No, you're in Libya at the request of some of the Libyan people, namely those who support the rebel faction. In case you've missed all the news stories, Qaddafi has considerable support among the general population in western part of the countries - so much so that there were already cases where rebels tried to "liberate" some towns, and were chased out of them by armed locals.
You're mistaken. The general population in Gaddafi-controlled areas acts the part when it's preferable to dying. Most of the men in Gaddafi's army were forced to fight. Most towns that greeted the freedom fighters with hostility had been subject to Gaddafi propaganda that the rebels were insurgents funded by Al Qaeda. There have been significant protests in Tripoli, but they can only do so much with the crazy man next door to them. Gaddafi is a brutal dictator, has been for decades, and no one in Libya has any love for him, except for those that benefited from their allegiance to him.
While Obama should've gone back and gotten authorization from Congress to extend the mission in Libya, he acted properly initially, because otherwise there'd be a lot of blood on our hands (see: Bush Sr. in Iraq) as the resistance capital Benghazi was about to fall had we not intervened.
Of course, as far as I know we never declared war on Pakistan either, but Congress has been happy to sign checks for drones to fire missiles inside Pakistan territory. Is this not also "putting US Armed Forces into hostilities"? And if you want to be technical, Congress has not passed a bill declaring war on anyone since World War II. It's all "authorization to use force", which is more of the kind of Orwellian terminology in use post-WWII, such as changing the Department of War to the Department of Defense.
In my opinion, this is not "hostilities" in the sense of invading a country. We are in Libya at the request of the Libyan people to prevent a humanitarian disaster. Obama may have slipped up on the technicalities, but the technicalities are only being brought up now because of politics. The cause is a just one.
It would have been nice if something better had been standardized
No, the problem is that the "standard" has barely changed since Javascript was introduced many years ago. The base language, ECMAScript, is shared with Actionscript (Flash's coding language). Except JS still looks like Actionscript from ten years ago. This comes down to the intractability of the standards committee to move forward with any large design changes due to various corporate dissenters, as well as between the ECMAScript committee and W3C. I mean, the first update since *1999* was in 2009, and that was a very, very, very watered down update (based on the few things the committee could agree on) intended to show everyone they'd made progress, but seemed more like the Bring Out Your Dead sketch. More or less, the ECMAScript committee is the software version of the UN. Now they're planning for another update, but they've already said they won't be adding classes or the things that would pull it out of the software dark ages, and there's no release date.
After that internal meltdown, Adobe pulled a Cartman and continued on with Actionscript development. And who can blame them? ECMAScript/Javascript is a disaster. There's many JS apologists out there who think that Javascript is like some kind of totally expressive free jazz ensemble, and that everyone else *just doesn't get it*, man. The real fact is, most of these Javascript developers have only ever worked in Javascript (or PHP...tomato, tomato) and don't see the performance/efficiency gains of moving to a language with modern features. It doesn't help that browsers are putting nitrous and rocket packs on what is effectively a '78 Pinto; it tends to mask the fact that the language is a hurtling fireball of death. Hey, I sympathize with JS developers. They've been working with the same screwdriver for 12 years. You get used to the tool. Actionscript developers went through the same thing with the intro of AS 3.0, when it moved to a strictly-typed environment with many new language features. But you know, Adobe had the cojones to do that and risked pissing off its developers. Unlike the ECMAScript standards committee.
And so here we are sadly, with a language that has becoming the de facto web language, that hasn't changed much at all in 12 years. A language mostly unsuitable for OOP development. A language that's a pain to debug. A language lacking basic, basic features. It's a '78 Pinto with some racing stripes and a jet engine strapped to the top. But it's totally paid off!
It certainly could be something in OS X's Java implementation. The Java-based PS3 Media Server has the same problem on OS X; it releases very little of its memory. Streaming long bits of HD content becomes a RAM problem quickly. In both cases this could be a case of not releasing asset memory due to programmer error. But I'm not really sure this a Java issue -- look at Firefox 4+ on OS X. It has massive memory leaks: it seems to never let go of HTML images, as well as Flash videos. I have to restart Firefox more than once per day now.
