different HDMI components I don't have or five dozen stupid DSP effects that only get used when the guy at Circuit City is demoing them.
This really isn't that weird, is it?
Incidentally, I've considered myself an audiophile since the early '90s, and I haven't bought a single bakelite knob. (I have bought Monster Cables, I confess, but the original $1/foot variety. In the future, I'd probably get Belden 5000UE at about $0.40/ft and add banana plugs myself.)
And don't change the argument, within cities, DSL is available in even the poorest areas. The poor in the US are still relatively affluent, and it is still very profitable for infrastructure companies to cover them. DSL's availability is a matter of demographics, but that isn't the same as affluence -- it's all about rate of return. Upgrading a central office to support DSL is a very expensive proposition for a phone company, and they need to get a certain number of subscriptions to justify it (obviously). A densely-populated urban area is a better investment than a subdivision where all the homes are on quarter-acre lots; even if the subdivision's per-household income is much higher than the urban area's and the percentage of overall subscribers in the population will be substantially greater there, there are just so many damn more people in the urban area that the rate of return is going to be much higher. This was an issue a few years ago back in Celebration, Florida, a planned "new urban" community owned by Disney: as it turned out, all of Celebration was served by one CO, and Sprint didn't have any interest in upgrading it to DSL. As rich as the average Celebration resident was, there just weren't enough of them to justify the cost.
This is what previous posters have been trying to get across when they were mentioning the Rural Electrification Projects of the early 20th century. Private power and telephone companies saw no profit in running utility lines out to farm country, where you might have a home every acre (or every five or ten!); the upshot is that rural customers who had any service at all would be paying three or four times as much as urban dwellers for it. This was addressed by private-public partnerships and utility co-ops, some of which still exist to this day.
No offense, but your argument seems to exhibit a particular kind of libertarian naivete which refuses to admit the existence of indirect benefits. You, personally, may be poorer by the amount of the surcharge on your power bill still funding such projects, and indeed you are probably being denied a full meal at Chili's annually (if the taxes are particularly onerous in your area, you may even be denied a margarita with that meal), but you, personally, have almost certainly reaped much more indirect benefit from farmers who have utility service. Like other private-public partnerships where government has intervened to do things like build the railroads and the interstate system, the point is that if you stop thinking of societal infrastructure as a profit center in and of itself and instead as something that is, broadly speaking, part of the general welfare, the indirect return on that investment in terms of efficiency, opening markets, and creating whole new ones vastly exceeds the capital spent on the infrastructure.
Back on the actual topic of the Slashdot post (gasp), I think a previous poster hit the nail on the head -- municipal wi-fi networks tend not to work because they really aren't societal infrastructure in the way electricity, sewer, and roads are. They're not even necessary if you grant that internet access is becoming critical infrastructure (just plug into the damn ethernet jack, son). And suddenly, you're not arguing for a subsidized basic service or even a subsidized forward-thinking visionary plan with room for debate, you're arguing for a government-provided luxury. That's gonna raise hackles across the political spectrum.
On a practical level rather than a "my code is more beautiful than yours" level, one answer is simple: deployment. If you're writing a program that's intended to be used pretty much just by you (or other people on your dev team, perhaps), it really doesn't matter what you write it in. If you're writing a program that's going to have to be rolled out to production systems that you don't have absolute control over -- like, say, a commercial web-hosting service -- there are new issues.
Ruby is getting a lot of attention because of Rails, and Rails' attention is making it moderately easy to find web hosts that support it. It is easier to deploy a Rails application than it is to deploy a Django application, if you're taking into account "I must find a web host that supports my framework/language." If you are writing, a web app in Smalltalk using Seaside, well, not only are you definitely not shoving that out to your $8/month Dreamhost account, the chances are you're going to have to have complete control of the production side (i.e., colocation or self-hosting). Also, of course, if you're writing for a business, maintainability becomes an issue with any "obscure" language: eventually, the original development team won't be there, and if you can't replace them because the dozen other people in your area who know the language you chose are happy at the research labs they're working at, you find yourself in a very uncomfortable place. I've heard the even a kindergartner can learn Smalltalk so fast they'll be writing complete CRM systems in a week! speech, too, but in practice it seems those kindergartners are few and far between.
Frankly, deployment issues are one of the reasons I'm slinking back to PHP myself; as much as I love Rails in theory, as it turns out, in practice Rails is a sufficient resource pig that many shared hosts that claim to support Rails put serious limitations on it unless you bump up your service level. (I know I'm inviting arguments from Rails fans here, but yes, I've really looked into this.)
The GPL is about restricting the developer in a few specific areas for the good of the non-developer. While I've made this observation before on occasion, I don't think that's really what the GPL does, even though I understand that's the intent (not to mention the talking point).
For the most part, the primary advantage a non-developer has by using open source software is that if the original developers abandon the project, the program doesn't necessarily sink with them. (By "non-developer," I'm stipulating that the user doesn't have the technical expertise to make changes to more than configuration files--debugging or new features requires an actual developer.) This isn't something to be taken lightly, I recognize; there's a lot of good software from days past that's in abandonware limbo at best, frozen as it existed at its point of last release forever.
But the point to understand here is that on a pragmatic rather than philosophical level, to the non-developer the license doesn't matter. Whether code can be incorporated into "non-free" projects is something that concerns developers, not end users. If I'm using a software package (and I can't program), it doesn't matter to me if FooCorp takes that same package and releases their closed-source FooDeluxe version of it. I can choose to purchase FooDeluxe if I want, but "OpenFoo" doesn't go away; it's possible development of OpenFoo may get kneecapped, particularly if FooCorp hired the lead developer or some such, but the risk of having the original developers leave for whatever reason doesn't change based on the license. The original OpenFoo code is still there and still open sourced, so it could be picked up.
It's always struck me that the GPL is best at protecting developers against the FooCorp scenario. The GPL can prevent Developer A from making a profit that's largely based on Developer B's work (or at least make it more difficult). Were I directing a company that wanted to open source some or all of their products, for whatever reason, I'd choose the GPL precisely because it restricts my competitors, existing or potential, from easily using my work.
