How do you fight "against" a vacuum-assist brake system that is not being sustained by the engine?
If there's no vacuum then it's just your foot with no boost, but the lack of negative pressure on the "closed" side doesn't actively work against you - there's very little air in there to start with, and is ultimately exposed to atmosphere anyway (at the manifold end, or the pump on a diesel, so if it's not running it's just you and your foot. The car doesn't "push back", it just doesn't help you.
Similarly, the steering system is designed with a failsafe in mind, so that if the PAS pump fails (or the engine shuts off) it doesn't actively work against you as you try to bring the car to a stop. It will be tougher, but it's not like they didn't think "oh what will happen if this pump fails?" during the design and test phase.
OS X has no DRM itself. It's a combination OSS/Proprietary OS, but there is no DRM as part of the OS itself, unless you include the DVD app/DVD drive (but you can just install libdvdcss if you want). The movies and TV shows from the store feature it (and thus Quicktime needs to be able to play these files) but that is at the behest of the movie studios. Apple worked hard (and stated as a goal from the very beginning of iTunes and the iTunes store) to *remove* DRM from the content offered, and even while it was selling DRM'ed tracks offered (and actively promoted) burning the tracks to CD to strip off the DRM from within iTunes itself.
You seem to also be stuck on a platform that *whatever the circumstances* an Apple product could *never* be the best choice. People buy products that work for them, and they're also pretty good at sensing a dud (even if that dud had duped a lot of people into buying it initially via marketing - the word spreads quickly).
You are sold on Apple products, not because each product meets your needs exactly, but because you believe in the Apple brand.
This, here is the major beef. You cannot possibly know that. By your logic I would be using a Mighty Mouse or a Magic Mouse with my iMac, when I'm actually using a Microsoft mouse because it fits my needs. The mouse that came with the iMac is in a box somewhere, or I gave it to someone - I didn't need the little scroll ball on the top, but I did want a more traditional scroll wheel. Perhaps a third party mouse should be a BTO on a Mac, but it's no problem to just plug one in.
You could have stopped when you called me "special needs" - slurring me and genuinely disabled people in the name of a cheap joke at a computer maker you disagree with is just low.
If you're going to debate, at least pretend not to be a 12 year old kid.
I needed a computer that could be packed into its box very quickly, was easy to transport, could run Windows, could run OS X and had a large LCD screen. The iMac fit that niche perfectly. I put a bigger HD in it recently, but it is otherwise the same machine I bought in 2006. Best £1100 I ever spent, and while I do file my income tax online I do not look up recipes. I do my cooking like my chemistry: bucket style.
You are trying to equate a used Honda with a Lamborghini - presumably to state that the Lambo is way more expensive and less practical than the Honda as an analogy for Mac vs other options. I believe it fails because the Mac itself is just as capable (if not moreso in some areas for things it can do specifically that other OSes can't). It's not a 2 seater sports supercar with a gigantic V10 engine compared to a 7 seater MPV with an economical 4 cylinder. I would say the analogy is better between a used Honda and a used VW Touran/Passat - you will pay more for the VW that does the same job (same number of seats, same boot space, same engine performance, same size) but some people just prefer the VW and will pay more for it. And hey, perhaps that VW comes ready with that radio with the iPod dock connector built in without the need for a 3rd party head unit or a 3.5mm cable that plugs into the front.
Unless you're claiming that Macs are like supercars: the best performance you can buy? I didn't think so somehow.
(Incidentally, as an unintentionally hilarious side note, I drive a diesel Citroen Xsara Picasso - just about the most practical, unexciting, fuel efficient, un-flashy, unhip Eurobox out there. I call it the MomBus, because that's what it is. I'm a 29 year old guy who drives a soccer mom van because I like the practicality and the 50mpg combined mpg).
I personally bear no ill will towards people who use alternate operating systems. You seem to have an enormous axe to grind against Apple users for some reason.
I can't see how difficult it would be to download the codec pack you need (say, Perian for example, although there are others) and double click it (that will start the installer) and click "install" (that will install the codecs) and then "quit" when it finishes (that will quit the installer). Then double click your movie file, or drag it onto the Quicktime icon.
It's no more difficult than installing VLC or Mplayer.
Choosing not to use Quicktime Player is one thing, but claiming it is "easier" to install a different media player is just... inaccurate, unless you seriously don't know how to use google, and there's really no "futzing around" unless you have trouble downloading and installing something.
So, what you're saying is that anyone who doesn't share your exact opinions on what technology they want to buy is being coerced or tricked into spending money on junk?
I suppose it;s only natural though. You think we've been duped into buying Apple products, I think you have been duped into using a free, unpolished, clunky, maybe-it'll-work, operating system by RMS, but it's free so it doesn't matter!
