The problem here is the fundamental misunderstanding or misuse of the words (a)theist and (a)gnostic.
Theism and atheism merely describe your position on the existence of a God or Gods.
Gnosticism describes the nature of the position--do you know, or do you not know? Someone that is gnostic "knows" that their position is correct. Someone that is "agnostic" doesn't really know either way.
A theist can be gnostic ("I KNOW God exists") or agnostic ("I believe God exists, but I have no way to prove it; the position may be unknowable"). Obviously, the same positions exist for an atheist.
I understand what the vernacular is, but the vernacular isn't very clear. I'm an atheist. I do not believe in any deity in any religion. I can't prove that such a being doesn't exist--such a proof is fundamentally impossible for me to construct; I believe the burden of proof is on theists. In this way, I'm agnostic.
If you asked even such a person as Richard Dawkins if he were gnostic or agnostic, I'm sure he'd say he was agnostic. He's just rather loud about it.
I don't understand what that would get me. My music is sorted into folders on my Mac, but I almost never interact with it that way. Why would I need to do that on my iPhone--the abstraction layer of an application that understands the music is much more powerful. I can search manually in a lot of ways, or I can type various bits of remembered data into the search field and get to it like that.
When implemented properly (and we could argue about whether or not Apple did it properly--it's a fair question), the file-system method provides nearly no benefit at all.
Well, let's see what gets released before we judge it. From what I understand, the plastic is inexpensive compared to aluminum, but is still quite high quality (or at least used in a higher quality way). But that's all just hearsay at the moment.
iOS 7 isn't actually inconsistent, and I prefer the DIFFERENT sense of depth that it has. The depth is no longer in the icons, but in the layering of the UI. It's nice. I've been running the beta the whole time, and as of B4, I was at a point where iOS 6 on my iPad is feeling pretty clunky. Sure, that's an anecdote, but 'people are already complaining' is a) a tautology--someone is ALWAYS complaining; and b) meaningless. Which people? How many? Do they matter? Are they people that would complain anyway? Were they on the fence already? Who's 'people'?
Jobs was a perfectionist, but he had plenty of bad ideas. He's dead and it would be nice if he weren't, but in his famous Stanford commencement address, he goes out of his way to point out that this is how things go and it's GOOD. The revolution is in someone else's hands now. Maybe Apple won't see those great heights ever again, but maybe they will.
Steve Jobs was the only Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs wasn't the only genius. Let's just see what happens.
I've got a 16GB iPhone. I have 50 or 60GB of music. But more to the point, it's not a very good system of music organisation to have the music as a giant monolithic block. I carry around about 3GB of music at any given time, but I do it in a way that guarantees that I'm not listening to the same stuff over and over again. I've got playlists that take into account the rating of the song, when the song was last played and whether it currently lives in any other playlists. The playlist is limited to a certain size, and it refreshes on the fly (when the song playcounts are updated when I plug the phone into my Mac). (I also have a few artists and albums that I consider indispensable, so I've got them synced at all times.)
iTunes is not great software on Windows, but it works pretty well on the Mac. It's a bit heavy for what I think most people need--Apple could possibly break it up into other applications--but doing that sort of sorting on my own would make me crazy. I'd listen to my music a lot less.
So while the simplicity of dragging your music over to your device is nice in one respect, it utterly misses the boat in other ways.
Your definition of 'actual work' is very limited, or you're being too specific. Doctors and pilots have started using tablets for their actual work. I've heard of more than one field biologist (on/., no less!) that uses a tablet for their field work.
You can generate content on a tablet, it's just harder to generate certain KINDS of content on a tablet. It's not a great device to program on because of the OS/apps right now, but you can get work done on it.
Windows RT may have been designed as a productivity device, but apparently it was no better at it than the iPad or any Android tablet or any laptop out there, or it would've sold really well.
And maybe some of our work would be better off scrutinised to see how it would be better to have a simple tablet suffice for a lot of it. I know not everyone can do that (my work, for starters), but sometimes the best tool is the one that's available.