Yet all the BSDs are really good. Especially OpenBSD. I think this really depends on what metric you're using. In terms of "fewest holes in the default install," I'll take OpenBSD at their word that they're golden gods, but in terms of performance and scalability, OpenBSD gets its butt kicked on many benchmarks. In a test a few years back, the conclusion was, "The installation routine sucks, the disk performance sucks, the kernel was unstable, and in the network scalability department it was even outperformed by it's father, NetBSD. OpenBSD also gets points deducted for the sabotage they did to their IPv6 stack. If you are using OpenBSD, you should move away now." While OpenBSD has gone through a major version since then, so has everybody else, and given the response of OpenBSD developers to this benchmark was essentially to blow off scalability concerns as irrelevant to their goal.
The kicker for me about OpenBSD, I suppose, is that while one could challenge its scalability problems as being more about metrics than real world use, one could challenge its security superiority in exactly the same way. Most of what leaves a system open to security vulnerability -- not all, but most -- is stuff that isn't in an OpenBSD default install, but is stuff that you're going to actually have to install (or enable) in many usage scenarios. OpenBSD advocates tend to paint it as leagues ahead of everything else; iIn practice, running (say) FreeBSD and simply tracking the STABLE branch is going to give you a pretty secure system.
On the other hand, we have a different group D, Another political group that wants to leave it as a police action and let Al Qaeda have free rein in whatever countries it can find support in.
With all due respect, this is the difference in perspective here. Most of "group D" thinks that the appropriate actions after Al Qaeda attacked America would have involved, um, going after Al Qaeda. Instead, "group R" took the attacks as a justification for going after Hussein and bringing down the government of Iraq. This is the foreign policy equivalent of using crimes committed by decrying the teenage drug gang in your city, and taking definitive action against -- the long-established organized crime ring a couple metro areas away.
When us "group D" folks point this out, the "group R" folks tend to ask things like, "So, you SUPPORTED Hussein? Huh? Huh?" But c'mon, that's a "have you stopped beating your wife yet" kind of attack. No, of course we didn't. We just don't think attacking Iraq had much to do with stopping Al Qaeda. And we think that no matter what your position on the war was to start with, the Iraq of 2007 is a much more violent, unstable, and not to put too fine a point on it, terrorist-filled place than the Iraq of 2001 was, and this is in no small part because we've flipped the political situation on its head. Hussein hated America but most of his citizenry hated him, and really didn't mind us. Now we've got a government there that (sort of) likes us but is completely ineffectual at running the country (and by some reports aiding and abetting its slide into civil war), and a citizenry that blames us -- with some justification -- for turning their country into a constant war zone. Nobody wants to live under a fascist dictatorship, but you know, replacing that with a country where death squads set up check points to kill people who belong to the "wrong" religious sect was not a way for America to win friends and influence people.
You can believe Al Qaeda "supports" the Democrats if you want, but I might gently point out that, um, you're the one taking Al Qaeda propaganda at its word when you do that. I think it's absolutely true that Bin Laden doesn't want a strong, stable, democratic Iraq, but -- again with all due respect -- after five years of "group R" getting their way on every single point when it comes to how to fight this war, Iraq looks like it's an awfully long way away from being strong, stable and democratic, doesn't it?
This is actually an issue I've been wrestling with recently.
From a language standpoint, Ruby -- and Python -- are simply much nicer to deal with than PHP usually is. As you probably know, PHP started life as a series of Perl scripts, and even though it left that behind long ago it still reminds me a lot of Perl in its quirkiness and overall feeling of being held together with Scotch tape and spit.
I'm using CakePHP for a work project now and it highlights a lot of these problems. It tries to be object-oriented; for instance, it closely mimics Ruby on Rails' MVC system. Except, you know, when it doesn't: for instance, it returns data results as arrays, rather than objects, so you'll end up writing code like this:
...and when you're dealing with more complex relationships (say, you have an order record which has multiple line item records which you need a field from), Ruby's conciseness starts looking mighty attractive compared to Cake's bloviation.
Having said that, though, I put the qualifier "usually" in there for a reason. If you were actually taking advantage of PHP 5, that PHP code could, and arguably should, be simply:
PHP 5.1's new PDO data abstraction layer is pretty easy to work with, lets you work directly with objects, lets you iterate through returned record objects correctly with foreach loops. While there's a lot of data abstraction choices for PHP, PDO is pretty competitive in performance with any of them, very straightforward and, in recent versions of PHP, just baked right in.
PHP 5's object system in general is actually much better than I'd been giving it credit for until I finally dug into it, too. It's definitely worth taking a bit of time -- if you're used to any other OO system, it won't take long -- to learn things about it.
I wrote on my blog not too long ago that PHP shares a largely self-inflicted image problem with Javascript: they can both be fairly powerful, well-executed languages, but they're burdened with a whole lot of crap. Part of that crap is just cruft that's been thrown onto the language (particularly in PHP's case), and part of it is that most people who program in both PHP and Javascript really aren't programmers, and boy, does it show.
I suspect for my next big project, I'm going to write in PHP 5 "natively"; as impressed as I am with what CakePHP is trying to do, their implementation is grating, and I don't think any framework that insists on backward compatibility with PHP 4 is going to be able to move past that. While it may seem a little perverse in this framework-happy age to start from scratch, really, you don't have to start from scratch: PHP's PEAR library contains a fair amount of good components (a fair amount of less good ones, to be sure, too).
As for performance, I think scalability issues with both PHP and RoR get overstated by critics. Ruby's biggest issue at this point performance-wise is simply that it's a very slow language. Rails does a lot of caching tricks to minimize this, but any other language can do the same caching tricks. PHP doesn't have that problem. Neither does Python; I saw someone tagged this article rather facetiously with "django," but you know, Django's a pretty good framework, and I'd give it a serious look for any project were I you. (I'm still giving it a look myself.)
The other issue you face with Rails and Django is deployment. PHP tends to pretty much just work when you slap it up on most web servers; Rails and Django, well, don't. You need a host who knows what they're doing with those frameworks or you need to be hosting it yourself, and learn what you're doing. Rails' deployment syst
You know, I don't like to respond to things like this, but those of us who haven't supported the Iraq war have been told that we are fucking committing treason because we've expressed our opinion. That saying anything critical of any aspect of the administration's way of doing things means we're "against the troops," that we're helping Al Qaeda, that we need to shut up or leave the country because we're not real Americans. So don't pretend that "silencing any opinion they don't agree with" is some kind of wacko left-wing thing that conservatives are standing strong against. Just -- don't.