Here's the passage in question, for those too lazy to look at the FPDF:
c) This Court is in no position to judge the comparative force of the parties’ policy arguments as to the wisdom of the clear-and- convincing-evidence standard that Congress adopted. Congress specified the applicable standard of proof in 1952 when it codified the common-law presumption of patent validity. During the nearly 30 years that the Federal Circuit has interpreted 282 as the Court does today, Congress has often amended 282 and other patent laws, but apparently has never considered any proposal to lower the standard of proof. Indeed, Congress has left the Federal Circuit’s interpreta- tion in place despite ongoing criticism, both from within the Federal Government and without. Accordingly, any recalibration of the stan- dard of proof remains in Congress’ hands.
You have some replies stating that the Supreme Court should clean up the mess they started, but our system doesn't work that way. The Supreme Court can only apply a test of constitutionality to existing Congressional laws. They can't just outright invalidate or change laws they think are broken, even if the rationale for the law began with the Court. That's why this opinion states that Congress must clean up its own mess. All the Court can do in this case is wag its collective finger at Congress.
One thing I haven't seen discussed is the deep integration of Twitter into iOS 5. There are Post To Twitter buttons everywhere. It seems to me that this is a pretty flagrant antitrust violation; a stifling of competition by raising the barrier of entry significantly for any Twitter competitor service. Considering that Microsoft went through the wringer for similar tactics, this seems a bold move. Apple can't claim that iOS is not a significant player in the market. God knows how much money Twitter paid Apple to clutter up the interface.
Indeed, "native" is an odd choice of word for what it is. In fact, it is a closed messaging system, only working with other iDevices. (As far as I could tell from the keynote, it doesn't even work with iChat on Macs!) Most likely a closed protocol just like FaceTime. It does look quite slick for what it is, but if it can't hook up with other protocols it's a bit of a limited-use service.
Not necessarily. Jobs realizes that content is king, and if he can lock people into the ecosystem with iCloud, and keeps the feature set "good enough" to compete with other devices, people won't have a great desire to leave. Not to say that Apple won't continue to innovate; Apple's investments in the speech-to-text and "intelligent agent" category speak to something big coming from them in that area. A lot of us thought we'd see this in iOS 5, but I guess they'll wait until next year.
In the CNN article, Zuckerberg is quoted as saying, "This year I've basically become a vegetarian since the only meat I'm eating is from animals I've killed myself." Funny, the vegetarians I know aren't going around slitting the throats of animals. If your diet is 90% vegetarian and 10% of the time you're executing animals, you're not a vegetarian.
While as a vegan I'm glad he's eating less meat, he seems to feel like he's exonerating himself from the death of the animals by being aware and thankful for their sacrifice. As if they had any say in the matter. I also think it's pretty messed up to just stroll in, slit a neck or two, and be off. That's a bit psychopathic.
It's also funny that he says he's eating much better foods and feels healthier. Yeah, that may be because you're eating a lot more vegetarian food now Zuckerberg, not because you've been murdering some pigs and goats in your spare time. It sounds like he's falling into the classic rich celebrity scenario of being swept up by some kooky figure with a crazy plan.
I do miss when the Mac OS had ResEdit. ResEdit did what its name suggested -- it let you edit and create resource forks of files, which is where pre-10 Mac OS kept all the "meta", non-data information in a file. You could configure & customize pretty much any bit of the OS using the program. That seems antithetical in the Jobsian world of Apple closed systems. When I was a kid, I got MultiFinder to run on a 1MB Mac Plus by using ResEdit to hack out bits of things from the system files to reduce the RAM footprint.
On a somewhat related note, have you noticed that iTunes has gotten, well...big? Like over 200MB of active RAM big? For an mp3 player. Ridiculous. Well, open up the package contents, and you'll find a whole mess of language files. Delete the languages you don't need and you'll save yourself about a 100MB of RAM. For some reason iTunes keeps every language pack in active RAM.
3)Buy Music and Apps inside Miro -- I like my music and apps free thanks.
Eh? I imagine there is some freely-released music out there, but by and large most artists are trying to put food on the table. Or did you mean free-as-in-screw-the-artist?