Algorithms aren't patentable. You'd get sued if you stole Apple's code, sure, but the thing about runtime systems is that all you need to know is the fundamental basis of how it works to make a reasonable version of it.
All programmers do this over time. I solved problems back when I was a new programmer starting out, but I can carry them forward regardless of the system or engine that I'm working on. In fact, one of the complaints that I have about my job is that a lot of days I spend reimplementing solutions for problems I solved a long time ago. (At different companies, no less. Nobody's going to sue me for knowing that I can insert fake items into a queue that are used for controlling the queue behaviour instead of those items being processed for, say, character actions.)
It doesn't surprise me that other industries suffer from the same problem as the one I'm in (games). We're constantly solving problems over and over again like they're brand new.
There's no way to put that genie back in the bottle. Just remember this the next time there's something to vote for. Government regulations aren't arbitrary, and they may well curtail corporate growth, but the government is around to look after our best interests. There's not really any other way to do it.
We DO judge companies and occasionally declare them in violation of the law, but we haven't figured out what a suitable punishment is. It may well be that we need to impact the holdings of shareholders directly (I say this as an owner of corporate shares, but one that usually can't be bothered to vote because of my tiny holdings) to force them to be responsible for the company that they're holding. It's a complicated issue, but it's tractable if we're willing to put some actual muscle behind it. Elizabeth Warren was a good start; now the world just needs a few thousand more of her.
I agree. Also, I'd like to point out that this stuff is exactly the same stuff that people used to say about Apple when they were the spritely underdog. Oh, Apple was everyone's best pal, making nice things that worked well, fighting the power! Fighting the good fight against Microsoft!
Then it was Google, fighting the good fight against the tyranny of Apple, with their vicious lockdown and abhorrent profits!
All those interpretations are wrong. These guys are in it for the bucks. They provide a service--and they really DO try to provide the BEST service they can, within boundaries--but they're not trying to be your pal. Google will not come and take care of you when you're sick, but neither will Apple come and smother you with a pillow while you sleep. We've spent too much time anthropomorphising these companies. Use the services that are good, pay for the products that you like. Let your emotional investment end there.
I suppose you can contend that there's only one reason for anything in evolution: it happens and it has a beneficial side effect (or at least, no negative side effect).
But menopause itself may be an evolutionary response to men being interested in younger women (menopause is really unusual in animals; I think humans may be the only animal it occurs in, but don't quote me on that). If there's no interest, it's a beneficial side-effect to not waste resources by preparing a womb every month. So now that the female is freed from the necessity of breeding, they can take an interest in children, and children that grow up with grandmothers are more successful and survive more often, so you get a knock-on effect of women that enter menopause at a certain age are a net benefit to groups of people, until that mutation has spread to the entire species.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, but if we don't try to understand how these things--even seemingly inconsequential things--how can we understand how complex creatures and social structures come to be and survive? Everything that we understand about ourselves or any other animal feeds back into the general pool of knowledge. If something has a reason, we should find it. It feels ridiculous to just wave our hands and declare that we don't really care. (As a group, I mean. You can do that all you like and I wouldn't judge you for it; I'm not interested in all branches of geology, for instance, but I'm glad someone out there is.)
It's true that sometimes things arise that aren't evolutionary advantages, but at the very least, they're guaranteed to NOT be a disadvantage.
Still, you can find a reason for grandmothers, and it's not so trivial as 'they weren't a disadvantage', since it would seem that having an old woman around past childbearing age who is slower and more vulnerable than the other members of the group WOULD be a disadvantage. We're interested in studying grandmothers because they run counter to certain assumptions we'd have about fitness and survival. Clearly they must have been a net advantage if we can find them in the fossil record (and we do).