And I mean this in the nicest possible way, but it'd be a lot easier to believe you have an interest in upholding everyone's right to an opinion and your fight against those who would silence dissent if it wasn't for your funny ha ha isn't that clever signature joking about keeping liberals from reproducing.
While I can't speak for the OP, for me, this article hits the "why are they posting something whose only point is to be political flamebait" nerve. The only -- the only -- possible outcome of posting a link to a fiery blog post which boils down to "They're making G.I. Joe politically correct! Man the battle stations!" is to create a long frothing argument between liberals, conservatives and libertarians over everything from the size of the government to the war in Iraq. They're not even attempting to make this sound like news: the Slashdot link could have been titled with, "New G.I. Joe team to be 'multicultural'," which would bring out nearly the same level of frothiness but the headline/summary would at least be pretending to be objective. But no, they wrote the headline to say, point blank, that G.I. Joe's status as an American icon is under attack.
I don't think one needs to be politically left-of-center to find this to just be exasperating shit. Most of the complaints about poor editorial judgment and general irrelevance on Slashdot are greatly exaggerated, but when someone wants to make a serious case for Slashdot's decline, this article is going to be one of the examples they use.
In response to Rwanda, that was a civil war between the Hutu and the Tutsi, neither of which is a church. Just like the US Civil War was not about religion, neither was Rwanda's. Absolutely. My point was in part that religion was used as a justification in that war, but the war itself wasn't religiously motivated. I don't think wars are ever entirely motivated by religion, and I think that's true in most cases in Islamic countries, too.
However, that's a point where "war" and "conflict" definitely aren't synonymous; a lot of conflicts are religiously motivated. There are obviously non-Islamic cases of that, too, certainly throughout history and even in recent times, but it seems that the most violent parts of the world currently often have strong Islamic influence or control.
The other point, though, was simply that those violent parts are also in pretty dire straits economically. They're second- or third-world, with everything that implies about resources. Historically, those conditions are frequently associated with increased crime and brutality, and are prime breeding grounds for revolution. My strong suspicion is that if more Islamic countries were like Dubai economically, more of them would be, well, like Dubai. (I'm aware Dubai isn't without problems on various levels, but you probably see what I mean.)
"Western meddling" wasn't an excuse, more an observation. Again, looking at broader conflicts, I think that's why a lot of the anger gets directed toward Western interests -- it's not have-nots envying haves, as some critics have suggested, but have-nots resenting the feeling that the haves kept coming over and screwing with them, often leaving the have-nots even worse off than when they started. I didn't mean to suggest that's the driving force of everything that could be characterized as "Muslim anger," though; it has more to do with the anti-Western trend running through it.
Now I'll throw a wrench into things with a random musing. One of the biggest differences between Islam and Christianity occurred to me after I wrote that last post: age. Islam is the 'youngest' of the major world religions, which means they're not that much older currently than when Christianity was engaged in the various Crusades. I wonder if there's something about the stage of the religion currently that magnifies its ability to be used as bludgeon.
I'm sure someone will read this and say, "Hey, didn't you just argue it was economics?"; I give economics higher weight (especially at a macro level), but I'm not discounting religion -- particularly one that's a very, well, crusading variant. The second- and third-world conditions are the fire, but that doesn't mean religion doesn't come along and throw gasoline into the mix.
While I'll preface this with the obligatory "speaking out of my ass" warning, the current conflict between Christianity and Islam may not have nearly as much to do with religion as is claimed (by Islamists as well as their critics). I think it has a lot more to do with history and economics.
Whether we like it or not, most of the history of Islamic countries is a history of constant Western meddling. We're not just talking about the Crusades, we're talking about the British empire, other European-controlled colonies, on up to 20th century American involvement. And there's a lot more of that than people now remember (or learned about). The first democracy in a predominantly Muslim country, for example, happened fifty years ago -- in Iran -- but as happened all too often during the Cold War, given a choice between an anti-American democracy and a pro-American despot, America backed the despot (the Shah of Iran). Not many Americans understand how much America, Britain and other "Christian" countries actively did to screw up that region, but the people there definitely do.
Religion comes into play, I think, mostly because it's a great motivator to bring together people who feel victimized and oppressed. God doesn't want you to be in this condition and if you bring the fight to the infidels, God will be on your side. It's easy to portray what we're seeing in Islamic countries as a function of Islam, but ever heard of the Rwandan genocide? It's as horrific as anything you can find in the Middle East -- estimates range from 500,000 to 800,000 people killed in the 1994 massacre. Rwanda was a predominantly Christian country. And darned if they weren't told that God was on their side. (Some pastors of the time have been convicted of war crimes since then.) You want irony? Many of the survivors of the genocide converted to Islam, because Christianity was the religion that went after them -- and it was the tiny Muslim communities in Rwanda that gave them protection.
This is really the key to understanding this phenomenon: Rwanda and countries like Iraq and Afghanistan have a lot of similar problems, from ravaged economies and little infrastructure to histories of oppression. What they do not have in common is religion. Christianity's presence didn't keep people from rising up and killing one another in Rwanda; Islam's presence isn't what compels people to do so in the Middle East. It's very easy to focus on ostensible differences between Christianity and Islam, but if you're really trying to understand the roots of Islamic terrorism, religious teachings are more red herring than Rosetta stone.
While I've said this before on occasion on Slashdot, thousand-dollar cables are not what most audiophiles are particularly interested in -- in fact, I really only see them being talked about by people who make thousand-dollar cables, and by people mocking audiophiles.:) Seriously, while I know they're out there, I don't know people who buy them. I suppose if you've already spend $100K on the audio equipment, another $10K on cabling doesn't sound ridiculous, but for those of use who'd spend "merely" $5K on the hardware, that's not gonna happen.
Unfortunately, the focus on the ha-ha-aren't-they-stupid tends to make people dismissive of anything more expensive than lamp wire for cabling, which is equally silly. We're not talking about woo-woo stuff like silver strands versus copper -- we're talking about basic electrical principles like impedance, capacitance and resistance. They matter, and they really are different between different kinds of cable.
And incidentally, gold connectors? They don't corrode. Nothing voodoo-ish about the idea, just common sense. And for goodness' sake, you can get audio cables with gold connectors at Radio Shack for $10 -- I do not understand why I keep seeing them being talked about in the same breath as $2000/meter Transparent Reference cables.
