Its math. If calories expended are greater than what you eat, you will lose weight. Track your calories and start exercising. I'll accept that there are probably some people who are genetically challenged at losing weight, just like there are people with crazy metabolisms that can't gain weight no matter how much they eat. But even if you don't get all the way to a 6-pack, you'll still feel good, have more energy, and (most importantly) be healthier.
Difficult weight loss is still weight loss. It will just take longer to achieve the same results. Go to a gym and talk to a nutritionist. Develop a weight loss plan (you should be able to come up with a plan based on your starting weight and you goal in 1 session), then count your calories, and do moderate exercise a few times a week. Replace ramen and TV dinners with better quality food so you're getting the most out of those calories.
Continuing that thought... How many of the protestors vote regularly? And how many of them vote on emotional issues (gay marriage, marijuana, abortion) instead of issues that actually affect them on a daily basis? If it is more important for you and your children to be unemployed, broke, and stupid than for homosexuals to share healthcare benefits, keep it up.
The message to the 1% is falling on deaf ears (to be fair, some of them probably get a good laugh out of it). Instead target the rest of the 99% to pull their heads out of their asses and vote for real changes that will benefit themselves.
Congress is on the payroll because Congress has the wrong people in it. The 99% (or at least 50% of them) voted those corrupt politicians into office to "represent" them. I support these protests as far as raising awareness, but none of their messages will be heard by the 1%. The message should be to the rest of the 99%, to get out and vote and make change happen. Ignore the BS, and vote on what really affects you on a daily basis. Gay marriage and medical marijuana didn't cause the recession.
We still want noon to be when the sun is overhead, and midnight to be the middle of the night.
They would be, they just wouldn't necessarily be at 12:00. Or at 0:00. I'm not saying its a good idea, just that it descriptive time would still work, and would in fact be more useful as you travel around. Midnight and noon. Sunrise and sunset. Dusk and dawn and twilight and all that. Business hours. Hammer time.
Bonus: it screws up the analytics, since your viewer is effectively clicking on every shortened URL (in order to fetch the proper URL) even though you actually click on none.
All I see in the picture is some grotesquely obese guy with a poor fashion choice. And he looks pretty cramped in that Ford Excursion.;)
The article actually specifically mentions that issue, at the end of the first paragraph, "Obesity has caused more people to buy larger vehicles..." I'm sure most of the increase in (non-commercial) car size is due to enormously fat people not fitting into normal cars (and bottoming out suspension, etc). That's pretty much common sense, and we've already had the "bigger cars use more gas" discussion. This article is trying to hit closer to home with the message, "your big fat ass uses more gas". Even a big, inefficient gas guzzler uses more gas hauling around a load of 300lb passengers than it does passengers 2/3 or half that size. Other wasteful behavior is pretty much irrelevant to this discussion, and doesn't negate the facts that body weight affects gas mileage. No matter how much unnecessary cargo, or sand bags, or whatever else you might have in the car (that can easily be removed if you wanted), your ass is always with you, putting additional load on the car's engine. No matter how stupid it is to go grocery shopping in a lifted H2 on 44s with a chrome winch, and an ATV on the roof rack, it still uses even more fuel if the driver is 200lb overweight.
Sure the article says its only.7% increase overall, but that increase is heavily weighted towards obese people. Skinny drivers help bring up the average MPG, so the impact doesn't seem as great. The increase in fuel consumption due to obesity affects *my* gas-mileage by about 0 percent. My 300-lb friend probably makes way more than.7% more trips to the gas station than I do, since he's carrying the burden (so to speak). That extra billion gallons of waste isn't evenly distributed across the population (though the environmental impact of burning that extra fuel to drag one's fat ass around town affects us all equally).
I'd be curious to see the study break out the numbers by weight class, or maybe have a test group of various people driving the same car (or same kind of car, and do it for several models) to see how their specific weights affect mileage. If they showed that being 50-100lb overweight actually costs you (just guessing) 10% more annually, that would have way more impact.
Interestingly, the bigger cars will show less of a performance decrease from obese drivers, since an extra 200-lb on the driver's body is a much smaller percentage of the total vehicle weight. Adding a 300-lb passenger to an 8000 SUV won't really affect much; its a drop in the bucket. Add a 300-lb passenger to a Toyota Corolla, and you can immediately tell a difference in the way the car accelerates and handles. As an obese driver of an H2 sheds weight, there will hardly be any increase in gas mileage; a 100-lb weight loss is barely more than a 1% change in total vehicle weight; mileage might increase from 11 mpg to 11.1 mpg. Drop 100-lb from your body and an econobox getting 35+mpg will gain a couple of mpg. The fact that obese people don't fit in efficient cars dilutes the real problem even more.