As for Miro itself, yeah, no thanks. First, the installer tries to put some Yahoo crapware on your system, which pretty much makes the app untrustworthy as far as I'm concerned. But it also tries to emulate the iTunes UI to a fault, while not really offering anything better in terms of finding/playing/arranging music.
There's nothing wrong with optimism. Our country was founded on it (along with slavery and the genocide of natives). But you are placing your optimism in a failed party system, instead of individuals. The Democrats and Republicans have both had their chances to turn a new leaf and do the people's will, but their entrenched interests are set in a self-winding clockwork of greed, power, and obligation. When they act in the banner of "national interests", it is the interests of their campaign funders, partisan base, lobbyists, and future employers in which they act, not the interests of people at large who they supposedly represent.
Obama was a last chance for the Democrats. I think most of us not under the influence of corn syrup and reality shows wanted to believe that Obama was somehow an internal revolution in the Democratic party; someone to whom only the people he was accountable to. But then we saw the bank bailouts, the tacit approval of Bush/Cheney crimes, the defense of wiretapping and assassinations of US citizens, the abandonment of a promise to close Guantanamo, the frail response to the "Arab Spring" revolutions, and in those revolutions we saw ourselves. Except that we don't seem to yet have the unified anger against the systemic violations of liberties to rise up in any meaningful way. Not when people like yourself are still clinging to the ghost of Kennedy.
The only way we can move forward as a country, and avoid a kind of Romanic crumbling of our nation, is organizing around a third party. A third party that represents and addresses the people, not corporations. This is only possible if we leave behind the ridiculous social bickerings of abortion and religious contentions and unite as a wide swath of Americans against the entities and individuals controlling America. But maybe I'm just a dreamer.
The Californian who equated "earthquake weather" to a hot day surprise is off the mark. But long-time Californians (moreso Los Angeles and San Francisco denizens I suspect) know of earthquake weather, and it's more that feeling of suffocating, stale stillness in the air that you mention. I have a remembrance of that sort of weather when the Northridge, CA quake struck. Perhaps the feeling is attributable to an increase in barometric pressure? I think in LA it's more associated with humid, partly overcast weather conditions, but that may be a psychological element at play, as LA is rarely humid.
Yes, I was just going to comment on their Time-To-Create review metric. They really took the piss out of all the 90s FPS games. Actually, I played the Mass Effect 2 demo on PS3 recently and remember seeing quite a few fucking crates. Humanity never learns.
While I agree with you that they've pushed forward several markets with genuine innovation and concern for user experience, the flip side is the abridgement of consumer rights that they've pushed forward along side these innovations. These two things aren't directly linked, as the latter is mostly due to the warped philosophy Jobs has been tainting the Apple culture with since he came back as CEO. But Jobs is moving the industry at an alarming rate towards computing devices that are completely locked down, the same way that the Playstation 3 is locked down. Jobs packages these rights violations in a package that is too tempting for the average consumer to resist. Without the innovations you spoke of, Jobs would not be able to fulfill his vision of tech products, a vision in which he truly believes that his customers are stupid and that he can make better decisions than they. He really does have the mindset of an Arab dictator.
So, with Sun in charge who knows? We wouldn't have the iDevices. Apple might or might not still be making computers. It's possible that they might have gone down a more Be kind of computing path, which wouldn't have been a bad thing. But whatever the outcome, this anti-consumer lockdown of devices probably would not be happening now unless Jobs had been able to find investors to start a purely iDevices company.
By the way, I guarantee you that in 2012 we will see a completely-redesigned Macbook Pro. It will not have a DVD drive. This will push all software sales towards the Mac App Store and its 30% revenue grab. Jobs will herald it as breaking the chains of physical media. But between the lines you will find the words, "I now own you".
I heard a NPR report today on this which mentioned some Egyptians are using dialup modems now and connecting to international numbers for an access point. Not sure how widespread this is.
I also wonder if a site-to-site wi-fi system using the infamous cantenna could be used to daisy chain net access from across the border. I know the Burmese Tiger rebels used this tactic pretty successfully.
