No more worry about cracked screens would be great. However there is a limit on utility that defines the form factor - we WANT big screens but it can't be too big or it's clumsy. I don't need a phone that rolls up - the new ones are flat enough to be unobtrusive.
Thinner and lighter are always nice, but damage resistance and battery life are bigger concerns.
Especially when all it really needs is bluetooth. Then they could develop an app so you can use your phone to control the features in your car, but that would make too much sense.
WFT. Idiots love to assume that the US had the power to somehow create a better regime than the shah's when in reality our choice was bad or worse. We chose bad, what we have now is worse.
The photochop is just a way for them to control the news of the day. Any day that doesn't include stories about their nuclear program is a good one for them.
And solar radiation is directly responsible for more cancer deaths than any other radiation source. BAN SOLAR FOR THE CHLDRNZZZZ!!!!!
The irony is that the greens spent so much time in the '80's and 90's demonizing nuclear energy and we are just now reaping what they sowed. Nuclear plants could be designed to be basically accident proof, yet they are saddled with such regulatory burden that it is basically not possible to build new ones in the US.
Hence we are stuck with a national energy policy that is based on wishes, rainbows and unicorn farts. And, like it or not, coal.
If you want to look a the future of an internationalized internet, just look to the UN where recently we had the human rights commission (or some such body) being controlled by a majority of dictatorships famous for suppressing human rights. The world was stood on it's head.
Face it, the US has done a great job of "managing the internet". The biggest non-US player is CHINA. Do we really want the world's largest non-democracy to be given control of the world's telecommunications infrastructure? The recent Google blackout during their presidential transition (no elections required over there) is just a small taste of things to come.
Why do people so easily forget that real, actual freedom isn't free and does not result from people whining on the internet?
It's sad how people confuse fantasy with reality, isn't it?
I get tired of hearing people drool over how great guys like Jobs and Musk are supposed to be. The ones who make the world go around are the entrepreneurs who run the small businesses that comprise the bulk of the economy.
Exactly. It's pure arrogance on their part to assume that the expertise at John Deere will be simple to match. Those folks know what they're doing because they've been doing it for generations. Institutional knowledge is a precious thing.
The other arrogance is to assume that somehow not making a profit will make it all better. A profit is simply an indicator that you are efficiently supplying people with goods and services that they actually want. A tractor that is 70% as good as a Deere won't sell on an open and competitive market where people vote with their dollars.
NFC strikes me as a dumb idea, too. The bastard child of RFID and bluetooth. Apple will patent it's own alternative then foist it off on the fanbois to drool over. Neither will become the standard and apple's garden will remain solidly walled.
The only way NFC could become truly useful would be for you to surrender your last vestiges of privacy and control to your phone. Who really wants to convert to e-currency with all the tracking that implies?
Feel free to start your own country where there is no taxation. And good luck with that.
Here in the real world, we recognize that there are essential services that must be paid for, that people are not always rational and ethical and that we must agree on a system to deal with these sad facts.
The pirate party getting a mayor elected might be interesting, but it's not like they can simply impose their entire agenda.
Additionally, if you admit that intellectual property issues are real owing to the fact that real people must do real work producing them, the entire "pirate" thing falls apart. Sure, it's good to have an opposing viewpoint to the draconian IP laws being pushed by big media, but don't expect IP ownership issues to go away. If they did, nobody could ever make a living creating, well, anything.
...and lose the one real advantage the US system has: competition. That's the one factor obamacare completely ignored and the one thing that could have actually increased efficiency and lowered costs.
Yet despite the fact that basically every big government social program is bankrupt, liberals continue to insist that we pour ever more money into them. The definition of insanity is when you repeat the same actions expecting different results.
Cell phones are becoming less about communications and more about tracking and identification. Pretty soon big brother isn't going to let you leave home without it.
Yep. First, take control of the skies. Carriers are very handy for that. Next, cover the area with attack copters. Finally, move in with frigates and destroyers. Nothing will be able to move without attracting a hellfire or SM-3. SEALs can mop up any fortified oil platforms, just like the last time the iranians got uppity.
The iranian tactic of swarming with large numbers of small craft will merely create a target rich environment. Sure, they might get lucky and sink a ship but their entire coastline on the strait will look like the surface of the moon.
Clean up the mines then it's back to business as usual.
Missiles alone can not project power. They have to be launched from somewhere - a land base, a ship or aircraft.