Most of the folks who wrote Gobe Productive rejoined Apple. I suspect the resemblance between "place everything in a box on pages" approach you see in Pages and Numbers is not just coincidentally similar to the ability Productive had to do the same thing.
While I know you're being facetious, Slashdot is the home of the pedantic geek, so: Access 2000 has a maximum database size of 2GB. You can only run a huge web site on it for relatively small values of "huge." Throwing great hardware at the problem will only mean you're running a poorly-chosen database program faster. (SQL Server is, as someone else pointed out, a completely unrelated program. No offense to the MySQL cheerleaders, but it wasn't until very recently that MySQL had kinda-sorta caught up to where SQL Server was a decade ago.)
"Not great?" The OP claimed that having a non-user-replaceable battery is "hardware lock-in." Even if you think it's a stupid idea and you don't buy arguments made as to why Apple chose that route, the battery issue doesn't meet any definition of lock-in I can possibly imagine. Perhaps that wasn't technically a troll, but since there is no "manifestly stupid" rating, troll may be as close as we can get.
If 15% of the new laptops sold this year are Apple, it really doesn't matter whether you decide to go and put Windows or Linux on it, from a market share standpoint: Apple is still selling 15% of the new laptops sold this year. This is something I think a lot of people (not speaking about you or the person you were replying to, per se, just in general) don't get: the hardware market is Apple, Dell, HP, Gateway, etc., not Apple and "Everybody Else" as one huge collective. Having said that, it's my suspicion that there are very few people who buy Macs with the intent of putting something other than OS X on them, simply because -- as you noted -- you can get other laptops for less from other companies. My MacBook Pro is a great laptop and I think it's relatively price-competitive for all it does, but if the set of "all it does" that was important to me personally didn't include "be a Mac," I'd have almost certainly gone with something else.
At any rate, this all strikes me as somewhat dubious. According to IDC, Apple's overall market share has grown by 26% in the last quarter and it's the #4 computer hardware vendor overall, and this is a more telling statistic than the idea that, out of all the computers shipped, the number of ones using Mac OS X dropped fractionally -- this simply means that, overall, there was slightly greater growth in PCs in the last quarter than in Macs, even though Apple did pretty well.
I think from a technical standpoint BeOS would have been just as good as NextStep as a basis for a "next-generation" MacOS. The usual knock (well, at the time) against BeOS was that it wasn't really a finished product then and was missing key features, which was true -- but Apple threw a lot of engineering resources and money at NextStep to turn it into Mac OS X, and I'm sure that would have happened with whatever BeOS became. There are still some aspects of BeOS that I miss, nearly a decade later, compared to current operating systems (including OS X).
However, one element that Apple got with the purchase of NeXT was what's really defined the company and the product line since, and that's not technical -- it's Steve Jobs. TFA may be correct that Apple wouldn't have done the iPhone and iPod if they'd bought Be, Inc., but that's not because of the operating system. Then again, Apple would have acquired another charismatic fruit loop of a leader in Jean-Louis Gassee, so who knows...
First Law of Republican Whining: any criticism of Republican actions or policy is only made by liberal Democrats, criticizing not out of sincere belief that the action or policy is wrong, but simply because the criticizer is a liberal Democrat. Pat Buchanan? Liberal Democrat. Lew Rockwell? Liberal Democrat. Ron Paul? Liberal Democrat. Andrew Sullivan? Liberal Democrat. Bruce Bartlett? Liberal Democrat. William Buckley? May still be a Republican, but since he's made statements that suggest he thinks the current Iraq policy may not be working, we'd better keep an eye on him.
Don't forget also, on most places, you have to pay sales tax (here is over 9%) at brick and mortar stores. Onlines sales don't burden you with that. And don't think that won't be changing. IIRC, Slashdot has run the "they want to tax the internet!" story recently and I've seen it in a few other places; they seem to be missing the point a bit, though -- the drive to tax online sales isn't about "taxing the internet" because it's the internet, or even because the government just wants more of your money. It's because they don't want less of your money. Sales that move online are lost sales tax revenues, and in most states sales tax is a significant chunk of government revenue as a whole.
Note I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing -- I'm saying, though, I suspect it's an unavoidable thing.
(Personally, I'd rather not see the death of the "offline store," sales tax or not. Browsing and window-shopping can be fun, instant gratification is always fun, and from an economic standpoint there's a value in keeping money as local as possible. That value already takes a big hit from national chains, where most of the money you spend isn't staying in the local economy; online sales remove all of it.)
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't found the iPhone's keyboard to be much worse than most physical cell phone keyboards, but that's not as much a function of the iPhone's brilliance as a function of how much most other cell phone keyboard suck. I didn't particularly like the Treo's, but it was amazing compared to most Blackberry keyboards, and particularly the keyboards that put multiple keys on each letter.
Having said that, though, tactile feedback would certainly be nice. I've heard from a couple people who prefer the iPhone's keyboard to the Treo's, but more who don't. I'm an iPhone owner now, but my previous phone for several years was the T-Mobile Sidekick, which has what I think is the best keyboard in the cell phone market. There are many things I prefer about the iPhone, but typing definitely ain't one of them.
Seriously, one thing Palm got really, really right when they first hit market was an obsessive focus on the form factor. There will undoubtedly be a market for the UMPC, but that market will not consist of people who want to be able to slip the device into their shirt pocket, and that market is really important for broad adoption.
But other than that, no conservative voices at all --
Wait, did I mention Tucker Carlson? No? Sorry. And the Weekly Standard, American Conservative, Human Events, and National Interest. Oh, and Front Page.
And the New York Post, although it's okay if you don't want to count them.
But, yeah! Without Fox around, there'd be... uh... no conservative voices in the media at all. Other than these.
Yay Fox. Stickin' it to the man.
While Sheepweevil makes essentially the same point, you could make the argument that restricting industry on the moon is good from the perspective of preserving natural monuments. There are a lot of sites right here on Earth that have no direct economic value, but that, it could be argued, have their own intrinsic, non-economic value. That notion of intrinsic value tends to sit very poorly with those who define all external value as economic, but conservation and preservation on purely economic measures has always been dicey. (i.e., if you tried to make an argument for restricting whaling based on the grounds that if you killed all of them, there wouldn't be a whaling industry any more, the moment someone comes along with a paper demonstrating that a higher return on investment can be achieved by killing all the whales now and sinking part of the profits into something else, you're hosed. An argument for saving whales has to assign them intrinsic value separate from their economic use.)