I can't disagree that there's a lot of randomness involved, and there's a lot of wild stuff that's part of our DNA (for instance, it's hypothesised that a virus infecting a sperm cell is the reason why humans have an enormous amount of virus DNA transcribed into our genome) but that doesn't mean things like grandmothers aren't worth researching. Maybe it's chaos, but maybe it's not. Studying those branches helps us separate the wheat from the chaff, so we can slowly unwind what's chance and what's not.
I actually just heard an interesting piece on The Science Show (an Australian Broadcast Corporation show) last night where a sex researcher pointed out that pair bonding tends to be strongest in places where resources are most scarce and it takes the most effort to raise children (e.g., the high north) and least strong in warm climates where the food almost literally falls out of the sky from trees. Because it takes a lot more directed effort to raise a child in a hard climate, the parents stay together as protectors and providers for longer.
Anyway, it's not clear from the article whether they're talking about some sort of genetic evolution or a cultural evolution. I'd have to read the original article to see what they really think about it. Biological monogamy is something that makes almost no sense to me, but it's obvious (particularly by your example) that cultures have their own values when it comes to the nature of parenting, monogamy and bonding.
I work as a programmer at Ubisoft. I have sleeves on my forearms, and I know lots of guys that work here that have plenty of large tattoos (and/or piercings). My arms DID cost me a lot of money.
Sure, these are a bit frivolous and are 100% aesthetic choices for me, but so are clothes, and these tattoos will last longer. You've got a lot of weird pre-conceived notions of people that have tattoos. As it happens, I have a job and have chosen a field where people don't mind that I have tattoos. I have friends that work in more conservative careers, and they have less obvious tattoos if they have any at all. I wear a lot of casual clothing and short sleeves at work, too, and my lawyer friends always have long sleeve shirts and jackets on. You'd never even guess at the kind of ink they have.
I agree that spending money that you don't have is irresponsible, but you can't judge whether or not they have enough money to make those decisions based on what they look like, or even what their current job is.
Anyway, don't judge people by what you can immediately see. You don't know their story.
Well, first of all, there's the question of who determines whether or not it's 'Adult' or merely 'NSFW', since they're treated differently. Since the barrier for 'adult' appears to be that you post nudity often, there are some non-pornographic photographers that are being caught in the net.
Secondly, as of right now, #gay is a verbatim search term. This affects not just porn, but posts about LGBT politics.
Thirdly, lots of artists were migrating to tumblr BECAUSE it was a way to join a network where you could be discovered by fans. Painters and cartoon artists that post pornographic art also can't be found anymore. I know more than one artist that stopped hosting their own portfolio site because it was easier to post on tumblr and provide a DNS redirect. It was a good system, and now the rug has been pulled out from under them.
This isn't just about hardcore porn; most (all?) of that stuff is discoverable through google, even if it's not packaged up as nicely. There's a lot of fandom and art going on that counts as 'adult' content, and it seems to me that it's being unfairly punished.
Plus, honestly, it's nice for users like me to be able to follow some of these people and discover new things that I like and have it all mixed in with my goofy fandom gifs and gender politics and whatnot. I LIKE how tumblr works right now. To me, this is just the puritanical nature of North American culture and law rearing its ugly head.
You know, there are a lot of states (and countries) that change policy in order to entice large companies, and show that the state is a good place to do business.
The tragedy here is that Google has the leverage, not the state. They could easily tell Inhofe and Oklahoma to stuff it and go somewhere with a government that's more science-based. They've got the money. Their bottom line wouldn't be SO heavily impacted.
There's very little nuance to be had with 'The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.' I appreciate that in all of science there are spectra and good bits and bad bits, but Inhofe leaves no room for disagreement on subtle details. If you believe what Inhofe says, you're a Denier with a capital 'D'.
He goes far beyond 'sceptic', which is something that all science enthusiasts should be--he's actively denying any and all science with his position. He's not your friend if you're the kind of person that reads and posts here.
Actually, no. It affects any signed package that would normally be found on the play store. If it weren't a more general problem, then Google wouldn't have released any patch at all, and Samsung wouldn't have applied the OS patch and distributed it. It makes applications look like they're signed by Google, and normally those come through the play store.