Although the lack of status bar is a real irritant (if that's Mozilla's idea of innovation, they need some new thinking caps), the extreme memory leaks in the betas of FF4 on OS X are troubling. I'll often leave FF4 open overnight and come back to find it's taken up another 500MB of real memory. If they don't fix this, I may have to finally migrate away. A bloated, leaky browser at this point is just unacceptable. I do like the history-search-in-url-field feature though; that's quite useful. But taking away the status bar just seems like hubris in the face of a perfectly acceptable convention, and what used to feel like a lean, mean browsing machine now feels like a...Microsoft product.
Several details seem fake...the iPad "2", the camera which looks more like a sticker. And then the crowd sound is very obviously just a looping audio file, which I assume was put it to make it seem like he was at CES. Come on/., I expect better from you. Okay, wait. No I don't.
Apple has done a fair job at controlling leaks compared to most tech companies (although in recent years more has gotten out). They should take a cue from Jobs and release documents with minor changes to each party. When one of the documents is leaked, it will be quite easy to determine who is doing the leaking.
The younger generations never use e-mail, and rarely call. They want brief messages that are convenient to them. Status updates are a bit more their speed. I see e-mail dying except in business communication, and perhaps romantic missives.
Most of the FB updates I see are the equivalent of bringing people over to look at vacation photos on their slide projector. Except now they don't have to make artichoke dip, they can just spam all their friends in five minutes.
I think people will continue this activity going forwards because FB is powered by narcissism, which is an enduring human trait. I do hope that more empowering and privacy-valued solutions like Diaspora will overtake that cesspool.
It's a wake-up call that most of the social media services we use are based in the United States, and thus subject to such subpoenas. I think the US government's eagerness to spy on internet communications puts US-based social media companies at a severe disadvantage in the global marketplace. But some of this blame must fall on the companies themselves. If Twitter is so concerned with free speech and democratic thought, they should be encrypting all DMs such that only the sender and recipient have the keys to unecrypt the private conversations.
It's ironic that the State Department encouraged Twitter to keep their service running 24/7 during the "Green Revolution" in Iran, which encouraged political and anti-regime dissent in that country through tweets, but when it comes to political dissent against the US government, suddenly these same government vanguards need to rifle through users' digital belongings in the middle of the night.
One can only hope that this will start to bring about a new generation of decentralized, non-commercial social media services such as Diaspora.
Huh. You can choose to say that my anecdote is unverifiable, but to claim that I'm lying? Fuck off son. I have no reason to lie. Apologies for not having a video camera rolling when it happened.
Slashdot Mirror
You're mistaken. The general population in Gaddafi-controlled areas acts the part when it's preferable to dying. Most of the men in Gaddafi's army were forced to fight. Most towns that greeted the freedom fighters with hostility had been subject to Gaddafi propaganda that the rebels were insurgents funded by Al Qaeda. There have been significant protests in Tripoli, but they can only do so much with the crazy man next door to them. Gaddafi is a brutal dictator, has been for decades, and no one in Libya has any love for him, except for those that benefited from their allegiance to him.
Given the overpopulation of the planet and scarcity of natural resources, procreation is indeed rather irrational.
While Obama should've gone back and gotten authorization from Congress to extend the mission in Libya, he acted properly initially, because otherwise there'd be a lot of blood on our hands (see: Bush Sr. in Iraq) as the resistance capital Benghazi was about to fall had we not intervened.
Of course, as far as I know we never declared war on Pakistan either, but Congress has been happy to sign checks for drones to fire missiles inside Pakistan territory. Is this not also "putting US Armed Forces into hostilities"? And if you want to be technical, Congress has not passed a bill declaring war on anyone since World War II. It's all "authorization to use force", which is more of the kind of Orwellian terminology in use post-WWII, such as changing the Department of War to the Department of Defense.
In my opinion, this is not "hostilities" in the sense of invading a country. We are in Libya at the request of the Libyan people to prevent a humanitarian disaster. Obama may have slipped up on the technicalities, but the technicalities are only being brought up now because of politics. The cause is a just one.