Of course, if I take off the devil's advocate hat, I might make the more prosaic point that there are a whole frikkin' lot of technological issues that have to be solved to get to the point where having this argument even makes sense. It's easy to pile onto Andrew Smith, the author of the anti-plundering column, but I'm not giving any kudos to Mark Whittington, the guy who wrote the response and managed to get Slashdot to put this on the front page. Smith's column is actually very short and doesn't really talk about "saving the moon's environment." Whittington is by and large using this as an excuse to trot out hoary old libertarian-crank* nonsense about how environmentalists are all anti-technology luddites who won't be happy unless we return to the Dark Ages.
*Before the libertarians leap on this, I do distinguish between "libertarian" and "libertarian-crank." Drawing the distinction is beyond the scope of this footnote.
Furthermore, the problem with bias is more a problem of psychology. There's been a few studies recently (some linked on Slashdot, I believe) showing that someone actually has to have a certain depth of understanding in a subject to evaluate their own competency correctly: people who know nothing, or moderate to significant amounts, about a subject usually accurately rate their own knowledge, but people who know a little about a subject tend to overestimate their knowledge. Couple that with the ability in modern times to read a whole lot of articles that each show a surface understanding of something people get passionate over -- Marxist theory, the gold standard, 9/11 -- and it's easy for people to become absolutely sure about the "truth" of talking points that they've come across time and time again without really understanding that they're hearing one half-truth that's undergone intense amplification in an echo chamber. And Wikipedia's system makes it hard to identify these and even harder to remove them: why, of course this is true, because there are multiple independent links I can give as reference! Well, if all those links are alarmist articles that, if you dig far enough, come from the same source whose understanding of what they're raising the alarm over is incorrect (or just incomplete), maybe they really shouldn't be given that much weight.
I use Wikipedia and I don't know that Citizendium is going to solve these potential pitfalls. But I think it's important to understand that "harnessing the collective intelligence of the masses" really does have potential pitfalls. It's good to profess question authority, but the problem with it -- and this is something I see outside Wikipedia, of course -- is that it often fails to distinguish between authority that's been granted (ilisten to him, he's a CEO!) and authority that's been earned (listen to him, he's been studying this field for two decades and is a recognized expert). At the extreme, this gets a little perverse: I have more than one friend who seems less likely to trust someone who's presented as an authority than someone who's just an interested layman.
While I've been trying to avoid giving examples that would cause arguments in and of themselves, I think this is really important when it comes to "controversial" issues, and those are probably precisely the issues where Wikipedia's style can lead to the most confusion. When push comes to shove, I would rather have articles on evolution vetted by evolutionary scientists, on the gold standard vetted by economists, and on climate change vetted by climate scientists. This doesn't mean that there's no place in an encyclopedia to talk about drawbacks to "fiat currency" and criticisms of prevailing climate models, but it does mean that you don't get equal time just because you're a contrarian. When the overwhelming bulk of study on a given topic supports one viewpoint, that's the viewpoint that an encyclopedia article -- which is, after all, meant as a quick overview of the topic in the first place -- logically should spend the bulk of its time on.
Wikipedia isn't as bad for this as its critics make it out to be, but ultimately, its distrust, and sometimes active snubbing, of experts is probably its most serious drawback, and there's no way to address that without doing a lot of re-examination of the Wikipedia "culture" -- and from what I understand, self-appointed editors there are very, very resistant to that notion. I think Citizendium is an interesting experiment with a different organizational model.
The money you spend on a system can be put into a lot of different components, many of them substantially less silly than arguments about wiring and cables -- the kinds and numbers of connections, support for different kinds of switching and related enhancements (i.e., HDMI 1.3? Analog to digital conversion? Upscaling?), and all the stuff that actually affects the audio signal like the number and class of amplification circuits, D/A-A/D converters, and so on. What makes someone an "audiophile," to my mind, is that they're more concerned with the audio signal stuff than the other features. You don't have to spend $50,000 or even $5,000 on stereo equipment to be an audiophile; the difference is that for whatever the budget you're setting yourself may be, you're going with a product that you believe is going to sound really great. I may spend (gasp) $800 on a product from Rotel or Outlaw Audio that does a lot less in terms of Great Lists of Features than something from Yamaha or Pioneer; the difference -- at least hopefully -- is that Rotel and Outlaw have put all that money into the audio signal rather than video switching between the 10 different HDMI components I don't have or five dozen stupid DSP effects that only get used when the guy at Circuit City is demoing them.
This really isn't that weird, is it?
Incidentally, I've considered myself an audiophile since the early '90s, and I haven't bought a single bakelite knob. (I have bought Monster Cables, I confess, but the original $1/foot variety. In the future, I'd probably get Belden 5000UE at about $0.40/ft and add banana plugs myself.)
This is what previous posters have been trying to get across when they were mentioning the Rural Electrification Projects of the early 20th century. Private power and telephone companies saw no profit in running utility lines out to farm country, where you might have a home every acre (or every five or ten!); the upshot is that rural customers who had any service at all would be paying three or four times as much as urban dwellers for it. This was addressed by private-public partnerships and utility co-ops, some of which still exist to this day.
No offense, but your argument seems to exhibit a particular kind of libertarian naivete which refuses to admit the existence of indirect benefits. You, personally, may be poorer by the amount of the surcharge on your power bill still funding such projects, and indeed you are probably being denied a full meal at Chili's annually (if the taxes are particularly onerous in your area, you may even be denied a margarita with that meal), but you, personally, have almost certainly reaped much more indirect benefit from farmers who have utility service. Like other private-public partnerships where government has intervened to do things like build the railroads and the interstate system, the point is that if you stop thinking of societal infrastructure as a profit center in and of itself and instead as something that is, broadly speaking, part of the general welfare, the indirect return on that investment in terms of efficiency, opening markets, and creating whole new ones vastly exceeds the capital spent on the infrastructure.