While it is conceivable that some super-hearing audiophiles can detect a difference when listening in their acoustically perfect sound-proof rooms, that's hardly "regular listening" for most people. In any other place where there is actual ambient noise, decent mp3s are probably indistinguishable from CDs (especially newer CDs where they over-process and compress everything so it seems "louder").
CDs will continue to be the primary choice as soon as music stores stop closing down.
Digital downloads are the primary choice for the younger generations, and the rest of the population is trending that way. Convenience is king. Physical media is becoming a niche market, much in the way vinyl records and tapes gave way to CDs (even though many people continue to claim that CDs "fail on decent audio equipment for regular listening" compared to dragging a small chunk of polished rock through grooves on a plastic disc).
I would hope we're past that already. It has been tried and failed many times. Trying it again as "customer abuse with a better price point" would fail just as badly. I expect its the same product as now, just priced to sell, instead of priced to sit on shelves and boost pageviews for The Pirate Bay.
Apple chooses their price point. They don't choose what people are willing to pay for an item.
If Apple had brought it out at $1000, I doubt many people would buy them. At $500 I'm still not interested in it. If I'm in their target market (and I think I should be) then it is overpriced by at least a couple hundred dollars.
If they want me to pay more for it, then it needs to do more. A camera would be nice. Multitasking is a necessity. I hate the constant starting and stopping of apps on the iPhone (and if the next iPhone OS doesn't support backgrounding third party apps, I'm bailing on the iPhone, too). Also multiple apps sharing the big screen (instead of the lame 2x blurrification of the iPhone apps, run 4 of them on screen at a time!).
I have a "hybrid" electric bike. It has an electric motor in the hub, and regular pedals for the human powerplant. The motor works best as an assist, particularly nice on steep hills. I mainly use the electric motor to get up to speed, then can pedal to maintain. Using both at the same time gives a good quick launch from a standstill. The electric motor on mine tops out at about 15mph, which is decent. I can go faster on a normal bike, but I break a sweat.:)
It still works, just slower. There is always alternative product.
I'm not quite ready to dump my iPhone over this, but I won't be buying an iPad. I can accept these limitations on my mobile phone, since I mostly just use the stock set of apps anyway. If these sorts of limits start showing up in MacOSX, then I'll "upgrade" my MacBook Pro (and my 3 other Macs) to linux instead of the next great feline. That's not a huge ding to Apple, but once I'm off their OS, I'll stop buying their hardware. I'll stop suggesting it to my family and friends.
While it's true that data packages are expensive, I use the hell out of my data package. I'd guess the margin on data usage is nowhere near the insane margins on text messages. And I still have to pay for text messages on top of my data plan. It's not a choice of one or the other. If I could text for free via the data channel, then AT&T would lose $5/month (or whatever my text plan costs me now).
I like having a unique ringtone on my phone, but it is solely for my own benefit. When I hear my ringtone, I absolutely know that it is my phone ringing. I don't play the musical snippet as a "favor" to you. Neither do I give a crap who else hears it. Its my signal that my cellphone has a call.
Cell phones are so prevalent that using any of the default sounds ends up with too many false alarms. Go to a construction site and play the "Nextel chirp". Then watch everyone within earshot check their phone. Its pretty funny, and demonstrates a failure of the alert tone.
I agree with you that the "ringtone industry" is a huge scam, exploiting teenagers and poor people. Ringtones are not status symbols. But if you seriously have an issue with someone's choice of ringtone, get over yourself.
Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. GWB started the war with Iraq, using 9/11 as a tenuous excuse. I agree with you that we should go after those responsible, but instead we've killed tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in a war that we absolutely started.
Guantanamo was a disgrace, IMHO. Throwing away our principles and embracing those of our enemies makes me ashamed of our country.
Its not information that you cannot otherwise get just about anywhere else, is it? I'm not suggesting we restrict access to the information, but we haven't had it in the car yet, and we shouldn't. Such a device does not belong where it can be a distraction to the driver. I'm sorry, but I don't want to be killed in a head-on collision with someone tweeting on their steering wheel, "OMG. I think I'm on the wrong side of the road! LOL!"
It reminds me of the LG refrigerator with a web browser built in. Sure its possible, but why? And staring at the screen while operating the refrigerator is very, very unlikely to kill anyone (unless, I suppose, you leave the door open, the food spoils, then you serve it to your family...).
I see this being interesting, a very good idea as far as the ability to access information goes but a very bad idea as far as safety goes.