No, the problem is that the "standard" has barely changed since Javascript was introduced many years ago. The base language, ECMAScript, is shared with Actionscript (Flash's coding language). Except JS still looks like Actionscript from ten years ago. This comes down to the intractability of the standards committee to move forward with any large design changes due to various corporate dissenters, as well as between the ECMAScript committee and W3C. I mean, the first update since *1999* was in 2009, and that was a very, very, very watered down update (based on the few things the committee could agree on) intended to show everyone they'd made progress, but seemed more like the Bring Out Your Dead sketch. More or less, the ECMAScript committee is the software version of the UN. Now they're planning for another update, but they've already said they won't be adding classes or the things that would pull it out of the software dark ages, and there's no release date.
After that internal meltdown, Adobe pulled a Cartman and continued on with Actionscript development. And who can blame them? ECMAScript/Javascript is a disaster. There's many JS apologists out there who think that Javascript is like some kind of totally expressive free jazz ensemble, and that everyone else *just doesn't get it*, man. The real fact is, most of these Javascript developers have only ever worked in Javascript (or PHP...tomato, tomato) and don't see the performance/efficiency gains of moving to a language with modern features. It doesn't help that browsers are putting nitrous and rocket packs on what is effectively a '78 Pinto; it tends to mask the fact that the language is a hurtling fireball of death. Hey, I sympathize with JS developers. They've been working with the same screwdriver for 12 years. You get used to the tool. Actionscript developers went through the same thing with the intro of AS 3.0, when it moved to a strictly-typed environment with many new language features. But you know, Adobe had the cojones to do that and risked pissing off its developers. Unlike the ECMAScript standards committee.
And so here we are sadly, with a language that has becoming the de facto web language, that hasn't changed much at all in 12 years. A language mostly unsuitable for OOP development. A language that's a pain to debug. A language lacking basic, basic features. It's a '78 Pinto with some racing stripes and a jet engine strapped to the top. But it's totally paid off!
It certainly could be something in OS X's Java implementation. The Java-based PS3 Media Server has the same problem on OS X; it releases very little of its memory. Streaming long bits of HD content becomes a RAM problem quickly. In both cases this could be a case of not releasing asset memory due to programmer error. But I'm not really sure this a Java issue -- look at Firefox 4+ on OS X. It has massive memory leaks: it seems to never let go of HTML images, as well as Flash videos. I have to restart Firefox more than once per day now.
Here's the passage in question, for those too lazy to look at the FPDF:
You have some replies stating that the Supreme Court should clean up the mess they started, but our system doesn't work that way. The Supreme Court can only apply a test of constitutionality to existing Congressional laws. They can't just outright invalidate or change laws they think are broken, even if the rationale for the law began with the Court. That's why this opinion states that Congress must clean up its own mess. All the Court can do in this case is wag its collective finger at Congress.
One thing I haven't seen discussed is the deep integration of Twitter into iOS 5. There are Post To Twitter buttons everywhere. It seems to me that this is a pretty flagrant antitrust violation; a stifling of competition by raising the barrier of entry significantly for any Twitter competitor service. Considering that Microsoft went through the wringer for similar tactics, this seems a bold move. Apple can't claim that iOS is not a significant player in the market. God knows how much money Twitter paid Apple to clutter up the interface.
Indeed, "native" is an odd choice of word for what it is. In fact, it is a closed messaging system, only working with other iDevices. (As far as I could tell from the keynote, it doesn't even work with iChat on Macs!) Most likely a closed protocol just like FaceTime. It does look quite slick for what it is, but if it can't hook up with other protocols it's a bit of a limited-use service.
Not necessarily. Jobs realizes that content is king, and if he can lock people into the ecosystem with iCloud, and keeps the feature set "good enough" to compete with other devices, people won't have a great desire to leave. Not to say that Apple won't continue to innovate; Apple's investments in the speech-to-text and "intelligent agent" category speak to something big coming from them in that area. A lot of us thought we'd see this in iOS 5, but I guess they'll wait until next year.
In the CNN article, Zuckerberg is quoted as saying, "This year I've basically become a vegetarian since the only meat I'm eating is from animals I've killed myself." Funny, the vegetarians I know aren't going around slitting the throats of animals. If your diet is 90% vegetarian and 10% of the time you're executing animals, you're not a vegetarian.