Back on the actual topic of the Slashdot post (gasp), I think a previous poster hit the nail on the head -- municipal wi-fi networks tend not to work because they really aren't societal infrastructure in the way electricity, sewer, and roads are. They're not even necessary if you grant that internet access is becoming critical infrastructure (just plug into the damn ethernet jack, son). And suddenly, you're not arguing for a subsidized basic service or even a subsidized forward-thinking visionary plan with room for debate, you're arguing for a government-provided luxury. That's gonna raise hackles across the political spectrum.
On a practical level rather than a "my code is more beautiful than yours" level, one answer is simple: deployment. If you're writing a program that's intended to be used pretty much just by you (or other people on your dev team, perhaps), it really doesn't matter what you write it in. If you're writing a program that's going to have to be rolled out to production systems that you don't have absolute control over -- like, say, a commercial web-hosting service -- there are new issues.
Ruby is getting a lot of attention because of Rails, and Rails' attention is making it moderately easy to find web hosts that support it. It is easier to deploy a Rails application than it is to deploy a Django application, if you're taking into account "I must find a web host that supports my framework/language." If you are writing, a web app in Smalltalk using Seaside, well, not only are you definitely not shoving that out to your $8/month Dreamhost account, the chances are you're going to have to have complete control of the production side (i.e., colocation or self-hosting). Also, of course, if you're writing for a business, maintainability becomes an issue with any "obscure" language: eventually, the original development team won't be there, and if you can't replace them because the dozen other people in your area who know the language you chose are happy at the research labs they're working at, you find yourself in a very uncomfortable place. I've heard the even a kindergartner can learn Smalltalk so fast they'll be writing complete CRM systems in a week! speech, too, but in practice it seems those kindergartners are few and far between.
Frankly, deployment issues are one of the reasons I'm slinking back to PHP myself; as much as I love Rails in theory, as it turns out, in practice Rails is a sufficient resource pig that many shared hosts that claim to support Rails put serious limitations on it unless you bump up your service level. (I know I'm inviting arguments from Rails fans here, but yes, I've really looked into this.)
For the most part, the primary advantage a non-developer has by using open source software is that if the original developers abandon the project, the program doesn't necessarily sink with them. (By "non-developer," I'm stipulating that the user doesn't have the technical expertise to make changes to more than configuration files--debugging or new features requires an actual developer.) This isn't something to be taken lightly, I recognize; there's a lot of good software from days past that's in abandonware limbo at best, frozen as it existed at its point of last release forever.
But the point to understand here is that on a pragmatic rather than philosophical level, to the non-developer the license doesn't matter. Whether code can be incorporated into "non-free" projects is something that concerns developers, not end users. If I'm using a software package (and I can't program), it doesn't matter to me if FooCorp takes that same package and releases their closed-source FooDeluxe version of it. I can choose to purchase FooDeluxe if I want, but "OpenFoo" doesn't go away; it's possible development of OpenFoo may get kneecapped, particularly if FooCorp hired the lead developer or some such, but the risk of having the original developers leave for whatever reason doesn't change based on the license. The original OpenFoo code is still there and still open sourced, so it could be picked up.
It's always struck me that the GPL is best at protecting developers against the FooCorp scenario. The GPL can prevent Developer A from making a profit that's largely based on Developer B's work (or at least make it more difficult). Were I directing a company that wanted to open source some or all of their products, for whatever reason, I'd choose the GPL precisely because it restricts my competitors, existing or potential, from easily using my work.
The kicker for me about OpenBSD, I suppose, is that while one could challenge its scalability problems as being more about metrics than real world use, one could challenge its security superiority in exactly the same way. Most of what leaves a system open to security vulnerability -- not all, but most -- is stuff that isn't in an OpenBSD default install, but is stuff that you're going to actually have to install (or enable) in many usage scenarios. OpenBSD advocates tend to paint it as leagues ahead of everything else; iIn practice, running (say) FreeBSD and simply tracking the STABLE branch is going to give you a pretty secure system.
On the other hand, we have a different group D, Another political group that wants to leave it as a police action and let Al Qaeda have free rein in whatever countries it can find support in.
With all due respect, this is the difference in perspective here. Most of "group D" thinks that the appropriate actions after Al Qaeda attacked America would have involved, um, going after Al Qaeda. Instead, "group R" took the attacks as a justification for going after Hussein and bringing down the government of Iraq. This is the foreign policy equivalent of using crimes committed by decrying the teenage drug gang in your city, and taking definitive action against -- the long-established organized crime ring a couple metro areas away.
When us "group D" folks point this out, the "group R" folks tend to ask things like, "So, you SUPPORTED Hussein? Huh? Huh?" But c'mon, that's a "have you stopped beating your wife yet" kind of attack. No, of course we didn't. We just don't think attacking Iraq had much to do with stopping Al Qaeda. And we think that no matter what your position on the war was to start with, the Iraq of 2007 is a much more violent, unstable, and not to put too fine a point on it, terrorist-filled place than the Iraq of 2001 was, and this is in no small part because we've flipped the political situation on its head. Hussein hated America but most of his citizenry hated him, and really didn't mind us. Now we've got a government there that (sort of) likes us but is completely ineffectual at running the country (and by some reports aiding and abetting its slide into civil war), and a citizenry that blames us -- with some justification -- for turning their country into a constant war zone. Nobody wants to live under a fascist dictatorship, but you know, replacing that with a country where death squads set up check points to kill people who belong to the "wrong" religious sect was not a way for America to win friends and influence people.
You can believe Al Qaeda "supports" the Democrats if you want, but I might gently point out that, um, you're the one taking Al Qaeda propaganda at its word when you do that. I think it's absolutely true that Bin Laden doesn't want a strong, stable, democratic Iraq, but -- again with all due respect -- after five years of "group R" getting their way on every single point when it comes to how to fight this war, Iraq looks like it's an awfully long way away from being strong, stable and democratic, doesn't it?
From a language standpoint, Ruby -- and Python -- are simply much nicer to deal with than PHP usually is. As you probably know, PHP started life as a series of Perl scripts, and even though it left that behind long ago it still reminds me a lot of Perl in its quirkiness and overall feeling of being held together with Scotch tape and spit.