I agree with you that its a very bad idea regarding safety, but completely disagree about it being a very good idea as far as anything. Its a "neat" idea, and probably implemented in a fairly clever way, but adding new, irrelevant yet more-engaging distractions to the driver is just stupid. If you are driving, you should not be reading RSS feeds, whether on a cell phone, laptop, or the freaking dashboard. If you need to be accessing information while you are driving, get a passenger to read it to you. Or let someone else drive.
Hopefully these things are implemented in such a way that they don't function (or at least don't allow you to interact with them) while the car is moving. If not, then I think the manufacturers are being irresponsible and will probably get sued (hopefully before these systems cause too many fatal accident).
In Oregon we have a similar new law this year. It should have been a more comprehensive distracted driving law, but instead it just outlaws using a hand-held cell phone or texting while driving. Systems like these will allow people to circumvent that law, since they'll be looking at their dashboard instead of the outlawed device. Either way their eyes aren't on the road.
I always tell people, "the problem isn't that *you* can't handle talking on the phone and driving (even though you really can't). Its that all of the idiots around us can't handle it, and I don't want them running into me!"
Re:Motion blur and bloom effects
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Framerates Matter
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree with you...
Some argue (like the battle between 30fps vs 60fps) that human eye can't process more than certain amount of "frames" per second.
Isn't the reason movies use 24 fps (and similarly TV uses ~30fps) because of historical technical limitations? That is right about the minimum rate where your eyes and brain can smooth out the annoying flicker. 30fps isn't the upper limit that the eye can process, but rather a lower limit that makes the image sequence appear as motion without causing stutter, headaches, or otherwise detract from the visual experience. Its a compromise to allow movies to fit on reasonable sized rolls of film, and for TV to have been able to fit "good enough" video quality into the available bandwidth at the time, and to not have frequency beating artifacts due to lights running on 60Hz AC power (or 50Hz & 25fps in Europe, etc).
For an easy example that 30fps isn't enough, run iTunes, play some music and turn on the "iTunes Classic Visualizer" full screen. Hit "F" to display the frame rate, then use "T" to toggle the 30fps limit on and off. Tell me you don't see a big difference.
I'm sure there's an upper threshold where you can't distinguish a difference as frame rate increases, but its much higher than 30 or 60 fps, and as the parent said it is probably higher than we can achieve in hardware for the near future.
I was actually talking about a 2nd generation iPhone. The "3G" refers to the cellular network technology, rather than the product generation. The 3rd generation iPhone is the "3GS". But that's all beside my point.
I wasn't comparing the G1 to the iPhone and finding it lacking. I was comparing the G1 to the Android marketing and press releases at the time and finding it lacking. When I compared my iPhone to Apple marketing, it held up.
I think the way Android is being released and marketed is confusing. The Android OS will always be ahead of the devices sold by carriers, just by the nature of how the carriers work. Since Android is open source, and since Google doesn't yet have any real stake in the device market, I don't see how that can change.
Surely Apple is already working on a 4th generation of the iPhone, but they keep the unavailable features under wraps until they're ready for market (or at least pretty close). iPhone marketing matches the iPhone reality right up until the announcement of the new version, and then there's only disparity for a brief time until the device ships.
Maybe when Google has their own device things will be different. Maybe we'll be able to update it to run beta versions of Android or even install builds from the latest source code. But as long as the marketing tracks with the latest OS developments that cannot be used on any available devices, the devices will always seem to be lacking. I'll always feel like I'm choosing between "last year's Android" and the "latest and greatest iPhone".
I certainly agree that some religions do teach hate, but Christ's teachings (for example) have never supported hate nor violence. (I'm not saying the Catholic Church never supported violence; that's an entirely separate issue.)
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Few religions advocate violence against those who hold different beliefs.
The actual text of the religions is not the problem. In fact Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are more than 95% the same, but some of the characters have different names. The problem isn't the religion itself, but that the people in power exploit religion to manipulate the poor and the gullible into doing strange things.
When I was in college, one of my friends was hard-core Christian, and he was really worried that if the rest of us didn't accept Christ, we'd be going to Hell. That's absurd. When we die, all of our corpses will rot in the ground just the same, but his priests (or whatever) gave him the idea that he needed to go out and "save" people, so he'd brainwash kids at summer camps, and try to convert his non-believer friends.
Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses go door to door harassing people who follow the wrong religion. And don't tell me they don't think its wrong; if they thought all religions were equal, they'd leave people alone.
The Republican party exploited religion to get George Bush elected president in 2004 (in 2000 they exploited religion to almost elect him, and used other bogus methods to eventually get him declared President).