All you'd need to do is trick someone into downloading the app from some source other than the play store, perhaps claiming that it's an upgrade to an app that they already have. Or by releasing a paid app for free.
iOS doesn't really have the same issues, though whether that's good or bad is a matter of some debate. To wit, if you have an old device that isn't supported anymore, and you wipe it or are forced to restore from backup, you can't download old applications any more because they aren't available on the AppStore. You're left with a device that's not really terribly useful. Apple's got a much harder line on how it EOLs devices.
More to the point, though, Apple doesn't sell devices that aren't up to date. You can't buy a phone running iOS 5. In a few months, you won't be able to buy a phone running iOS 6. You certainly can't buy anything with an OS that's 2 or 3 or 4 years old. New phones don't come encumbered with the problems of old phones. That's a big step up. Android's current fragmentation woes come from a lot of new phones as well as old ones.
I'm totally floored by this response. Your solution is to ignore new APIs with additional power and features? Why does Google even bother to update the OS, then? Are you saying that nothing that they've done is an improvement? If that's the case, they should honestly just give up this fight and work on patching older versions and unifying the market under an older system.
Well, that's exactly the point. If Amazon has to pay a publisher $10 for a book but can afford to sell it cheaper than that, then when Kobo wants to sell the same book, they have to go to the same publisher, pay the same $10, and match Amazon's price, despite their decidedly shallower pockets. In fact, my analogy ONLY works if you know that Amazon ISN'T the publisher.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem here is the fundamental misunderstanding or misuse of the words (a)theist and (a)gnostic.
Theism and atheism merely describe your position on the existence of a God or Gods.
Gnosticism describes the nature of the position--do you know, or do you not know?
Someone that is gnostic "knows" that their position is correct. Someone that is "agnostic" doesn't really know either way.
A theist can be gnostic ("I KNOW God exists") or agnostic ("I believe God exists, but I have no way to prove it; the position may be unknowable").
Obviously, the same positions exist for an atheist.
I understand what the vernacular is, but the vernacular isn't very clear. I'm an atheist. I do not believe in any deity in any religion. I can't prove that such a being doesn't exist--such a proof is fundamentally impossible for me to construct; I believe the burden of proof is on theists. In this way, I'm agnostic.
If you asked even such a person as Richard Dawkins if he were gnostic or agnostic, I'm sure he'd say he was agnostic. He's just rather loud about it.
I don't understand what that would get me. My music is sorted into folders on my Mac, but I almost never interact with it that way. Why would I need to do that on my iPhone--the abstraction layer of an application that understands the music is much more powerful. I can search manually in a lot of ways, or I can type various bits of remembered data into the search field and get to it like that.
When implemented properly (and we could argue about whether or not Apple did it properly--it's a fair question), the file-system method provides nearly no benefit at all.
Oooh, ouch. Nothing to find, so nothing to cite, hmm?
Well, let's see what gets released before we judge it. From what I understand, the plastic is inexpensive compared to aluminum, but is still quite high quality (or at least used in a higher quality way). But that's all just hearsay at the moment.
iOS 7 isn't actually inconsistent, and I prefer the DIFFERENT sense of depth that it has. The depth is no longer in the icons, but in the layering of the UI. It's nice. I've been running the beta the whole time, and as of B4, I was at a point where iOS 6 on my iPad is feeling pretty clunky. Sure, that's an anecdote, but 'people are already complaining' is a) a tautology--someone is ALWAYS complaining; and b) meaningless. Which people? How many? Do they matter? Are they people that would complain anyway? Were they on the fence already? Who's 'people'?
Jobs was a perfectionist, but he had plenty of bad ideas. He's dead and it would be nice if he weren't, but in his famous Stanford commencement address, he goes out of his way to point out that this is how things go and it's GOOD. The revolution is in someone else's hands now. Maybe Apple won't see those great heights ever again, but maybe they will.