Carriers are effective at controlling large areas of ocean and land due to their ability to launch long range aircraft. This allows them to stay out of range of anti ship missiles while it's aircraft destroy the enemy's ability to launch attacks. When you consider that fact that a US supercarrier has a larger air wing than most nations, and that the US possesses twelve of them when no other nation has even one, it becomes clear why carriers rule.
The real weapon is, as always, knowledge. The decisive carrier battles of WW2 were decided by the ability to place the assets where they were needed to destroy the enemy. Lose the knowledge battle and carriers are just great big targets.
Of course, when you need to gather knowledge about the enemy, aircraft are extremely useful. So are submarines. Float a ship loaded with deadly anti ship missiles and threaten a carrier group with it. You'll know a submarine is in the area when your ship unexpectedly explodes and sinks.
The name "barney frank" comes to mind. He was the driving force behind fannie mae churning out millions of subprime loans in order to "make housing more affordable". All this cheap money had the effect of creating the housing bubble, ironically making housing LESS affordable. Then, of course, the bubble burst and the people left holding the bag on upside down mortgages were the very ones frank was trying to "help". In response, the dems created the "occupy wall street" movement in order to shift blame from themselves to the banks that wrote the loans.
Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations. Alinsky would be proud.
Seriously, touch is at it's beginning and we're still figuring out how best to use it. The current Ipad is not the be all and end all of touch interfaces. The mouse and keyboard paradigm survives because it works really well. Touch as an adjunct to that is awesome. By itself not so much.
But out of all those goofy apps could come innovation in how touch interfaces SHOULD work. Eventually these things will work themselves out and not disappear like a fart in the wind.
It doesn't. In california, the teachers union (along with other unions) operates like the mafia. Tax dollars come in and are funneled directly to the unions via the public school districts. The unions in turn use their voting bloc and monetary support for the democratic party to cement control.
They have a stranglehold on education dollars and they control the legislature. Nothing even vaguely threatening to the current union system will get to the floor for debate much less come to a vote. The losers are the taxpayers and the students.
Corporations aren't even close to being the heart of the problem. Corporations behave in a rational and predictable manner in order to maximize profits. The operate under rules and regulations set by CONGRESS. We need the legal fiction of corporations in order to create the institutions that can accomplish things. Anyone who hates corporations doesn't understand their necessity in the real world.
Sure, there are abuses. That's another predictable element of corporate behavior. Free market competition is what keeps this sort of thing in check. Don't like how one corporation operates? Use the goods/services of another. If enough people agree with you and do the same the problems fix themselves. THAT is economic freedom, which is just as important as the freedom of speech.
Apple didn't even come close to "inventing the smart phone" as if it were a complete thing unto itself. They didn't invent the touchscreen, the computer processor, they didn't invent operating systems, they didn't invent wireless data transfer or cellular communications.
What they did was take existing tech and combine it in a new way. Not to denigrate apple's achievements; they're phenomenal. But the things they're claiming to "own" aren't really the things that allowed the smartphone revolution to occur.
They're suing samsung because they can, and it's not the consumer's best interest they're worrying about. I like google and android in part because they aren't microsoft and they aren't apple. Competition is good for ME.
This whole thing makes me want to go buy and SIII ASAP.
Yep, the parent poster misses the point. People like cities because that's where the cool stuff is concentrated. We aren't talking about cities in terms of the boundaries of the municipality but rather the city centers where culture thrives.
Restaurants, shops, galleries, theaters, sports venues, you name it. Who in their right mind would choose a sterile office park with a subway franchise as the only choice for lunch when you could be near world class cuisine? And be within walking distance of a cultural event after work?
Cities aren't soul crushing, they're the geographic locus of the human soul.
The only thing anyone is proving is that it's impossible to own the moral high ground. Many seem to assert that there is nothing worth fighting for. Yet when you actually speak to someone from, say, behind the iron curtain or from someplace like Vietnam, suddenly the picture changes. Even with Iraq. messy as it was, there was twenty years of almost cartoonishly bad oppression that included the actual use of WMD, yet the anti US crowd dismisses it all with the wave of a hand.
What is worth fighting for? Should the US simply stand by and watch as the rest of the world descends into dictatorship and religious extremism?
Peace comes from strength and credible military deterrence, not from wishing hard.
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No more worry about cracked screens would be great. However there is a limit on utility that defines the form factor - we WANT big screens but it can't be too big or it's clumsy. I don't need a phone that rolls up - the new ones are flat enough to be unobtrusive.