I was brought up Jewish and told by my parents that I could only date Jewish girls (it didn't work, but I'm not a mindless idiot).
These aren't examples of violence, but they do demonstrate the same sort of misappropriation of religion as used to train suicide bombers. The radical Islamists just have a more easily manipulated base to pull from, since their standard of living is way worse than ours. Poor people in America are way better off than the massive poverty in other countries. Go to a group of starving middle-eastern kids. Show them a bunch of ignorant rednecks who think all Muslims are terrorists, and tell them "this is America". Its easy to get them to hate us, and probably only slightly harder to get some of them to give up their miserable lives to "punish the infidels" ("burn the witches", anyone?), since they'll go to heaven, or have 72 virgins in the afterlife, or whatever the religion teaches.
You're conflating the ideas of "tolerance" and "acceptance". A group need not accept $BEHAVIOR among its members in order to tolerate that behavior in others.
You're arguing semantics. Thinking that someone is going to hell for $BEHAVIOR and not associating with them on that principle is not the same as tolerance. Its religious superiority. You don't need to be violent to them in this life, because they'll be gone in the next one. Few religions don't seem to place a higher value on the afterlife than they do on actual life.
So you're saying the ignorance and incompetence demonstrated by the American government is the better option? I don't think our misguided, knee-jerk responses to every attack come across as anything but weak. We're sacrificing our freedom for nothing. How is that a show of strength?
A few high ranking individuals in our government used 9/11 as an excuse to attack Iraq. A small group of radicals pulled of a significant attack and tricked us into an almost decade long war (and at the rate Obama is calling troops home, we'll be lucky if it only lasts a decade). The militant Christians who were running our country at the time are responsible for orders of magnitudes more deaths than have been caused by terrorists. Our unprovoked attack on Iraq emboldens terrorists by demonstrating that we're assholes.
The only reason the suicide bomber failed to take down that plane on Christmas was because his bomb didn't work. He got it through security, through multiple airports, and made it as far as setting himself on fire in his seat before he was finally "thwarted" by another passenger. All of the "security" measures failed, and the passengers are only alive because the bomber was himself incompetent. If the bomb had worked, the hero would have been too late. (But still, good on him for taking the guy out!)
I don't have an answer, but its hard to say that the European governments, by trying to act as good examples of diplomacy, are doing any worse a job of improving the situation than we are. I'd say all the money (and lives) we're wasting on this war, while our whole economy fell apart doesn't give us a whole lot to boast about.
I'll preface this by saying I haven't used a Droid, or other 2nd-gen Android Phone. I did use a G1 for a little while, and from my experience no amount of marketing would have put it up with the iPhone. The interface was clunky and inconsistent. In particular there were 2 separate email apps built-in, one for Gmail and one for everything else, and they behaved differently. Battery life was abysmal at best. While the G1 has some advantages over the iPhone, it was not a usable smart phone unless you were tethered to a power supply. It reminded me very much of the Sidekick (which was developed by many of the same people as Android, and I owned 3 different versions of the sidekick), which notoriously over-promised and under-delivered every step of the way.
The first few releases of Android followed similar patterns. When I bought my iPhone 3G it did (almost) everything they advertised, and there wasn't hype about the next version until 6 months later. My brand new iPhone was the best iPhone one could get. When I got my G1, I was disappointed that it didn't have all of the cool features I had already been reading about in Android press releases and articles. Android marketing seems more about the "next" version, which makes the actual product seem dated before its even for sale.
I hope the new versions of Android devices are better, but those experiences have left me skeptical. I'll give them a look when my iPhone contract is up (next summer), but I'm not falling for the hype this time. If the product for sale doesn't have the features I want, I won't get it. I can't buy it hoping that they'll eventually deliver. I've been burned by that too many times.
I've been really happy with my iPhone 3G. When I got it, I knew I was giving up important features that I had on Windows Mobile, like the ability to shoot crappy video and an open development platform, but the iPhone mostly worked as promised (with a notable exception of Push Notifications, which did not show up until a year or so later with the 3rd generation of the OS). With the limitations of the iPhone (one app at a time is the most troubling), I'm certainly going to shop around before my next purchase, rather than automatically buy next summer's iPhone, but it will take more than slick marketing for Android to win my business (but I am pulling for them!).
Don't forget that he is equating downloading and listening to a U2 album with child pornography. One is a horrible abuse that I wouldn't wish on any child, and the other is child pornography. (sorry. poor taste). Bono is despicable, greedy douchebag for invoking child porn in order to fatten his wallet.
