I think this is a stupid law, but I don't think "it's inconvenient for my friend" is a good argument against it. We'd never pass *anything* if that were enough reason to nix something.
Do you really think our education system is substantially better than it was in the fifties and sixties, and that the improvement is a result of Federal action?
No, and no. I think a cultural shift away from valuing education and intellectual pursuits has far more to do with the decline of education than any effect Federal involvement could have had.
Basically your attitude just guarantees that states like Montana and Idaho will have a lot of counties with shitty roads, because even though you have to travel through those places to get to where you want to go, not enough people live there to support building nice wide highways through them. I guess we're stuck driving through affluent counties to get where we need to go, even though that means we may have to take a *really* long, inefficient route to get there.
What's that you say? Have the state government handle building the highways? Alright, so now the states can basically afford to interconnect cities within them with decent highways going through the sparsely populated areas. But now we have the problem that states like Idaho and Montana and North Dakota and places with low populations still can't afford to connect their large cities with large cities in other states with interstate highways. So maybe have the federal government step in there and build necessary infrastructure?
How about we just agree that for local roads, it makes the most sense to let local governments to build them. For state highways, it makes the most sense for state governments to build them. For the federal interstate system, it makes the most sense to have the federal government handle that. Oh hey, that's already the system we have! Great! Now we can quit bitching about how roads get paid for!
And many of the roads in this country are still built and maintained with city, county and State funds.
Oh, right, and those aren't part of the government. <rolls eyes>
Want to continue pointless mental masturbation over who provides what and how long you could live without one or the other, or discuss something that actually matters -- like fixes for systemic problems?
Washington constantly pushes out unfunded mandates that increase the burden on local schools. Both parties push for these things when they get power, no child left behind, how many potatoes kids should eat during the week.
Yes, the Republican government certainly liked to do that in the early part of the 2000s.
And are you seriously arguing against nutritional guidelines? I'll grant that they can be gamed as much as anything can be gamed, but you frame it as the government showing the audacity to suggest that kids should have their dietary needs met. Are you against exercise programs as well?
Why do you think large, non-human entities like government and corporations would feel 'shame' over anything? People feel shame. Make someone personally responsible and *maybe* there will be shame. The government and corporations can't -- and won't -- give a shit.
Education is SUPPOSED to be an investment, you've presumably heard the 'you have to spend money to make money' line? You know, where you do something now that costs you money in the hopes that sometime in the future it will pay off? It's not the same thing as "buying a Porsche every year." To even insinuate it as such is idiotic.
Typical goalpost-moving "free market utopia" nonsense. The great thing about it is that we will *never* have a completely free market with no distortions, so there will *always* be something to excuse "well the free market didn't work because it was distorted by X." (X nearly always being the government -- never large, entrenched organizations like corporations)
And I never worked for minimum wage! Even my job cleaning up and working a cash register paid more than minimum.
Wow, your anecdote just proves that minimum wage doesn't even exist, and that people shouldn't have any problem paying for school. Amazing! End of discussion.
Repeatedly? They said they wouldn't release Honeycomb's source because it was shit. What other instance do you have about them 'going back on their word' about Android's openness? And on top of that, even if they *did* close the source forever, how is that any different than your beloved Apple?
You're going to be eating a lot of crow when ICS hits source code repositories. Somehow I doubt you'll ever offer up a mea culpa over it and instead find something else to bitch about.
I'm really not that worried about this possibility, simply because Google would be fools to not release the code and they know it. They've benefited greatly from contributions to projects like Cyanogen, and the collective will of the Internet tends to come up with a lot of good ideas for them to integrate back into the official distribution.
I suppose it's possible that they *could* just decide "oh, we'll let them keep playing with Gingerbread and just steal any good ideas we see," but I think they know that's short-sighted and will cost them a lot more than good will.
That image doesn't prove much except that similar products look similar.
My favorite is the packaging that's supposed to be a direct, slavish copy: the iPad's box has just a picture of an iPad. The Galaxy Tab's box has, VERY CLEARLY, "Samsung GALAXY Tab" below a picture of the device. How the fuck is that copying or misleading?
Then the USB cable -- notice that they include both ends to make it look even more egregious, except that one end is a fucking standard form factor and standard icon, and the other has superficial similarities of being a wide, flat dock connector like pretty much every other wide, flat dock connector out there.
Then the microphone apps... that don't even look the same.
I don't understand the willful ignorance of Apple fanboys over this. Does it somehow validate your decades of irrelevance to think that people now *want* Apple devices? I mean, that's great and all, but seriously there's a lot of very similar products in the market right now and if you squint at them just right, you could say that just about everything is a direct copy of iPad or an iPhone -- as long as you ignore the fact that the iPad and iPhone already look pretty similar to products that came before them.
Oopsie. And it doesn't matter what "anyone familiar with both devices would instantly notice," trade redress suits are about complaints that a product is designed so that someone NOT familiar with the product might confuse them.
Anyone who goes into a store wanting an iPhone and ends up confused enough to accidentally buy a Samsung phone doesn't deserve any protection from confusion.