While as a vegan I'm glad he's eating less meat, he seems to feel like he's exonerating himself from the death of the animals by being aware and thankful for their sacrifice. As if they had any say in the matter. I also think it's pretty messed up to just stroll in, slit a neck or two, and be off. That's a bit psychopathic.
It's also funny that he says he's eating much better foods and feels healthier. Yeah, that may be because you're eating a lot more vegetarian food now Zuckerberg, not because you've been murdering some pigs and goats in your spare time. It sounds like he's falling into the classic rich celebrity scenario of being swept up by some kooky figure with a crazy plan.
Oh, no. It's a correct belief. It's just that corporate interests with better lobbyists (RIAA, MPAA, et al) won the day here.
I do miss when the Mac OS had ResEdit. ResEdit did what its name suggested -- it let you edit and create resource forks of files, which is where pre-10 Mac OS kept all the "meta", non-data information in a file. You could configure & customize pretty much any bit of the OS using the program. That seems antithetical in the Jobsian world of Apple closed systems. When I was a kid, I got MultiFinder to run on a 1MB Mac Plus by using ResEdit to hack out bits of things from the system files to reduce the RAM footprint.
On a somewhat related note, have you noticed that iTunes has gotten, well...big? Like over 200MB of active RAM big? For an mp3 player. Ridiculous. Well, open up the package contents, and you'll find a whole mess of language files. Delete the languages you don't need and you'll save yourself about a 100MB of RAM. For some reason iTunes keeps every language pack in active RAM.
3)Buy Music and Apps inside Miro -- I like my music and apps free thanks.
Eh? I imagine there is some freely-released music out there, but by and large most artists are trying to put food on the table. Or did you mean free-as-in-screw-the-artist?
As for Miro itself, yeah, no thanks. First, the installer tries to put some Yahoo crapware on your system, which pretty much makes the app untrustworthy as far as I'm concerned. But it also tries to emulate the iTunes UI to a fault, while not really offering anything better in terms of finding/playing/arranging music.
There's nothing wrong with optimism. Our country was founded on it (along with slavery and the genocide of natives). But you are placing your optimism in a failed party system, instead of individuals. The Democrats and Republicans have both had their chances to turn a new leaf and do the people's will, but their entrenched interests are set in a self-winding clockwork of greed, power, and obligation. When they act in the banner of "national interests", it is the interests of their campaign funders, partisan base, lobbyists, and future employers in which they act, not the interests of people at large who they supposedly represent.
Obama was a last chance for the Democrats. I think most of us not under the influence of corn syrup and reality shows wanted to believe that Obama was somehow an internal revolution in the Democratic party; someone to whom only the people he was accountable to. But then we saw the bank bailouts, the tacit approval of Bush/Cheney crimes, the defense of wiretapping and assassinations of US citizens, the abandonment of a promise to close Guantanamo, the frail response to the "Arab Spring" revolutions, and in those revolutions we saw ourselves. Except that we don't seem to yet have the unified anger against the systemic violations of liberties to rise up in any meaningful way. Not when people like yourself are still clinging to the ghost of Kennedy.
The only way we can move forward as a country, and avoid a kind of Romanic crumbling of our nation, is organizing around a third party. A third party that represents and addresses the people, not corporations. This is only possible if we leave behind the ridiculous social bickerings of abortion and religious contentions and unite as a wide swath of Americans against the entities and individuals controlling America. But maybe I'm just a dreamer.
The Californian who equated "earthquake weather" to a hot day surprise is off the mark. But long-time Californians (moreso Los Angeles and San Francisco denizens I suspect) know of earthquake weather, and it's more that feeling of suffocating, stale stillness in the air that you mention. I have a remembrance of that sort of weather when the Northridge, CA quake struck. Perhaps the feeling is attributable to an increase in barometric pressure? I think in LA it's more associated with humid, partly overcast weather conditions, but that may be a psychological element at play, as LA is rarely humid.
Yes, I was just going to comment on their Time-To-Create review metric. They really took the piss out of all the 90s FPS games.
Actually, I played the Mass Effect 2 demo on PS3 recently and remember seeing quite a few fucking crates. Humanity never learns.