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Its math. If calories expended are greater than what you eat, you will lose weight. Track your calories and start exercising. I'll accept that there are probably some people who are genetically challenged at losing weight, just like there are people with crazy metabolisms that can't gain weight no matter how much they eat. But even if you don't get all the way to a 6-pack, you'll still feel good, have more energy, and (most importantly) be healthier.
Difficult weight loss is still weight loss. It will just take longer to achieve the same results. Go to a gym and talk to a nutritionist. Develop a weight loss plan (you should be able to come up with a plan based on your starting weight and you goal in 1 session), then count your calories, and do moderate exercise a few times a week. Replace ramen and TV dinners with better quality food so you're getting the most out of those calories.
Continuing that thought... How many of the protestors vote regularly? And how many of them vote on emotional issues (gay marriage, marijuana, abortion) instead of issues that actually affect them on a daily basis? If it is more important for you and your children to be unemployed, broke, and stupid than for homosexuals to share healthcare benefits, keep it up.
The message to the 1% is falling on deaf ears (to be fair, some of them probably get a good laugh out of it). Instead target the rest of the 99% to pull their heads out of their asses and vote for real changes that will benefit themselves.
Congress is on the payroll because Congress has the wrong people in it. The 99% (or at least 50% of them) voted those corrupt politicians into office to "represent" them. I support these protests as far as raising awareness, but none of their messages will be heard by the 1%. The message should be to the rest of the 99%, to get out and vote and make change happen. Ignore the BS, and vote on what really affects you on a daily basis. Gay marriage and medical marijuana didn't cause the recession.
We still want noon to be when the sun is overhead, and midnight to be the middle of the night.
They would be, they just wouldn't necessarily be at 12:00. Or at 0:00. I'm not saying its a good idea, just that it descriptive time would still work, and would in fact be more useful as you travel around. Midnight and noon. Sunrise and sunset. Dusk and dawn and twilight and all that. Business hours. Hammer time.
...unless you buy the full version of the app :)
Bonus: it screws up the analytics, since your viewer is effectively clicking on every shortened URL (in order to fetch the proper URL) even though you actually click on none.
All I see in the picture is some grotesquely obese guy with a poor fashion choice. And he looks pretty cramped in that Ford Excursion. ;)
The article actually specifically mentions that issue, at the end of the first paragraph, "Obesity has caused more people to buy larger vehicles..." I'm sure most of the increase in (non-commercial) car size is due to enormously fat people not fitting into normal cars (and bottoming out suspension, etc). That's pretty much common sense, and we've already had the "bigger cars use more gas" discussion. This article is trying to hit closer to home with the message, "your big fat ass uses more gas". Even a big, inefficient gas guzzler uses more gas hauling around a load of 300lb passengers than it does passengers 2/3 or half that size. Other wasteful behavior is pretty much irrelevant to this discussion, and doesn't negate the facts that body weight affects gas mileage. No matter how much unnecessary cargo, or sand bags, or whatever else you might have in the car (that can easily be removed if you wanted), your ass is always with you, putting additional load on the car's engine. No matter how stupid it is to go grocery shopping in a lifted H2 on 44s with a chrome winch, and an ATV on the roof rack, it still uses even more fuel if the driver is 200lb overweight.
Sure the article says its only .7% increase overall, but that increase is heavily weighted towards obese people. Skinny drivers help bring up the average MPG, so the impact doesn't seem as great. The increase in fuel consumption due to obesity affects *my* gas-mileage by about 0 percent. My 300-lb friend probably makes way more than .7% more trips to the gas station than I do, since he's carrying the burden (so to speak). That extra billion gallons of waste isn't evenly distributed across the population (though the environmental impact of burning that extra fuel to drag one's fat ass around town affects us all equally).
I'd be curious to see the study break out the numbers by weight class, or maybe have a test group of various people driving the same car (or same kind of car, and do it for several models) to see how their specific weights affect mileage. If they showed that being 50-100lb overweight actually costs you (just guessing) 10% more annually, that would have way more impact.
Interestingly, the bigger cars will show less of a performance decrease from obese drivers, since an extra 200-lb on the driver's body is a much smaller percentage of the total vehicle weight. Adding a 300-lb passenger to an 8000 SUV won't really affect much; its a drop in the bucket. Add a 300-lb passenger to a Toyota Corolla, and you can immediately tell a difference in the way the car accelerates and handles. As an obese driver of an H2 sheds weight, there will hardly be any increase in gas mileage; a 100-lb weight loss is barely more than a 1% change in total vehicle weight; mileage might increase from 11 mpg to 11.1 mpg. Drop 100-lb from your body and an econobox getting 35+mpg will gain a couple of mpg. The fact that obese people don't fit in efficient cars dilutes the real problem even more.
