The timeframe he specified was designed to leave them out. And he specified "foreign state" specifically in order to leave out terrorist attacks, both here and abroad.
"Internet retailers take advantage of public services just the same as everyone else, but are exempted from contributing back?"
This "not paying for local services" line of crap needs to die. It's entirely false-to-fact.
In states where they actually have a physcial presence (headquarters, warehouses), internet companies pay for those services in state and local taxes just like everyone else. And provide jobs, to boot.
Elsewhere, they REDUCE the demand on public services. Think for a change. Which has a larger local impact? One UPS truck on a single programmed least-distance travelled route making 50 stops to drop off packages, or 50 homeowners making 50 individual trips driving 50 SUVs from 50 different homes to 50 different stores... and then driving back again?
Not to mention that the local delivery services are ALSO paying local taxes to use those roads.
Not paying sales tax places the internet retailer on the same playing field as the local store, as paying shipping fees is a wash against paying sales tax. It's the same logic that exempted catalog sales from sales tax. And one mght also remind you that there are millions of "mom and pop" internet retailers too, selling everything from crafts to custom cars. Mom and pop still exist. Only the venue has changed.
Again, "not paying social services" is a line. It's a political talking point that exists SOLEY to justifty another way for state and local governments to stick their hand into your pocket.
While I do think that we spend WAY WAY too much money on our military-industrial complex, one has to absolutely love the way you framed that statement.
"May I remind you that in the past 50 years, the USA has not been attacked at home by a foreign state once."
Fifty years. Nice of you to conveniently leave out WWI and WWII.
"You fight because you have interests elsewhere you want to protect."
Yeah, like financing and backing most of NATO during the cold war, so that the USSR didn't "liberate" most of Western Europe. That was all done simply for our benefit. Or opposing China's and USSR's expansionist polices in Korea and Vietnam and Afghanistan. (Yes, we had other reasons too, but we did oppose them.)
And I'd remind you that we were in fact attached rather recently, but you also managed to discount that quite nicely by saying by a foreign "state".
We also, IIRC, lead the world in foreign aid. And, since you mention it, we're also one of the UN's largest backers, AND suppliers. I suppose we could cut all of that funding too, since we only do so out of "vested interests".
"As far as Apple, iMacs seem to have much less longevity than the more expensive Mac Pro... Regardless with Apple, you are paying a higher premium for the hardware...."
They also have a much, much higher RESALE value as well, which people rarely factor into the equation. I've sold many a Mac a year or two later for 60-70% of the purchase price.
This from a crowd that rabidly defends its "right" to use AdBlock and FlashBlock and NoScript and Greasemonkey.
All of which are add-ons designed (in part) to strip web sites of their ad-based revenue streams.
At least with Safari's reader mode the page loads first -- with the ads. You then make a conscious choice to click the Reader button and just see main body text.
Ditto. There was talk a while back of charging $0.25 a share per transaction. Doing so would discourage flipping stocks just because it rose ten cents.
I also like the idea of dropping capital gains taxes on stocks held longer than a couple of years. Do that, and you encourage long-term investment in worthwhile companies.
"...a catastrophic banking crisis brought about by poor government incentivizing in the marketplace..."
Fanny and Freddie were insignificant next to the shenanigans worked by Goldman and J.P. Morgan Chase and IAG.
Instead, try an internet bubble that lead to too much cash chasing too few investments. As such financiers created ever more dodgy and creative instruments (mortgage-backed derivatives) that themselves depended upon a steady and ever increasing supply of mortgages. Which in turn encouraged companies to approve anyone and everyone... all behind the scenes and under the covers with little to no government oversight.
They can buy them, but it won't matter until Android is updated to do the same auto-pixel doubling trick the iPhone uses to support the higher resolutions.
They increased sensor size. The size of a pixel in the 5mp camera is the same as that of the 3mp camera, despite the increase in the number of pixels. It also uses a backside illuminated sensor, which nicer standalone cameras are just now starting to use to reduce the noise floor and increase low light sensitivity.
"...they appear to have followed the then-current industry regulations."