Steve Jobs was the only Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs wasn't the only genius. Let's just see what happens.
Citation, please.
I've got a 16GB iPhone. I have 50 or 60GB of music. But more to the point, it's not a very good system of music organisation to have the music as a giant monolithic block. I carry around about 3GB of music at any given time, but I do it in a way that guarantees that I'm not listening to the same stuff over and over again. I've got playlists that take into account the rating of the song, when the song was last played and whether it currently lives in any other playlists. The playlist is limited to a certain size, and it refreshes on the fly (when the song playcounts are updated when I plug the phone into my Mac). (I also have a few artists and albums that I consider indispensable, so I've got them synced at all times.)
iTunes is not great software on Windows, but it works pretty well on the Mac. It's a bit heavy for what I think most people need--Apple could possibly break it up into other applications--but doing that sort of sorting on my own would make me crazy. I'd listen to my music a lot less.
So while the simplicity of dragging your music over to your device is nice in one respect, it utterly misses the boat in other ways.
Here's two ways to extend your desktop onto your iPad (if you have a Mac):
http://avatron.com/apps/air-display
http://displaypadapp.com/
Your definition of 'actual work' is very limited, or you're being too specific. Doctors and pilots have started using tablets for their actual work. I've heard of more than one field biologist (on /., no less!) that uses a tablet for their field work.
You can generate content on a tablet, it's just harder to generate certain KINDS of content on a tablet. It's not a great device to program on because of the OS/apps right now, but you can get work done on it.
Windows RT may have been designed as a productivity device, but apparently it was no better at it than the iPad or any Android tablet or any laptop out there, or it would've sold really well.
And maybe some of our work would be better off scrutinised to see how it would be better to have a simple tablet suffice for a lot of it. I know not everyone can do that (my work, for starters), but sometimes the best tool is the one that's available.
Algorithms aren't patentable. You'd get sued if you stole Apple's code, sure, but the thing about runtime systems is that all you need to know is the fundamental basis of how it works to make a reasonable version of it.
All programmers do this over time. I solved problems back when I was a new programmer starting out, but I can carry them forward regardless of the system or engine that I'm working on. In fact, one of the complaints that I have about my job is that a lot of days I spend reimplementing solutions for problems I solved a long time ago. (At different companies, no less. Nobody's going to sue me for knowing that I can insert fake items into a queue that are used for controlling the queue behaviour instead of those items being processed for, say, character actions.)
It doesn't surprise me that other industries suffer from the same problem as the one I'm in (games). We're constantly solving problems over and over again like they're brand new.
There's no way to put that genie back in the bottle. Just remember this the next time there's something to vote for. Government regulations aren't arbitrary, and they may well curtail corporate growth, but the government is around to look after our best interests. There's not really any other way to do it.
We DO judge companies and occasionally declare them in violation of the law, but we haven't figured out what a suitable punishment is. It may well be that we need to impact the holdings of shareholders directly (I say this as an owner of corporate shares, but one that usually can't be bothered to vote because of my tiny holdings) to force them to be responsible for the company that they're holding. It's a complicated issue, but it's tractable if we're willing to put some actual muscle behind it. Elizabeth Warren was a good start; now the world just needs a few thousand more of her.
I agree. Also, I'd like to point out that this stuff is exactly the same stuff that people used to say about Apple when they were the spritely underdog. Oh, Apple was everyone's best pal, making nice things that worked well, fighting the power! Fighting the good fight against Microsoft!
Then it was Google, fighting the good fight against the tyranny of Apple, with their vicious lockdown and abhorrent profits!
All those interpretations are wrong. These guys are in it for the bucks. They provide a service--and they really DO try to provide the BEST service they can, within boundaries--but they're not trying to be your pal. Google will not come and take care of you when you're sick, but neither will Apple come and smother you with a pillow while you sleep. We've spent too much time anthropomorphising these companies. Use the services that are good, pay for the products that you like. Let your emotional investment end there.