*disclaimer, I also use Linux, but free free not to believe me since I am one of those "lemmings who buys things just because adverts say so".
You realise quicktime is not a single type of video right? It's a framework that plays back many different types of container with myriad different codecs. Hell, Quicktime on OS X plays back WMV (although not on the iPhone, since you need the [free] codec).
Point is, there's no "quicktime video" - there are just videos (in containers like.avi,.mkv,.mp4,.wmv, in various codecs like H.264, WMV and so on) that the quicktime framework plays back.
Xenon is a noble gas too, and it reacts with Fluorine to form stable XeF2 and XeF4 (just don't get the solid form of it wet), and can also form oxides - XeO3 and XeO4 are two of the stable forms.
A bold-face, italic is a big word to throw around casually. Just because your high school science teacher told you that noble group elements are totally unreactive does not mean it's entirely true.
Either way, noble group elements can form oxides. Yes sir, with oxygen.
I can see now why you posted AC. How embarrassing!
See, you are attributing malice where none exists. I heard the "OS X is likely to get closed up like the iPhone" argument from someone else here and there is absolutely no evidence for it - in fact, it is the exact opposite.
They have made big strides with Boot Camp, even going as far as making an elegant driver CD (on the windows side) - it was the most painless XP driver setup I've ever done! It has come a long way from the beta software that it once was, and it freely distributed with 10.5 and 10.6. They put a lot of work into it. Why on earth would they prevent you booting alternate OSes after doing that? They make their money on the hardware, so if you buy an Apple to run Windows (and I know people that have done exactly that) then why would they want to stop you?
Apple are going out of their way to make OS X a dev-friendly environment, with free dev tools, large amounts of documentation, large pushes with OSS projects that are core to OS X (rather than keeping them closed). Their model for OS X is totally different to the iPhone and iPad, and the steps they have taken with OS X as it has matured suggest the exact opposite of closing it up like the iPhone OS.
Someone suggested that Apple was "very likely" to go to an app store model for OS X, with a single purchase point and inability to install software from any other source. The evidence was "that's how it works on the iPhone, so they must want to do it".
There is no way OS X will change to that model - not after all the effort put into it to make it totally opposite to that. They are two different products.
MS sells a video game console with a closed up OS that is difficult (impossible currently?) to alter to install your own software on there, with a closed up XB Live online game store/multiplayer thing. This clearly means that they are going to do that to Windows....
Yeah, right.
You are projecting an agenda onto Apple. I don;t think it's anything that sinister, much in the way that people project agendas onto Google or MS, plotting out the most Machiavellian business plans. It's not all villainous guys with outrageous moustaches.
You're possibly not missing anything - the iPad may end up like the Apple TV and not quite hit the potential that it could have.
I think it will be a hit with a lot of people who loved the iPod Touch (or iPhone) and just wished occasionally that it had bigger screen for things like facebook, popcap games, browsing, IM and watching TV shows. I doubt it will be a success if that's all it can do at that price point it is at, but it will come down.
There is a specially designed version of iWork available for it, so homework could indeed be a possibility (even opening and saving Office formats, depending on the content of the document, but iWork > Office is pretty much assured to work), and who knows, MS might actually port a version of Mac Office onto it if it becomes popular enough. The Mac Business Unit may already be working on it internally to see if it's feasible.
Library books or course textbooks - I would kill to be able to carry around my copy of Warren. It's a monster, like most comprehensive core science textbooks, so being able to flip through it on the iPad would be great, especially with searching and links to external sites. Multiply that by all the course textbooks I have and I don;t have to worry about where I'm working since I have all the books with me for reference.
It has great potential, and could be excellent. If it was just another tablet (but running OS X instead of Windows) then it would almost certainly fail - I just don;t think the market is there for a tablet. I also do not think that it is a replacement for a netbook, as much as Jobs would like to believe, I just think it is an alternative way to do *some* of the things a netbook could do, but not all.
They don;t go after people for hackintoshes either - my point was that if I don;t add some sort of disclaimer, someone will respond that "it is all locked down, there is no way to use an alternate store" when there is, you just have to play outside the box - which is what you want to do anyway!
So what is it this week? The a wildly popular, monopoly-position smartphone or a "tiny slim percentage of the smartphone market, it is so insignificant"? - I have heard both arguments on slashdot, often in the same article.
Either way, there are strong competitors to the iPhone - there were before it arrived, and there are even more now. No one platform is gigantically ahead of the other, and antitrust requires using your monopoly to leverage an unfair advantage in another market (eg, using OS monopoly to subvert competitors and force your browser into the number 1 spot). If people don;t like the iPhone they have several options to move to.