Which didn't include common safety measures taken elsewhere. Why? Because they lobbied heavily against them, and because it would have cost them an extra $500,000 per well.
At the very least BP should crucify the bean-counter that came up with that plan for "saving" money.
Actually, if Google really wanted to help they should have simply spent a half billion or so, bought the H.264 patents from MPEG-LA, and donated the whole thing to the public domain.
Bingo. One patent-free codec for which we ALREADY have hardware support.
Or they could have prepaid the royalties for the Mozzila folks. But no, now we have to have another Bluray vs. HD-DVD battle.
Actually, there was another report that I'm not going to bother to lookup, that said about half the people studied unconsciously speak about 50% louder than the ambient noise level when on the phone.
Note the "unconsciously" part. There's a good chance you're one of them.
You're missing the difference between a language and libraries. A language is keywords, syntax and grammar, operations and expressions. Libraries (and frameworks) are bundled pieces of prewritten functions that actually let you do something. Libraries are the "features" let the language interact with its environment and/or accomplish real work.
Javascript is actually not a bad little language, but it has a limited feature set (bundled libraries) and the environment js typically lives in (a web browser) is a complex tree of rendered elements. Worse, different environments behave in slightly different ways, meaning that a piece of code that worked in Safari might not work in IE. (Okay, WILL not work. Happy?)
Frameworks iron out those differences in such a way that you can usually ignore them, and get on with actually accomplishing something. Yes, you could do without them, but now you're the one that has to get your code working everywhere, and, basically, reinventing the wheel. Add that to the fact that most employers would rather have you generating visible results...
"If you could use one codeset to write an app for the iPhone/Android/WinMo/WebOS then how is the iPhone special?"
Precisely. It would have the same, boring, least-common-denominator apps as everything else. Further, Apple must now wait for Adobe to integrate changes into Flash to support new features and new hardware, assuming that Adobe ever gets around to doing so at all. And if the iPhone has new capabilities and the rest of the phones on the market do not, do you think Adobe is going to code them in just for Apple? And do so in a timely fashion?
History has shown otherwise.
It is, as you say, about competition, and about ensuring that Apple's products have well-designed, tightly-integrated applications, and that it DOESN'T have the same set of cookie-cutter apps running on every other commodity device out there.
"No third party programs can us video acceleration on OSX."
Ummm... more accurate to say that third party programs can't directly access the video hardware (and accelerators). But third-party programs use OpenGL and Core Animation and Quicktime and OpenCL all of the time, and all of those are accelerated.
And I'm willing to bet that giving Flash direct access to the hardware would have blocked future product development by Apple. Or at least made it much more difficult. Did you notice the discrete GPU switching and battery savings in the new MacBook Pros? That kind of thing is possible only because the OS is between the applications and the hardware allocating and controlling access to physical resources...
Which is the job of the OS, after all.
Besides, Flash video is just a red herring, as it still fails to explain why Flash sucks at something as basic as handling simple animation. A few web pages with Flash ads can pull my MBP battery life down by HOURS.
The problem is that the average person can't spend 100 hours in a driving simulator, so most of us can't adequately practice emergency situations.
Basic driving (keeping the car on the road in a semi-safe fashion) is a task. Talking on the phone is a task. Then a truck appears out of nowhere (emergency task) and the brain freezes as it tries to reprioritize its task queue. Boom. Crash.
This "third task hesitation" has been studied and documented, and it's a killer when you're in a situation where you have to make the proper decision in the blink of an eye... like when you're driving.
There's also the fact that in a year or so you can resell the Mac for a significant portion of the purchase price, which effectively drops the cost down quite a bit. That cheap PC will be hard to give away....
Slashdot Mirror
The timeframe he specified was designed to leave them out. And he specified "foreign state" specifically in order to leave out terrorist attacks, both here and abroad.
"Internet retailers take advantage of public services just the same as everyone else, but are exempted from contributing back?"
This "not paying for local services" line of crap needs to die. It's entirely false-to-fact.
In states where they actually have a physcial presence (headquarters, warehouses), internet companies pay for those services in state and local taxes just like everyone else. And provide jobs, to boot.