I suppose you can contend that there's only one reason for anything in evolution: it happens and it has a beneficial side effect (or at least, no negative side effect).
But menopause itself may be an evolutionary response to men being interested in younger women (menopause is really unusual in animals; I think humans may be the only animal it occurs in, but don't quote me on that). If there's no interest, it's a beneficial side-effect to not waste resources by preparing a womb every month. So now that the female is freed from the necessity of breeding, they can take an interest in children, and children that grow up with grandmothers are more successful and survive more often, so you get a knock-on effect of women that enter menopause at a certain age are a net benefit to groups of people, until that mutation has spread to the entire species.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, but if we don't try to understand how these things--even seemingly inconsequential things--how can we understand how complex creatures and social structures come to be and survive? Everything that we understand about ourselves or any other animal feeds back into the general pool of knowledge. If something has a reason, we should find it. It feels ridiculous to just wave our hands and declare that we don't really care. (As a group, I mean. You can do that all you like and I wouldn't judge you for it; I'm not interested in all branches of geology, for instance, but I'm glad someone out there is.)
It's true that sometimes things arise that aren't evolutionary advantages, but at the very least, they're guaranteed to NOT be a disadvantage.
Still, you can find a reason for grandmothers, and it's not so trivial as 'they weren't a disadvantage', since it would seem that having an old woman around past childbearing age who is slower and more vulnerable than the other members of the group WOULD be a disadvantage. We're interested in studying grandmothers because they run counter to certain assumptions we'd have about fitness and survival. Clearly they must have been a net advantage if we can find them in the fossil record (and we do).
I can't disagree that there's a lot of randomness involved, and there's a lot of wild stuff that's part of our DNA (for instance, it's hypothesised that a virus infecting a sperm cell is the reason why humans have an enormous amount of virus DNA transcribed into our genome) but that doesn't mean things like grandmothers aren't worth researching. Maybe it's chaos, but maybe it's not. Studying those branches helps us separate the wheat from the chaff, so we can slowly unwind what's chance and what's not.
I actually just heard an interesting piece on The Science Show (an Australian Broadcast Corporation show) last night where a sex researcher pointed out that pair bonding tends to be strongest in places where resources are most scarce and it takes the most effort to raise children (e.g., the high north) and least strong in warm climates where the food almost literally falls out of the sky from trees. Because it takes a lot more directed effort to raise a child in a hard climate, the parents stay together as protectors and providers for longer.
Anyway, it's not clear from the article whether they're talking about some sort of genetic evolution or a cultural evolution. I'd have to read the original article to see what they really think about it. Biological monogamy is something that makes almost no sense to me, but it's obvious (particularly by your example) that cultures have their own values when it comes to the nature of parenting, monogamy and bonding.
Certainly not that; I've only been here for 2! :)
I work as a programmer at Ubisoft. I have sleeves on my forearms, and I know lots of guys that work here that have plenty of large tattoos (and/or piercings). My arms DID cost me a lot of money.
Sure, these are a bit frivolous and are 100% aesthetic choices for me, but so are clothes, and these tattoos will last longer. You've got a lot of weird pre-conceived notions of people that have tattoos. As it happens, I have a job and have chosen a field where people don't mind that I have tattoos. I have friends that work in more conservative careers, and they have less obvious tattoos if they have any at all. I wear a lot of casual clothing and short sleeves at work, too, and my lawyer friends always have long sleeve shirts and jackets on. You'd never even guess at the kind of ink they have.
I agree that spending money that you don't have is irresponsible, but you can't judge whether or not they have enough money to make those decisions based on what they look like, or even what their current job is.
Anyway, don't judge people by what you can immediately see. You don't know their story.
Yeah, I was just coming back and reading over the comment and I saw it there and thought to myself, "why did I type verbatim instead of verboten"? :P
Well, first of all, there's the question of who determines whether or not it's 'Adult' or merely 'NSFW', since they're treated differently. Since the barrier for 'adult' appears to be that you post nudity often, there are some non-pornographic photographers that are being caught in the net.