Yeah. WTF?
Is a "patent pool organization" kind of like an ASCAP or RIAA or MPAA, but for patents? Gee. I can't imagine how that might go wrong.
Amen!
While it is conceivable that some super-hearing audiophiles can detect a difference when listening in their acoustically perfect sound-proof rooms, that's hardly "regular listening" for most people. In any other place where there is actual ambient noise, decent mp3s are probably indistinguishable from CDs (especially newer CDs where they over-process and compress everything so it seems "louder").
CDs will continue to be the primary choice as soon as music stores stop closing down.
Digital downloads are the primary choice for the younger generations, and the rest of the population is trending that way. Convenience is king. Physical media is becoming a niche market, much in the way vinyl records and tapes gave way to CDs (even though many people continue to claim that CDs "fail on decent audio equipment for regular listening" compared to dragging a small chunk of polished rock through grooves on a plastic disc).
I would hope we're past that already. It has been tried and failed many times. Trying it again as "customer abuse with a better price point" would fail just as badly. I expect its the same product as now, just priced to sell, instead of priced to sit on shelves and boost pageviews for The Pirate Bay.
Apple chooses their price point. They don't choose what people are willing to pay for an item.
If Apple had brought it out at $1000, I doubt many people would buy them. At $500 I'm still not interested in it. If I'm in their target market (and I think I should be) then it is overpriced by at least a couple hundred dollars.
If they want me to pay more for it, then it needs to do more. A camera would be nice. Multitasking is a necessity. I hate the constant starting and stopping of apps on the iPhone (and if the next iPhone OS doesn't support backgrounding third party apps, I'm bailing on the iPhone, too). Also multiple apps sharing the big screen (instead of the lame 2x blurrification of the iPhone apps, run 4 of them on screen at a time!).
I have a "hybrid" electric bike. It has an electric motor in the hub, and regular pedals for the human powerplant. The motor works best as an assist, particularly nice on steep hills. I mainly use the electric motor to get up to speed, then can pedal to maintain. Using both at the same time gives a good quick launch from a standstill. The electric motor on mine tops out at about 15mph, which is decent. I can go faster on a normal bike, but I break a sweat. :)
It still works, just slower. There is always alternative product.
I'm not quite ready to dump my iPhone over this, but I won't be buying an iPad. I can accept these limitations on my mobile phone, since I mostly just use the stock set of apps anyway. If these sorts of limits start showing up in MacOSX, then I'll "upgrade" my MacBook Pro (and my 3 other Macs) to linux instead of the next great feline. That's not a huge ding to Apple, but once I'm off their OS, I'll stop buying their hardware. I'll stop suggesting it to my family and friends.
While it's true that data packages are expensive, I use the hell out of my data package. I'd guess the margin on data usage is nowhere near the insane margins on text messages. And I still have to pay for text messages on top of my data plan. It's not a choice of one or the other. If I could text for free via the data channel, then AT&T would lose $5/month (or whatever my text plan costs me now).
I like having a unique ringtone on my phone, but it is solely for my own benefit. When I hear my ringtone, I absolutely know that it is my phone ringing. I don't play the musical snippet as a "favor" to you. Neither do I give a crap who else hears it. Its my signal that my cellphone has a call.
Cell phones are so prevalent that using any of the default sounds ends up with too many false alarms. Go to a construction site and play the "Nextel chirp". Then watch everyone within earshot check their phone. Its pretty funny, and demonstrates a failure of the alert tone.
I agree with you that the "ringtone industry" is a huge scam, exploiting teenagers and poor people. Ringtones are not status symbols. But if you seriously have an issue with someone's choice of ringtone, get over yourself.
Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. GWB started the war with Iraq, using 9/11 as a tenuous excuse. I agree with you that we should go after those responsible, but instead we've killed tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in a war that we absolutely started.
Guantanamo was a disgrace, IMHO. Throwing away our principles and embracing those of our enemies makes me ashamed of our country.
Its not information that you cannot otherwise get just about anywhere else, is it? I'm not suggesting we restrict access to the information, but we haven't had it in the car yet, and we shouldn't. Such a device does not belong where it can be a distraction to the driver. I'm sorry, but I don't want to be killed in a head-on collision with someone tweeting on their steering wheel, "OMG. I think I'm on the wrong side of the road! LOL!"
It reminds me of the LG refrigerator with a web browser built in. Sure its possible, but why? And staring at the screen while operating the refrigerator is very, very unlikely to kill anyone (unless, I suppose, you leave the door open, the food spoils, then you serve it to your family...).