Elsewhere, they REDUCE the demand on public services. Think for a change. Which has a larger local impact? One UPS truck on a single programmed least-distance travelled route making 50 stops to drop off packages, or 50 homeowners making 50 individual trips driving 50 SUVs from 50 different homes to 50 different stores... and then driving back again?
Not to mention that the local delivery services are ALSO paying local taxes to use those roads.
Not paying sales tax places the internet retailer on the same playing field as the local store, as paying shipping fees is a wash against paying sales tax. It's the same logic that exempted catalog sales from sales tax. And one mght also remind you that there are millions of "mom and pop" internet retailers too, selling everything from crafts to custom cars. Mom and pop still exist. Only the venue has changed.
Again, "not paying social services" is a line. It's a political talking point that exists SOLEY to justifty another way for state and local governments to stick their hand into your pocket.
Don't be an idiot. And don't let them do it.
While I do think that we spend WAY WAY too much money on our military-industrial complex, one has to absolutely love the way you framed that statement.
"May I remind you that in the past 50 years, the USA has not been attacked at home by a foreign state once."
Fifty years. Nice of you to conveniently leave out WWI and WWII.
"You fight because you have interests elsewhere you want to protect."
Yeah, like financing and backing most of NATO during the cold war, so that the USSR didn't "liberate" most of Western Europe. That was all done simply for our benefit. Or opposing China's and USSR's expansionist polices in Korea and Vietnam and Afghanistan. (Yes, we had other reasons too, but we did oppose them.)
And I'd remind you that we were in fact attached rather recently, but you also managed to discount that quite nicely by saying by a foreign "state".
We also, IIRC, lead the world in foreign aid. And, since you mention it, we're also one of the UN's largest backers, AND suppliers. I suppose we could cut all of that funding too, since we only do so out of "vested interests".
"As far as Apple, iMacs seem to have much less longevity than the more expensive Mac Pro ... Regardless with Apple, you are paying a higher premium for the hardware...."
They also have a much, much higher RESALE value as well, which people rarely factor into the equation. I've sold many a Mac a year or two later for 60-70% of the purchase price.
"But what apple now has done is unfair..."
This from a crowd that rabidly defends its "right" to use AdBlock and FlashBlock and NoScript and Greasemonkey.
All of which are add-ons designed (in part) to strip web sites of their ad-based revenue streams.
At least with Safari's reader mode the page loads first -- with the ads. You then make a conscious choice to click the Reader button and just see main body text.
Ditto. There was talk a while back of charging $0.25 a share per transaction. Doing so would discourage flipping stocks just because it rose ten cents.
I also like the idea of dropping capital gains taxes on stocks held longer than a couple of years. Do that, and you encourage long-term investment in worthwhile companies.
Better yet, do both.
"...a catastrophic banking crisis brought about by poor government incentivizing in the marketplace..."
Fanny and Freddie were insignificant next to the shenanigans worked by Goldman and J.P. Morgan Chase and IAG.
Instead, try an internet bubble that lead to too much cash chasing too few investments. As such financiers created ever more dodgy and creative instruments (mortgage-backed derivatives) that themselves depended upon a steady and ever increasing supply of mortgages. Which in turn encouraged companies to approve anyone and everyone... all behind the scenes and under the covers with little to no government oversight.
The end result we've already seen.
They can buy them, but it won't matter until Android is updated to do the same auto-pixel doubling trick the iPhone uses to support the higher resolutions.
They increased sensor size. The size of a pixel in the 5mp camera is the same as that of the 3mp camera, despite the increase in the number of pixels. It also uses a backside illuminated sensor, which nicer standalone cameras are just now starting to use to reduce the noise floor and increase low light sensitivity.
I can't wait to get one.
Citation?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031417936798.html
"...they appear to have followed the then-current industry regulations."
Which didn't include common safety measures taken elsewhere. Why? Because they lobbied heavily against them, and because it would have cost them an extra $500,000 per well.
At the very least BP should crucify the bean-counter that came up with that plan for "saving" money.