The app store is not the consumer's property - it is a service offered by Apple that is available to your phone. Apple sells you the app on behalf of the third party developer - and it can choose not to at any time - a fact that the developer is well aware of. There is no "sticking their nose where it doesn't belong" - THEY OWN THE APP STORE so it is very much their business and they can choose what products to carry.
If you want to exercise your consumer rights, you can jailbreak your phone (which Apple is not prosecuting consumers for) and get your deep-linking porn apps from other sources, or just use the built in browser.
I hate coffee. I like the smell of it, but despise the taste. I don't own any branded clothes, I'm not "hip" by any stretch of the imagination. I have an engineering degree, and am halfway through a chemistry degree. I drive a diesel soccer mom car (a xsara picasso in fact) because it is cheap to run and tax, and is very practical. I listen to BBC Radio 2. I don't watch much TV at all. This whole "reality tv" craze has just passed me by.
My iMac is mine - I dual boot OS X and XP (very rarely, for an app that required.Net), and my Powerbook is also mine - it runs Ubuntu (yes, the non-supported PPC version). It is in no way "Theirs".
You, as a windows user clearly have no clue about viruses or malware and you think "the internet" is the blue E. You run your 20"LCD monitor at 800x600 and think that the computer is the screen and the tower is the "modem".
Here's a bell curve for the iPad user demographic:...../^\.....x
The x is your data point. If you classify the Mac platform as "weak bang for the buck with limited software availability" then you are very much not the target market.
And it's not really "form over function" if the device does *exactly what you want it to do* better than the alternatives (for me that's Windows or Linux), and in cellphones that's pretty much all the other cellphones I have come across. Even Android is not really showing me anything that I personally am doing right now on the iPhone that I could do better on an Android device, and no, I don't need to listen to streaming radio stations while simultaneously checking my email while driving the car, nor do I need root access on my phone. It just does what I ask it to do.
So the mac platform (mobile and OS X) have "nothing to offer" YOU personally - but this being the case, you must surely see that the Mac itself, the iPhone, the iPod Touch (and when it;s released the iPad) do in fact have "something to offer" a large number of people who find that the products work for them.
You can dismiss them as helpless sheep, wandering blind in the tech wilderness if you like, but that would be somewhat disingenuous and I think you know it. If you're smart enough to use any alternative than Windows as your main OS you are smart enough to understand that just because a product doesn't work for you doesn't make it worthless.
Show me a computer that costs £1225 ($1500) [price of the higher spec 21.5" iMac on UK/US store) that has the same specs - in those specs you must also include the ability to pack it up into a box in 2 minutes (including unplugging cables) and carry it like a suitcase so you can take it to your friend's house and set it up again in under 2 minutes, with a 21" IPS screen and all the other hardware, and the ability to triple boot OS X/Win/Linux as required (hackintoshes are allowed - I know the OS X licence forbids it, but go with it). The computer must be entirely contained in one unit except for the keyboard and mouse.
There was a reason that one of the best Windows laptops of 2009 was a MacBook Pro - people like the hardware, regardless of OS, and are willing to pay for what they like. If you can afford the extra for the nice case, then why not? What makes a computer any different from any other tool/device/appliance you own? No one bats an eyelid if you buy a slightly more expensive TV set because you preferred the way the case looked, even if the picture quality was the same. I mean, you have to look at the case too for as long as you own the thing.
No one bats an eye when people spend more money on a car that does exactly the same as a perfectly serviceable and good quality boxy car. Raw performance figures, rock bottom price (and the relative open-ness of the OS) are not the sole indicators of a product. "Value for money" doesn't mean "the absolute fastest thing I can buy for the lowest money" - it is a highly subjective thing.
I am very happy with the £1100 I paid for my late-2006 iMac - it was worth every penny I paid for it, and continues to be my main machine and will be for some time.
We tested all those vast arrays of herbs and treatments and the ones that worked we called "medicine". The ones that didn't we called "placebos".
Even better, Ben Goldacre in Bad Science talks about the dilution factor of homeopathic remedies, which are diluted so much that a sphere of water with a diameter equal to the distance between the Earth and the Sun would contain about 11 molecules of the original material, with the rest being water. Any benefit conferred by these diluted solutions, which are literally just water, are purely down to the placebo effect.
Many people confuse homeopathy with herbalism and do not realise just how far homeopathic remedies are diluted. The typical dilution is called "30C": this means that the original substance has been diluted by 1 drop in 100, 30 times. On the Society of Homeopaths site, in their "What is homeopathy?" section, they say that "30C contains less than 1 part per million of the original substance."