I see this being interesting, a very good idea as far as the ability to access information goes but a very bad idea as far as safety goes.
I agree with you that its a very bad idea regarding safety, but completely disagree about it being a very good idea as far as anything. Its a "neat" idea, and probably implemented in a fairly clever way, but adding new, irrelevant yet more-engaging distractions to the driver is just stupid. If you are driving, you should not be reading RSS feeds, whether on a cell phone, laptop, or the freaking dashboard. If you need to be accessing information while you are driving, get a passenger to read it to you. Or let someone else drive.
Hopefully these things are implemented in such a way that they don't function (or at least don't allow you to interact with them) while the car is moving. If not, then I think the manufacturers are being irresponsible and will probably get sued (hopefully before these systems cause too many fatal accident).
In Oregon we have a similar new law this year. It should have been a more comprehensive distracted driving law, but instead it just outlaws using a hand-held cell phone or texting while driving. Systems like these will allow people to circumvent that law, since they'll be looking at their dashboard instead of the outlawed device. Either way their eyes aren't on the road.
I always tell people, "the problem isn't that *you* can't handle talking on the phone and driving (even though you really can't). Its that all of the idiots around us can't handle it, and I don't want them running into me!"
I agree with you...
Some argue (like the battle between 30fps vs 60fps) that human eye can't process more than certain amount of "frames" per second.
Isn't the reason movies use 24 fps (and similarly TV uses ~30fps) because of historical technical limitations? That is right about the minimum rate where your eyes and brain can smooth out the annoying flicker. 30fps isn't the upper limit that the eye can process, but rather a lower limit that makes the image sequence appear as motion without causing stutter, headaches, or otherwise detract from the visual experience. Its a compromise to allow movies to fit on reasonable sized rolls of film, and for TV to have been able to fit "good enough" video quality into the available bandwidth at the time, and to not have frequency beating artifacts due to lights running on 60Hz AC power (or 50Hz & 25fps in Europe, etc).
For an easy example that 30fps isn't enough, run iTunes, play some music and turn on the "iTunes Classic Visualizer" full screen. Hit "F" to display the frame rate, then use "T" to toggle the 30fps limit on and off. Tell me you don't see a big difference.
I'm sure there's an upper threshold where you can't distinguish a difference as frame rate increases, but its much higher than 30 or 60 fps, and as the parent said it is probably higher than we can achieve in hardware for the near future.
I was actually talking about a 2nd generation iPhone. The "3G" refers to the cellular network technology, rather than the product generation. The 3rd generation iPhone is the "3GS". But that's all beside my point.
I wasn't comparing the G1 to the iPhone and finding it lacking. I was comparing the G1 to the Android marketing and press releases at the time and finding it lacking. When I compared my iPhone to Apple marketing, it held up.
I think the way Android is being released and marketed is confusing. The Android OS will always be ahead of the devices sold by carriers, just by the nature of how the carriers work. Since Android is open source, and since Google doesn't yet have any real stake in the device market, I don't see how that can change.
Surely Apple is already working on a 4th generation of the iPhone, but they keep the unavailable features under wraps until they're ready for market (or at least pretty close). iPhone marketing matches the iPhone reality right up until the announcement of the new version, and then there's only disparity for a brief time until the device ships.
Maybe when Google has their own device things will be different. Maybe we'll be able to update it to run beta versions of Android or even install builds from the latest source code. But as long as the marketing tracks with the latest OS developments that cannot be used on any available devices, the devices will always seem to be lacking. I'll always feel like I'm choosing between "last year's Android" and the "latest and greatest iPhone".
I certainly agree that some religions do teach hate, but Christ's teachings (for example) have never supported hate nor violence. (I'm not saying the Catholic Church never supported violence; that's an entirely separate issue.)
Few religions advocate violence against those who hold different beliefs.
The actual text of the religions is not the problem. In fact Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are more than 95% the same, but some of the characters have different names. The problem isn't the religion itself, but that the people in power exploit religion to manipulate the poor and the gullible into doing strange things.
When I was in college, one of my friends was hard-core Christian, and he was really worried that if the rest of us didn't accept Christ, we'd be going to Hell. That's absurd. When we die, all of our corpses will rot in the ground just the same, but his priests (or whatever) gave him the idea that he needed to go out and "save" people, so he'd brainwash kids at summer camps, and try to convert his non-believer friends.
Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses go door to door harassing people who follow the wrong religion. And don't tell me they don't think its wrong; if they thought all religions were equal, they'd leave people alone.
The Republican party exploited religion to get George Bush elected president in 2004 (in 2000 they exploited religion to almost elect him, and used other bogus methods to eventually get him declared President).