I'm using CakePHP for a work project now and it highlights a lot of these problems. It tries to be object-oriented; for instance, it closely mimics Ruby on Rails' MVC system. Except, you know, when it doesn't: for instance, it returns data results as arrays, rather than objects, so you'll end up writing code like this:
Rather than Ruby's roughly equivalent:
Having said that, though, I put the qualifier "usually" in there for a reason. If you were actually taking advantage of PHP 5, that PHP code could, and arguably should, be simply:
PHP 5.1's new PDO data abstraction layer is pretty easy to work with, lets you work directly with objects, lets you iterate through returned record objects correctly with foreach loops. While there's a lot of data abstraction choices for PHP, PDO is pretty competitive in performance with any of them, very straightforward and, in recent versions of PHP, just baked right in.
PHP 5's object system in general is actually much better than I'd been giving it credit for until I finally dug into it, too. It's definitely worth taking a bit of time -- if you're used to any other OO system, it won't take long -- to learn things about it.
I wrote on my blog not too long ago that PHP shares a largely self-inflicted image problem with Javascript: they can both be fairly powerful, well-executed languages, but they're burdened with a whole lot of crap. Part of that crap is just cruft that's been thrown onto the language (particularly in PHP's case), and part of it is that most people who program in both PHP and Javascript really aren't programmers, and boy, does it show.
I suspect for my next big project, I'm going to write in PHP 5 "natively"; as impressed as I am with what CakePHP is trying to do, their implementation is grating, and I don't think any framework that insists on backward compatibility with PHP 4 is going to be able to move past that. While it may seem a little perverse in this framework-happy age to start from scratch, really, you don't have to start from scratch: PHP's PEAR library contains a fair amount of good components (a fair amount of less good ones, to be sure, too).
As for performance, I think scalability issues with both PHP and RoR get overstated by critics. Ruby's biggest issue at this point performance-wise is simply that it's a very slow language. Rails does a lot of caching tricks to minimize this, but any other language can do the same caching tricks. PHP doesn't have that problem. Neither does Python; I saw someone tagged this article rather facetiously with "django," but you know, Django's a pretty good framework, and I'd give it a serious look for any project were I you. (I'm still giving it a look myself.)
The other issue you face with Rails and Django is deployment. PHP tends to pretty much just work when you slap it up on most web servers; Rails and Django, well, don't. You need a host who knows what they're doing with those frameworks or you need to be hosting it yourself, and learn what you're doing. Rails' deployment syst
You know, I don't like to respond to things like this, but those of us who haven't supported the Iraq war have been told that we are fucking committing treason because we've expressed our opinion. That saying anything critical of any aspect of the administration's way of doing things means we're "against the troops," that we're helping Al Qaeda, that we need to shut up or leave the country because we're not real Americans. So don't pretend that "silencing any opinion they don't agree with" is some kind of wacko left-wing thing that conservatives are standing strong against. Just -- don't.
And I mean this in the nicest possible way, but it'd be a lot easier to believe you have an interest in upholding everyone's right to an opinion and your fight against those who would silence dissent if it wasn't for your funny ha ha isn't that clever signature joking about keeping liberals from reproducing.
While I can't speak for the OP, for me, this article hits the "why are they posting something whose only point is to be political flamebait" nerve. The only -- the only -- possible outcome of posting a link to a fiery blog post which boils down to "They're making G.I. Joe politically correct! Man the battle stations!" is to create a long frothing argument between liberals, conservatives and libertarians over everything from the size of the government to the war in Iraq. They're not even attempting to make this sound like news: the Slashdot link could have been titled with, "New G.I. Joe team to be 'multicultural'," which would bring out nearly the same level of frothiness but the headline/summary would at least be pretending to be objective. But no, they wrote the headline to say, point blank, that G.I. Joe's status as an American icon is under attack.
I don't think one needs to be politically left-of-center to find this to just be exasperating shit. Most of the complaints about poor editorial judgment and general irrelevance on Slashdot are greatly exaggerated, but when someone wants to make a serious case for Slashdot's decline, this article is going to be one of the examples they use.
However, that's a point where "war" and "conflict" definitely aren't synonymous; a lot of conflicts are religiously motivated. There are obviously non-Islamic cases of that, too, certainly throughout history and even in recent times, but it seems that the most violent parts of the world currently often have strong Islamic influence or control.
The other point, though, was simply that those violent parts are also in pretty dire straits economically. They're second- or third-world, with everything that implies about resources. Historically, those conditions are frequently associated with increased crime and brutality, and are prime breeding grounds for revolution. My strong suspicion is that if more Islamic countries were like Dubai economically, more of them would be, well, like Dubai. (I'm aware Dubai isn't without problems on various levels, but you probably see what I mean.)
"Western meddling" wasn't an excuse, more an observation. Again, looking at broader conflicts, I think that's why a lot of the anger gets directed toward Western interests -- it's not have-nots envying haves, as some critics have suggested, but have-nots resenting the feeling that the haves kept coming over and screwing with them, often leaving the have-nots even worse off than when they started. I didn't mean to suggest that's the driving force of everything that could be characterized as "Muslim anger," though; it has more to do with the anti-Western trend running through it.
Now I'll throw a wrench into things with a random musing. One of the biggest differences between Islam and Christianity occurred to me after I wrote that last post: age. Islam is the 'youngest' of the major world religions, which means they're not that much older currently than when Christianity was engaged in the various Crusades. I wonder if there's something about the stage of the religion currently that magnifies its ability to be used as bludgeon.
I'm sure someone will read this and say, "Hey, didn't you just argue it was economics?"; I give economics higher weight (especially at a macro level), but I'm not discounting religion -- particularly one that's a very, well, crusading variant. The second- and third-world conditions are the fire, but that doesn't mean religion doesn't come along and throw gasoline into the mix.
While I'll preface this with the obligatory "speaking out of my ass" warning, the current conflict between Christianity and Islam may not have nearly as much to do with religion as is claimed (by Islamists as well as their critics). I think it has a lot more to do with history and economics.
Whether we like it or not, most of the history of Islamic countries is a history of constant Western meddling. We're not just talking about the Crusades, we're talking about the British empire, other European-controlled colonies, on up to 20th century American involvement. And there's a lot more of that than people now remember (or learned about). The first democracy in a predominantly Muslim country, for example, happened fifty years ago -- in Iran -- but as happened all too often during the Cold War, given a choice between an anti-American democracy and a pro-American despot, America backed the despot (the Shah of Iran). Not many Americans understand how much America, Britain and other "Christian" countries actively did to screw up that region, but the people there definitely do.