Actually, if Google really wanted to help they should have simply spent a half billion or so, bought the H.264 patents from MPEG-LA, and donated the whole thing to the public domain.
Bingo. One patent-free codec for which we ALREADY have hardware support.
Or they could have prepaid the royalties for the Mozzila folks. But no, now we have to have another Bluray vs. HD-DVD battle.
Actually, there was another report that I'm not going to bother to lookup, that said about half the people studied unconsciously speak about 50% louder than the ambient noise level when on the phone.
Note the "unconsciously" part. There's a good chance you're one of them.
Are either of you seriously suggesting that correct decision in this matter should be based on which is the cheapest solution?
You're missing the difference between a language and libraries. A language is keywords, syntax and grammar, operations and expressions. Libraries (and frameworks) are bundled pieces of prewritten functions that actually let you do something. Libraries are the "features" let the language interact with its environment and/or accomplish real work.
Javascript is actually not a bad little language, but it has a limited feature set (bundled libraries) and the environment js typically lives in (a web browser) is a complex tree of rendered elements. Worse, different environments behave in slightly different ways, meaning that a piece of code that worked in Safari might not work in IE. (Okay, WILL not work. Happy?)
Frameworks iron out those differences in such a way that you can usually ignore them, and get on with actually accomplishing something. Yes, you could do without them, but now you're the one that has to get your code working everywhere, and, basically, reinventing the wheel. Add that to the fact that most employers would rather have you generating visible results...
'Course, they could win the same way they won in the MP3 player market....
Time will tell.
"If you could use one codeset to write an app for the iPhone/Android/WinMo/WebOS then how is the iPhone special?"
Precisely. It would have the same, boring, least-common-denominator apps as everything else. Further, Apple must now wait for Adobe to integrate changes into Flash to support new features and new hardware, assuming that Adobe ever gets around to doing so at all. And if the iPhone has new capabilities and the rest of the phones on the market do not, do you think Adobe is going to code them in just for Apple? And do so in a timely fashion?
History has shown otherwise.
It is, as you say, about competition, and about ensuring that Apple's products have well-designed, tightly-integrated applications, and that it DOESN'T have the same set of cookie-cutter apps running on every other commodity device out there.
"No third party programs can us video acceleration on OSX."
Ummm... more accurate to say that third party programs can't directly access the video hardware (and accelerators). But third-party programs use OpenGL and Core Animation and Quicktime and OpenCL all of the time, and all of those are accelerated.
And I'm willing to bet that giving Flash direct access to the hardware would have blocked future product development by Apple. Or at least made it much more difficult. Did you notice the discrete GPU switching and battery savings in the new MacBook Pros? That kind of thing is possible only because the OS is between the applications and the hardware allocating and controlling access to physical resources...
Which is the job of the OS, after all.
Besides, Flash video is just a red herring, as it still fails to explain why Flash sucks at something as basic as handling simple animation. A few web pages with Flash ads can pull my MBP battery life down by HOURS.
It may not need to be. Apparently Farmville is coming to the iPhone and the iPad...
http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/21/its-coming-farmville-heading-to-iphone-and-ipad/
I wanted to put a slave strobe over mine that would overexpose the shot when the traffic camera strobe fired...
The problem is that the average person can't spend 100 hours in a driving simulator, so most of us can't adequately practice emergency situations.
Basic driving (keeping the car on the road in a semi-safe fashion) is a task. Talking on the phone is a task. Then a truck appears out of nowhere (emergency task) and the brain freezes as it tries to reprioritize its task queue. Boom. Crash.
This "third task hesitation" has been studied and documented, and it's a killer when you're in a situation where you have to make the proper decision in the blink of an eye... like when you're driving.
"But they have the same capabilities."
Uh... my desktop and notebook are touchscreen portable tablets???
Wow! Thanks for the heads up!
There's also the fact that in a year or so you can resell the Mac for a significant portion of the purchase price, which effectively drops the cost down quite a bit. That cheap PC will be hard to give away....
A plastic computer with roughly a third the battery life and a pound and a half heavier? Yep, that's matching specs. Count me in...
How about if you plug into your existing monitor and no extended warrenty?