While I agree with you that they've pushed forward several markets with genuine innovation and concern for user experience, the flip side is the abridgement of consumer rights that they've pushed forward along side these innovations. These two things aren't directly linked, as the latter is mostly due to the warped philosophy Jobs has been tainting the Apple culture with since he came back as CEO. But Jobs is moving the industry at an alarming rate towards computing devices that are completely locked down, the same way that the Playstation 3 is locked down. Jobs packages these rights violations in a package that is too tempting for the average consumer to resist. Without the innovations you spoke of, Jobs would not be able to fulfill his vision of tech products, a vision in which he truly believes that his customers are stupid and that he can make better decisions than they. He really does have the mindset of an Arab dictator.
So, with Sun in charge who knows? We wouldn't have the iDevices. Apple might or might not still be making computers. It's possible that they might have gone down a more Be kind of computing path, which wouldn't have been a bad thing. But whatever the outcome, this anti-consumer lockdown of devices probably would not be happening now unless Jobs had been able to find investors to start a purely iDevices company.
By the way, I guarantee you that in 2012 we will see a completely-redesigned Macbook Pro. It will not have a DVD drive. This will push all software sales towards the Mac App Store and its 30% revenue grab. Jobs will herald it as breaking the chains of physical media. But between the lines you will find the words, "I now own you".
I heard a NPR report today on this which mentioned some Egyptians are using dialup modems now and connecting to international numbers for an access point. Not sure how widespread this is.
I also wonder if a site-to-site wi-fi system using the infamous cantenna could be used to daisy chain net access from across the border. I know the Burmese Tiger rebels used this tactic pretty successfully.
KHAAANNN!!!
Although the lack of status bar is a real irritant (if that's Mozilla's idea of innovation, they need some new thinking caps), the extreme memory leaks in the betas of FF4 on OS X are troubling. I'll often leave FF4 open overnight and come back to find it's taken up another 500MB of real memory. If they don't fix this, I may have to finally migrate away. A bloated, leaky browser at this point is just unacceptable. I do like the history-search-in-url-field feature though; that's quite useful. But taking away the status bar just seems like hubris in the face of a perfectly acceptable convention, and what used to feel like a lean, mean browsing machine now feels like a...Microsoft product.
Several details seem fake...the iPad "2", the camera which looks more like a sticker. And then the crowd sound is very obviously just a looping audio file, which I assume was put it to make it seem like he was at CES. Come on /., I expect better from you. Okay, wait. No I don't.
Apple has done a fair job at controlling leaks compared to most tech companies (although in recent years more has gotten out). They should take a cue from Jobs and release documents with minor changes to each party. When one of the documents is leaked, it will be quite easy to determine who is doing the leaking.
The younger generations never use e-mail, and rarely call. They want brief messages that are convenient to them. Status updates are a bit more their speed. I see e-mail dying except in business communication, and perhaps romantic missives.
Most of the FB updates I see are the equivalent of bringing people over to look at vacation photos on their slide projector. Except now they don't have to make artichoke dip, they can just spam all their friends in five minutes.
I think people will continue this activity going forwards because FB is powered by narcissism, which is an enduring human trait. I do hope that more empowering and privacy-valued solutions like Diaspora will overtake that cesspool.
It's a wake-up call that most of the social media services we use are based in the United States, and thus subject to such subpoenas. I think the US government's eagerness to spy on internet communications puts US-based social media companies at a severe disadvantage in the global marketplace. But some of this blame must fall on the companies themselves. If Twitter is so concerned with free speech and democratic thought, they should be encrypting all DMs such that only the sender and recipient have the keys to unecrypt the private conversations.
It's ironic that the State Department encouraged Twitter to keep their service running 24/7 during the "Green Revolution" in Iran, which encouraged political and anti-regime dissent in that country through tweets, but when it comes to political dissent against the US government, suddenly these same government vanguards need to rifle through users' digital belongings in the middle of the night.
One can only hope that this will start to bring about a new generation of decentralized, non-commercial social media services such as Diaspora.
Huh. You can choose to say that my anecdote is unverifiable, but to claim that I'm lying? Fuck off son. I have no reason to lie. Apologies for not having a video camera rolling when it happened.