Religion comes into play, I think, mostly because it's a great motivator to bring together people who feel victimized and oppressed. God doesn't want you to be in this condition and if you bring the fight to the infidels, God will be on your side. It's easy to portray what we're seeing in Islamic countries as a function of Islam, but ever heard of the Rwandan genocide? It's as horrific as anything you can find in the Middle East -- estimates range from 500,000 to 800,000 people killed in the 1994 massacre. Rwanda was a predominantly Christian country. And darned if they weren't told that God was on their side. (Some pastors of the time have been convicted of war crimes since then.) You want irony? Many of the survivors of the genocide converted to Islam, because Christianity was the religion that went after them -- and it was the tiny Muslim communities in Rwanda that gave them protection.
This is really the key to understanding this phenomenon: Rwanda and countries like Iraq and Afghanistan have a lot of similar problems, from ravaged economies and little infrastructure to histories of oppression. What they do not have in common is religion. Christianity's presence didn't keep people from rising up and killing one another in Rwanda; Islam's presence isn't what compels people to do so in the Middle East. It's very easy to focus on ostensible differences between Christianity and Islam, but if you're really trying to understand the roots of Islamic terrorism, religious teachings are more red herring than Rosetta stone.
While I've said this before on occasion on Slashdot, thousand-dollar cables are not what most audiophiles are particularly interested in -- in fact, I really only see them being talked about by people who make thousand-dollar cables, and by people mocking audiophiles. :) Seriously, while I know they're out there, I don't know people who buy them. I suppose if you've already spend $100K on the audio equipment, another $10K on cabling doesn't sound ridiculous, but for those of use who'd spend "merely" $5K on the hardware, that's not gonna happen.
Unfortunately, the focus on the ha-ha-aren't-they-stupid tends to make people dismissive of anything more expensive than lamp wire for cabling, which is equally silly. We're not talking about woo-woo stuff like silver strands versus copper -- we're talking about basic electrical principles like impedance, capacitance and resistance. They matter, and they really are different between different kinds of cable.
And incidentally, gold connectors? They don't corrode. Nothing voodoo-ish about the idea, just common sense. And for goodness' sake, you can get audio cables with gold connectors at Radio Shack for $10 -- I do not understand why I keep seeing them being talked about in the same breath as $2000/meter Transparent Reference cables.
Most of the folks who wrote Gobe Productive rejoined Apple. I suspect the resemblance between "place everything in a box on pages" approach you see in Pages and Numbers is not just coincidentally similar to the ability Productive had to do the same thing.
While I know you're being facetious, Slashdot is the home of the pedantic geek, so: Access 2000 has a maximum database size of 2GB. You can only run a huge web site on it for relatively small values of "huge." Throwing great hardware at the problem will only mean you're running a poorly-chosen database program faster. (SQL Server is, as someone else pointed out, a completely unrelated program. No offense to the MySQL cheerleaders, but it wasn't until very recently that MySQL had kinda-sorta caught up to where SQL Server was a decade ago.)
"Not great?" The OP claimed that having a non-user-replaceable battery is "hardware lock-in." Even if you think it's a stupid idea and you don't buy arguments made as to why Apple chose that route, the battery issue doesn't meet any definition of lock-in I can possibly imagine. Perhaps that wasn't technically a troll, but since there is no "manifestly stupid" rating, troll may be as close as we can get.
If 15% of the new laptops sold this year are Apple, it really doesn't matter whether you decide to go and put Windows or Linux on it, from a market share standpoint: Apple is still selling 15% of the new laptops sold this year. This is something I think a lot of people (not speaking about you or the person you were replying to, per se, just in general) don't get: the hardware market is Apple, Dell, HP, Gateway, etc., not Apple and "Everybody Else" as one huge collective. Having said that, it's my suspicion that there are very few people who buy Macs with the intent of putting something other than OS X on them, simply because -- as you noted -- you can get other laptops for less from other companies. My MacBook Pro is a great laptop and I think it's relatively price-competitive for all it does, but if the set of "all it does" that was important to me personally didn't include "be a Mac," I'd have almost certainly gone with something else. At any rate, this all strikes me as somewhat dubious. According to IDC, Apple's overall market share has grown by 26% in the last quarter and it's the #4 computer hardware vendor overall, and this is a more telling statistic than the idea that, out of all the computers shipped, the number of ones using Mac OS X dropped fractionally -- this simply means that, overall, there was slightly greater growth in PCs in the last quarter than in Macs, even though Apple did pretty well.
I think from a technical standpoint BeOS would have been just as good as NextStep as a basis for a "next-generation" MacOS. The usual knock (well, at the time) against BeOS was that it wasn't really a finished product then and was missing key features, which was true -- but Apple threw a lot of engineering resources and money at NextStep to turn it into Mac OS X, and I'm sure that would have happened with whatever BeOS became. There are still some aspects of BeOS that I miss, nearly a decade later, compared to current operating systems (including OS X).
However, one element that Apple got with the purchase of NeXT was what's really defined the company and the product line since, and that's not technical -- it's Steve Jobs. TFA may be correct that Apple wouldn't have done the iPhone and iPod if they'd bought Be, Inc., but that's not because of the operating system. Then again, Apple would have acquired another charismatic fruit loop of a leader in Jean-Louis Gassee, so who knows...
First Law of Republican Whining: any criticism of Republican actions or policy is only made by liberal Democrats, criticizing not out of sincere belief that the action or policy is wrong, but simply because the criticizer is a liberal Democrat. Pat Buchanan? Liberal Democrat. Lew Rockwell? Liberal Democrat. Ron Paul? Liberal Democrat. Andrew Sullivan? Liberal Democrat. Bruce Bartlett? Liberal Democrat. William Buckley? May still be a Republican, but since he's made statements that suggest he thinks the current Iraq policy may not be working, we'd better keep an eye on him.
Note I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing -- I'm saying, though, I suspect it's an unavoidable thing.
(Personally, I'd rather not see the death of the "offline store," sales tax or not. Browsing and window-shopping can be fun, instant gratification is always fun, and from an economic standpoint there's a value in keeping money as local as possible. That value already takes a big hit from national chains, where most of the money you spend isn't staying in the local economy; online sales remove all of it.)