The only thing Samsung did that's different than a cheap knockoff manufacturer is that that put "Samsung" on the device instead of "Adple."
But they didn't. They're clearly selling a Samsung phone. They aren't trying to pass themselves off as Apple.
So can you jailbreak an Android phone and update the OS to the latest yourself? Is there a blog or tracker anywhere with a phone-OS-company matrix that shows who lets you use what on what?
Find for a phone you like, use Google to find out if you can install an alternate ROM on it. It's not that tough. Of course, you might not be able to buy the latest and greatest on day one, because nobody knows whether or not it'll be hacker friendly, but that's just how it works if this is an important feature for you.
When I got to the bit in the tutorials about apps being forcibly restarted when the orientation changes I cried with laughter.
Kind of tough to take the rest of your subjective criticisms seriously when you get this objective one completely wrong. The activity is restarted, not the app. If you don't know how to engineer an app to make it so that activity != the whole app, it doesn't speak very highly of your software engineering ability. I'm not even a Java dev and I had that 'problem' solved within hours.
Actually, there are plenty of Android apps that will automatically start/stop applications/services based on your location/time of day/whatever, so your brain doesn't need to remember to do all that manually if you don't want to.
That's pretty much a gross exaggeration of battery consumption. Not only that, but you seem to keep comparing battery life for Android phones under heavy load to the expected battery life of an iPhone under ideal conditions with no use. Apple doesn't own some magic technology that lets its phones do lots of work with no negative impact on battery life; they drain just as fast under heavy load.
I have my Evo 4G with me all the time with bluetooth enabled and I easily get 2 days out of the battery unless I'm doing a lot of web surfing or playing a lot of games.
From 10-15 feet, I doubt if I'd be able to tell the difference between very many tablets or smartphones unless they were distinct in very obvious ways, and I have 20-15 vision. They're all black or grayish with a large screen and rounded corners. The logos on the back are about the only distinguishing features. That the legal team wasn't able to do so instantly isn't surprising in the least.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooh, are we getting into a dick wagging contest over a made up religion? (redundant, I know) Fun.
--Jeremy
I think this is a stupid law, but I don't think "it's inconvenient for my friend" is a good argument against it. We'd never pass *anything* if that were enough reason to nix something.
--Jeremy
No, unfortunately the key word is not "all" -- the key word is "debts."
--Jeremy
Do you really think our education system is substantially better than it was in the fifties and sixties, and that the improvement is a result of Federal action?
No, and no. I think a cultural shift away from valuing education and intellectual pursuits has far more to do with the decline of education than any effect Federal involvement could have had.
--Jeremy
Okay, tax the rich at 100%, fine.
Ok, fine, drop all taxes to 0% and cut all spending to 0, disband the federal government.
Sounds equally stupid, right?
--Jeremy
Basically your attitude just guarantees that states like Montana and Idaho will have a lot of counties with shitty roads, because even though you have to travel through those places to get to where you want to go, not enough people live there to support building nice wide highways through them. I guess we're stuck driving through affluent counties to get where we need to go, even though that means we may have to take a *really* long, inefficient route to get there.
What's that you say? Have the state government handle building the highways? Alright, so now the states can basically afford to interconnect cities within them with decent highways going through the sparsely populated areas. But now we have the problem that states like Idaho and Montana and North Dakota and places with low populations still can't afford to connect their large cities with large cities in other states with interstate highways. So maybe have the federal government step in there and build necessary infrastructure?
How about we just agree that for local roads, it makes the most sense to let local governments to build them. For state highways, it makes the most sense for state governments to build them. For the federal interstate system, it makes the most sense to have the federal government handle that. Oh hey, that's already the system we have! Great! Now we can quit bitching about how roads get paid for!
--Jeremy
And many of the roads in this country are still built and maintained with city, county and State funds.
Oh, right, and those aren't part of the government. <rolls eyes>
Want to continue pointless mental masturbation over who provides what and how long you could live without one or the other, or discuss something that actually matters -- like fixes for systemic problems?
--Jeremy
Washington constantly pushes out unfunded mandates that increase the burden on local schools. Both parties push for these things when they get power, no child left behind, how many potatoes kids should eat during the week.
Yes, the Republican government certainly liked to do that in the early part of the 2000s.
And are you seriously arguing against nutritional guidelines? I'll grant that they can be gamed as much as anything can be gamed, but you frame it as the government showing the audacity to suggest that kids should have their dietary needs met. Are you against exercise programs as well?
--Jeremy
Why do you think large, non-human entities like government and corporations would feel 'shame' over anything? People feel shame. Make someone personally responsible and *maybe* there will be shame. The government and corporations can't -- and won't -- give a shit.
--Jeremy
Education is SUPPOSED to be an investment, you've presumably heard the 'you have to spend money to make money' line? You know, where you do something now that costs you money in the hopes that sometime in the future it will pay off? It's not the same thing as "buying a Porsche every year." To even insinuate it as such is idiotic.