Thinner and lighter are always nice, but damage resistance and battery life are bigger concerns.
Especially when all it really needs is bluetooth. Then they could develop an app so you can use your phone to control the features in your car, but that would make too much sense.
WFT. Idiots love to assume that the US had the power to somehow create a better regime than the shah's when in reality our choice was bad or worse. We chose bad, what we have now is worse.
The photochop is just a way for them to control the news of the day. Any day that doesn't include stories about their nuclear program is a good one for them.
And solar radiation is directly responsible for more cancer deaths than any other radiation source. BAN SOLAR FOR THE CHLDRNZZZZ!!!!!
The irony is that the greens spent so much time in the '80's and 90's demonizing nuclear energy and we are just now reaping what they sowed. Nuclear plants could be designed to be basically accident proof, yet they are saddled with such regulatory burden that it is basically not possible to build new ones in the US.
Hence we are stuck with a national energy policy that is based on wishes, rainbows and unicorn farts. And, like it or not, coal.
If you want to look a the future of an internationalized internet, just look to the UN where recently we had the human rights commission (or some such body) being controlled by a majority of dictatorships famous for suppressing human rights. The world was stood on it's head.
Face it, the US has done a great job of "managing the internet". The biggest non-US player is CHINA. Do we really want the world's largest non-democracy to be given control of the world's telecommunications infrastructure? The recent Google blackout during their presidential transition (no elections required over there) is just a small taste of things to come.
Why do people so easily forget that real, actual freedom isn't free and does not result from people whining on the internet?
When the partisan political aspect of an issue is already included in the original post.
Bettter to shut down discussions about AGW before they start! It's settled science!
It's sad how people confuse fantasy with reality, isn't it?
I get tired of hearing people drool over how great guys like Jobs and Musk are supposed to be. The ones who make the world go around are the entrepreneurs who run the small businesses that comprise the bulk of the economy.
Exactly. It's pure arrogance on their part to assume that the expertise at John Deere will be simple to match. Those folks know what they're doing because they've been doing it for generations. Institutional knowledge is a precious thing.
The other arrogance is to assume that somehow not making a profit will make it all better. A profit is simply an indicator that you are efficiently supplying people with goods and services that they actually want. A tractor that is 70% as good as a Deere won't sell on an open and competitive market where people vote with their dollars.
"Lack of revenue" is NEVER a business model.
NFC strikes me as a dumb idea, too. The bastard child of RFID and bluetooth. Apple will patent it's own alternative then foist it off on the fanbois to drool over. Neither will become the standard and apple's garden will remain solidly walled.
The only way NFC could become truly useful would be for you to surrender your last vestiges of privacy and control to your phone. Who really wants to convert to e-currency with all the tracking that implies?
Feel free to start your own country where there is no taxation. And good luck with that.
Here in the real world, we recognize that there are essential services that must be paid for, that people are not always rational and ethical and that we must agree on a system to deal with these sad facts.
The pirate party getting a mayor elected might be interesting, but it's not like they can simply impose their entire agenda.
Additionally, if you admit that intellectual property issues are real owing to the fact that real people must do real work producing them, the entire "pirate" thing falls apart. Sure, it's good to have an opposing viewpoint to the draconian IP laws being pushed by big media, but don't expect IP ownership issues to go away. If they did, nobody could ever make a living creating, well, anything.
...and lose the one real advantage the US system has: competition. That's the one factor obamacare completely ignored and the one thing that could have actually increased efficiency and lowered costs.
Yet despite the fact that basically every big government social program is bankrupt, liberals continue to insist that we pour ever more money into them. The definition of insanity is when you repeat the same actions expecting different results.
Cell phones are becoming less about communications and more about tracking and identification. Pretty soon big brother isn't going to let you leave home without it.
1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual.
Yep. First, take control of the skies. Carriers are very handy for that. Next, cover the area with attack copters. Finally, move in with frigates and destroyers. Nothing will be able to move without attracting a hellfire or SM-3. SEALs can mop up any fortified oil platforms, just like the last time the iranians got uppity.
The iranian tactic of swarming with large numbers of small craft will merely create a target rich environment. Sure, they might get lucky and sink a ship but their entire coastline on the strait will look like the surface of the moon.
Clean up the mines then it's back to business as usual.
Missiles alone can not project power. They have to be launched from somewhere - a land base, a ship or aircraft.