Secondly, as of right now, #gay is a verbatim search term. This affects not just porn, but posts about LGBT politics.
Thirdly, lots of artists were migrating to tumblr BECAUSE it was a way to join a network where you could be discovered by fans. Painters and cartoon artists that post pornographic art also can't be found anymore. I know more than one artist that stopped hosting their own portfolio site because it was easier to post on tumblr and provide a DNS redirect. It was a good system, and now the rug has been pulled out from under them.
This isn't just about hardcore porn; most (all?) of that stuff is discoverable through google, even if it's not packaged up as nicely. There's a lot of fandom and art going on that counts as 'adult' content, and it seems to me that it's being unfairly punished.
Plus, honestly, it's nice for users like me to be able to follow some of these people and discover new things that I like and have it all mixed in with my goofy fandom gifs and gender politics and whatnot. I LIKE how tumblr works right now. To me, this is just the puritanical nature of North American culture and law rearing its ugly head.
You know, there are a lot of states (and countries) that change policy in order to entice large companies, and show that the state is a good place to do business.
The tragedy here is that Google has the leverage, not the state. They could easily tell Inhofe and Oklahoma to stuff it and go somewhere with a government that's more science-based. They've got the money. Their bottom line wouldn't be SO heavily impacted.
Are they committed to Don't Be Evil or not?
Apple's bankrolling Solar Farms, too. In fact, they say their data centres run on 100% renewable energy at this point.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-21/apple-says-data-centers-now-use-100-renewable-energy.html
So I don't know about Apple being less evil, per se, but I don't think you've got any room to look down your nose at them here.
There's very little nuance to be had with 'The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.' I appreciate that in all of science there are spectra and good bits and bad bits, but Inhofe leaves no room for disagreement on subtle details. If you believe what Inhofe says, you're a Denier with a capital 'D'.
He goes far beyond 'sceptic', which is something that all science enthusiasts should be--he's actively denying any and all science with his position. He's not your friend if you're the kind of person that reads and posts here.
The iPhone 5 will drop in price as soon as the new batch of iPhones is out this fall. This is how it's always been.
Actually, no. It affects any signed package that would normally be found on the play store. If it weren't a more general problem, then Google wouldn't have released any patch at all, and Samsung wouldn't have applied the OS patch and distributed it. It makes applications look like they're signed by Google, and normally those come through the play store.
All you'd need to do is trick someone into downloading the app from some source other than the play store, perhaps claiming that it's an upgrade to an app that they already have. Or by releasing a paid app for free.
iOS doesn't really have the same issues, though whether that's good or bad is a matter of some debate. To wit, if you have an old device that isn't supported anymore, and you wipe it or are forced to restore from backup, you can't download old applications any more because they aren't available on the AppStore. You're left with a device that's not really terribly useful. Apple's got a much harder line on how it EOLs devices.
More to the point, though, Apple doesn't sell devices that aren't up to date. You can't buy a phone running iOS 5. In a few months, you won't be able to buy a phone running iOS 6. You certainly can't buy anything with an OS that's 2 or 3 or 4 years old. New phones don't come encumbered with the problems of old phones. That's a big step up. Android's current fragmentation woes come from a lot of new phones as well as old ones.
Seriously?
No, really, seriously?
I'm totally floored by this response. Your solution is to ignore new APIs with additional power and features? Why does Google even bother to update the OS, then? Are you saying that nothing that they've done is an improvement? If that's the case, they should honestly just give up this fight and work on patching older versions and unifying the market under an older system.
Well, that's exactly the point. If Amazon has to pay a publisher $10 for a book but can afford to sell it cheaper than that, then when Kobo wants to sell the same book, they have to go to the same publisher, pay the same $10, and match Amazon's price, despite their decidedly shallower pockets. In fact, my analogy ONLY works if you know that Amazon ISN'T the publisher.