I was brought up Jewish and told by my parents that I could only date Jewish girls (it didn't work, but I'm not a mindless idiot).
These aren't examples of violence, but they do demonstrate the same sort of misappropriation of religion as used to train suicide bombers. The radical Islamists just have a more easily manipulated base to pull from, since their standard of living is way worse than ours. Poor people in America are way better off than the massive poverty in other countries. Go to a group of starving middle-eastern kids. Show them a bunch of ignorant rednecks who think all Muslims are terrorists, and tell them "this is America". Its easy to get them to hate us, and probably only slightly harder to get some of them to give up their miserable lives to "punish the infidels" ("burn the witches", anyone?), since they'll go to heaven, or have 72 virgins in the afterlife, or whatever the religion teaches.
You're conflating the ideas of "tolerance" and "acceptance". A group need not accept $BEHAVIOR among its members in order to tolerate that behavior in others.
You're arguing semantics. Thinking that someone is going to hell for $BEHAVIOR and not associating with them on that principle is not the same as tolerance. Its religious superiority. You don't need to be violent to them in this life, because they'll be gone in the next one. Few religions don't seem to place a higher value on the afterlife than they do on actual life.
So you're saying the ignorance and incompetence demonstrated by the American government is the better option? I don't think our misguided, knee-jerk responses to every attack come across as anything but weak. We're sacrificing our freedom for nothing. How is that a show of strength?
A few high ranking individuals in our government used 9/11 as an excuse to attack Iraq. A small group of radicals pulled of a significant attack and tricked us into an almost decade long war (and at the rate Obama is calling troops home, we'll be lucky if it only lasts a decade). The militant Christians who were running our country at the time are responsible for orders of magnitudes more deaths than have been caused by terrorists. Our unprovoked attack on Iraq emboldens terrorists by demonstrating that we're assholes.
The only reason the suicide bomber failed to take down that plane on Christmas was because his bomb didn't work. He got it through security, through multiple airports, and made it as far as setting himself on fire in his seat before he was finally "thwarted" by another passenger. All of the "security" measures failed, and the passengers are only alive because the bomber was himself incompetent. If the bomb had worked, the hero would have been too late. (But still, good on him for taking the guy out!)
I don't have an answer, but its hard to say that the European governments, by trying to act as good examples of diplomacy, are doing any worse a job of improving the situation than we are. I'd say all the money (and lives) we're wasting on this war, while our whole economy fell apart doesn't give us a whole lot to boast about.
I'll preface this by saying I haven't used a Droid, or other 2nd-gen Android Phone. I did use a G1 for a little while, and from my experience no amount of marketing would have put it up with the iPhone. The interface was clunky and inconsistent. In particular there were 2 separate email apps built-in, one for Gmail and one for everything else, and they behaved differently. Battery life was abysmal at best. While the G1 has some advantages over the iPhone, it was not a usable smart phone unless you were tethered to a power supply. It reminded me very much of the Sidekick (which was developed by many of the same people as Android, and I owned 3 different versions of the sidekick), which notoriously over-promised and under-delivered every step of the way.
The first few releases of Android followed similar patterns. When I bought my iPhone 3G it did (almost) everything they advertised, and there wasn't hype about the next version until 6 months later. My brand new iPhone was the best iPhone one could get. When I got my G1, I was disappointed that it didn't have all of the cool features I had already been reading about in Android press releases and articles. Android marketing seems more about the "next" version, which makes the actual product seem dated before its even for sale.
I hope the new versions of Android devices are better, but those experiences have left me skeptical. I'll give them a look when my iPhone contract is up (next summer), but I'm not falling for the hype this time. If the product for sale doesn't have the features I want, I won't get it. I can't buy it hoping that they'll eventually deliver. I've been burned by that too many times.
I've been really happy with my iPhone 3G. When I got it, I knew I was giving up important features that I had on Windows Mobile, like the ability to shoot crappy video and an open development platform, but the iPhone mostly worked as promised (with a notable exception of Push Notifications, which did not show up until a year or so later with the 3rd generation of the OS). With the limitations of the iPhone (one app at a time is the most troubling), I'm certainly going to shop around before my next purchase, rather than automatically buy next summer's iPhone, but it will take more than slick marketing for Android to win my business (but I am pulling for them!).
Don't forget that he is equating downloading and listening to a U2 album with child pornography. One is a horrible abuse that I wouldn't wish on any child, and the other is child pornography. (sorry. poor taste). Bono is despicable, greedy douchebag for invoking child porn in order to fatten his wallet.
If its unary, isn't the token used irrelevant?