Carriers are effective at controlling large areas of ocean and land due to their ability to launch long range aircraft. This allows them to stay out of range of anti ship missiles while it's aircraft destroy the enemy's ability to launch attacks. When you consider that fact that a US supercarrier has a larger air wing than most nations, and that the US possesses twelve of them when no other nation has even one, it becomes clear why carriers rule.
The real weapon is, as always, knowledge. The decisive carrier battles of WW2 were decided by the ability to place the assets where they were needed to destroy the enemy. Lose the knowledge battle and carriers are just great big targets.
Of course, when you need to gather knowledge about the enemy, aircraft are extremely useful. So are submarines. Float a ship loaded with deadly anti ship missiles and threaten a carrier group with it. You'll know a submarine is in the area when your ship unexpectedly explodes and sinks.
The name "barney frank" comes to mind. He was the driving force behind fannie mae churning out millions of subprime loans in order to "make housing more affordable". All this cheap money had the effect of creating the housing bubble, ironically making housing LESS affordable. Then, of course, the bubble burst and the people left holding the bag on upside down mortgages were the very ones frank was trying to "help". In response, the dems created the "occupy wall street" movement in order to shift blame from themselves to the banks that wrote the loans.
Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations. Alinsky would be proud.
SO true.
Seriously, touch is at it's beginning and we're still figuring out how best to use it. The current Ipad is not the be all and end all of touch interfaces. The mouse and keyboard paradigm survives because it works really well. Touch as an adjunct to that is awesome. By itself not so much.
But out of all those goofy apps could come innovation in how touch interfaces SHOULD work. Eventually these things will work themselves out and not disappear like a fart in the wind.
Barking up the wrong tree. Analyze the DNA. If it codes for amino acids the same way as the rest of us the argument is over before it begins.
It doesn't. In california, the teachers union (along with other unions) operates like the mafia. Tax dollars come in and are funneled directly to the unions via the public school districts. The unions in turn use their voting bloc and monetary support for the democratic party to cement control.
They have a stranglehold on education dollars and they control the legislature. Nothing even vaguely threatening to the current union system will get to the floor for debate much less come to a vote. The losers are the taxpayers and the students.
Corporations aren't even close to being the heart of the problem. Corporations behave in a rational and predictable manner in order to maximize profits. The operate under rules and regulations set by CONGRESS. We need the legal fiction of corporations in order to create the institutions that can accomplish things. Anyone who hates corporations doesn't understand their necessity in the real world.
Sure, there are abuses. That's another predictable element of corporate behavior. Free market competition is what keeps this sort of thing in check. Don't like how one corporation operates? Use the goods/services of another. If enough people agree with you and do the same the problems fix themselves. THAT is economic freedom, which is just as important as the freedom of speech.
Apple didn't even come close to "inventing the smart phone" as if it were a complete thing unto itself. They didn't invent the touchscreen, the computer processor, they didn't invent operating systems, they didn't invent wireless data transfer or cellular communications.
What they did was take existing tech and combine it in a new way. Not to denigrate apple's achievements; they're phenomenal. But the things they're claiming to "own" aren't really the things that allowed the smartphone revolution to occur.
They're suing samsung because they can, and it's not the consumer's best interest they're worrying about. I like google and android in part because they aren't microsoft and they aren't apple. Competition is good for ME.
This whole thing makes me want to go buy and SIII ASAP.
Yep, the parent poster misses the point. People like cities because that's where the cool stuff is concentrated. We aren't talking about cities in terms of the boundaries of the municipality but rather the city centers where culture thrives.
Restaurants, shops, galleries, theaters, sports venues, you name it. Who in their right mind would choose a sterile office park with a subway franchise as the only choice for lunch when you could be near world class cuisine? And be within walking distance of a cultural event after work?
Cities aren't soul crushing, they're the geographic locus of the human soul.
Just imagine any such technology in the hands of the worst, most repressive government. That's the acid test.
Or when people find stupid survey questions amusing and deliberately answer them incorrectly.
The only thing anyone is proving is that it's impossible to own the moral high ground. Many seem to assert that there is nothing worth fighting for. Yet when you actually speak to someone from, say, behind the iron curtain or from someplace like Vietnam, suddenly the picture changes. Even with Iraq. messy as it was, there was twenty years of almost cartoonishly bad oppression that included the actual use of WMD, yet the anti US crowd dismisses it all with the wave of a hand.
What is worth fighting for? Should the US simply stand by and watch as the rest of the world descends into dictatorship and religious extremism?
Peace comes from strength and credible military deterrence, not from wishing hard.