--Jeremy
Typical goalpost-moving "free market utopia" nonsense. The great thing about it is that we will *never* have a completely free market with no distortions, so there will *always* be something to excuse "well the free market didn't work because it was distorted by X." (X nearly always being the government -- never large, entrenched organizations like corporations)
--Jeremy
And I never worked for minimum wage! Even my job cleaning up and working a cash register paid more than minimum.
Wow, your anecdote just proves that minimum wage doesn't even exist, and that people shouldn't have any problem paying for school. Amazing! End of discussion.
--Jeremy
Repeatedly? They said they wouldn't release Honeycomb's source because it was shit. What other instance do you have about them 'going back on their word' about Android's openness? And on top of that, even if they *did* close the source forever, how is that any different than your beloved Apple?
You're going to be eating a lot of crow when ICS hits source code repositories. Somehow I doubt you'll ever offer up a mea culpa over it and instead find something else to bitch about.
--Jeremy
Thanks for being an example of an Apple fanboy bashing Google. Double-bonus for still having that not-even-wrong sig about Google's openness.
--Jeremy
I'm really not that worried about this possibility, simply because Google would be fools to not release the code and they know it. They've benefited greatly from contributions to projects like Cyanogen, and the collective will of the Internet tends to come up with a lot of good ideas for them to integrate back into the official distribution.
I suppose it's possible that they *could* just decide "oh, we'll let them keep playing with Gingerbread and just steal any good ideas we see," but I think they know that's short-sighted and will cost them a lot more than good will.
--Jeremy
That image doesn't prove much except that similar products look similar.
My favorite is the packaging that's supposed to be a direct, slavish copy: the iPad's box has just a picture of an iPad. The Galaxy Tab's box has, VERY CLEARLY, "Samsung GALAXY Tab" below a picture of the device. How the fuck is that copying or misleading?
Then the USB cable -- notice that they include both ends to make it look even more egregious, except that one end is a fucking standard form factor and standard icon, and the other has superficial similarities of being a wide, flat dock connector like pretty much every other wide, flat dock connector out there.
Then the microphone apps... that don't even look the same.
I don't understand the willful ignorance of Apple fanboys over this. Does it somehow validate your decades of irrelevance to think that people now *want* Apple devices? I mean, that's great and all, but seriously there's a lot of very similar products in the market right now and if you squint at them just right, you could say that just about everything is a direct copy of iPad or an iPhone -- as long as you ignore the fact that the iPad and iPhone already look pretty similar to products that came before them.
--Jeremy
Oopsie. And it doesn't matter what "anyone familiar with both devices would instantly notice," trade redress suits are about complaints that a product is designed so that someone NOT familiar with the product might confuse them.
Anyone who goes into a store wanting an iPhone and ends up confused enough to accidentally buy a Samsung phone doesn't deserve any protection from confusion.
The only thing Samsung did that's different than a cheap knockoff manufacturer is that that put "Samsung" on the device instead of "Adple."
But they didn't. They're clearly selling a Samsung phone. They aren't trying to pass themselves off as Apple.
--Jeremy
No, and no.
--Jeremy
So can you jailbreak an Android phone and update the OS to the latest yourself? Is there a blog or tracker anywhere with a phone-OS-company matrix that shows who lets you use what on what?
Find for a phone you like, use Google to find out if you can install an alternate ROM on it. It's not that tough. Of course, you might not be able to buy the latest and greatest on day one, because nobody knows whether or not it'll be hacker friendly, but that's just how it works if this is an important feature for you.
--Jeremy
When I got to the bit in the tutorials about apps being forcibly restarted when the orientation changes I cried with laughter.
Kind of tough to take the rest of your subjective criticisms seriously when you get this objective one completely wrong. The activity is restarted, not the app. If you don't know how to engineer an app to make it so that activity != the whole app, it doesn't speak very highly of your software engineering ability. I'm not even a Java dev and I had that 'problem' solved within hours.
--Jeremy
Actually, there are plenty of Android apps that will automatically start/stop applications/services based on your location/time of day/whatever, so your brain doesn't need to remember to do all that manually if you don't want to.
--Jeremy
That's pretty much a gross exaggeration of battery consumption. Not only that, but you seem to keep comparing battery life for Android phones under heavy load to the expected battery life of an iPhone under ideal conditions with no use. Apple doesn't own some magic technology that lets its phones do lots of work with no negative impact on battery life; they drain just as fast under heavy load.
I have my Evo 4G with me all the time with bluetooth enabled and I easily get 2 days out of the battery unless I'm doing a lot of web surfing or playing a lot of games.
--Jeremy
The irony is strong with this one.
--Jeremy
From 10-15 feet, I doubt if I'd be able to tell the difference between very many tablets or smartphones unless they were distinct in very obvious ways, and I have 20-15 vision. They're all black or grayish with a large screen and rounded corners. The logos on the back are about the only distinguishing features. That the legal team wasn't able to do so instantly isn't surprising in the least.
--Jeremy
You're proud of the "Blame the Jews" chanting?
Oh fuck you. You aren't even interested in rational discussion.
--Jeremy