This is an understatement: a 30C homeopathic preparation is a dilution of 1 in 10030, or rather 1 in 1060, which means a 1 followed by 60 zeroes, or - let's be absolutely clear - a dilution of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000.
To phrase that in the Society of Homeopaths' terms, we should say: "30C contains less than one part per million million million million million million million million million million of the original substance."
At a homeopathic dilution of 100C, which they sell routinely, and which homeopaths claim is even more powerful than 30C, the treating substance is diluted by more than the total number of atoms in the universe. Homeopathy was invented before we knew what atoms were, or how many there are, or how big they are. It has not changed its belief system in light of this information.
Homeopathic remedies are *literally* water - they have *no* medical benefit whatsoever apart from as placebos. (and placebos can be pretty powerful - but there is no magic - you could replace all those remedies with tap water and say it was a treatment and the effect would be the same).
While I broadly agree with the subject of your post, the tiny release of tritium here is unlikely to kill anyone. Since 1955 there has only been about 250kg of the stuff produced in the first place, and the release here was on the order of 2 microcuries. You get a *significantly higher* amount of radiation from natural background sources. It's also a beta emmiter, so unless you ingest it (and it's a very light gas that will have dissipated quickly, so unlikely) you are not going to be harmed by it at all.
You're facing more danger crossing the road, or eating a Big Mac.
So they cover up a leak, that to put it into a scale familiar to you, is equivalent to spilling about 10 gallons of gasoline and not telling anyone about it and you think they are running the plant "dangerously"?
Because the culture of media sensationalism that has grown up around nuclear power is such that I will bet they made a decision about whether it was better to cover it up (since it really is the equivalent to spilling a gallon of benzene on the floor during a transfer in a chemical plant - not great, but really no big deal as long as it is dealt with effectively) or put it on record.
The very fact that the rad measurement has been given as 2 million picocuries instead of 2 microcuries is a clear indication of the "sensationalism" milage they want out of this - 2 million sounds way more scary than 2! It must have been deadly!
Even if you are drinking it, so what? The level of radiation is so small from this source you will literally be receiving more radiation from background. And while tritium does burn to produce water, it is not a spontaneous process. It is also a gas under atmospheric pressure, so the likelihood of it forming in a large enough fraction to burn in O2 and then condense into a volume of water small enough to be dangerous is... Well, lets just say even the Heart of Gold wouldn't be able to work out the probability of that.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you fight "against" a vacuum-assist brake system that is not being sustained by the engine?
If there's no vacuum then it's just your foot with no boost, but the lack of negative pressure on the "closed" side doesn't actively work against you - there's very little air in there to start with, and is ultimately exposed to atmosphere anyway (at the manifold end, or the pump on a diesel, so if it's not running it's just you and your foot. The car doesn't "push back", it just doesn't help you.
Similarly, the steering system is designed with a failsafe in mind, so that if the PAS pump fails (or the engine shuts off) it doesn't actively work against you as you try to bring the car to a stop. It will be tougher, but it's not like they didn't think "oh what will happen if this pump fails?" during the design and test phase.
Simple mpeg file support is native to Quicktime. You do not need Perian to play simple mpeg files.
Not all Apple products have DRM, fyi.
OS X has no DRM itself. It's a combination OSS/Proprietary OS, but there is no DRM as part of the OS itself, unless you include the DVD app/DVD drive (but you can just install libdvdcss if you want). The movies and TV shows from the store feature it (and thus Quicktime needs to be able to play these files) but that is at the behest of the movie studios. Apple worked hard (and stated as a goal from the very beginning of iTunes and the iTunes store) to *remove* DRM from the content offered, and even while it was selling DRM'ed tracks offered (and actively promoted) burning the tracks to CD to strip off the DRM from within iTunes itself.
You seem to also be stuck on a platform that *whatever the circumstances* an Apple product could *never* be the best choice. People buy products that work for them, and they're also pretty good at sensing a dud (even if that dud had duped a lot of people into buying it initially via marketing - the word spreads quickly).
You are sold on Apple products, not because each product meets your needs exactly, but because you believe in the Apple brand.
This, here is the major beef. You cannot possibly know that. By your logic I would be using a Mighty Mouse or a Magic Mouse with my iMac, when I'm actually using a Microsoft mouse because it fits my needs. The mouse that came with the iMac is in a box somewhere, or I gave it to someone - I didn't need the little scroll ball on the top, but I did want a more traditional scroll wheel. Perhaps a third party mouse should be a BTO on a Mac, but it's no problem to just plug one in.
You could have stopped when you called me "special needs" - slurring me and genuinely disabled people in the name of a cheap joke at a computer maker you disagree with is just low.
If you're going to debate, at least pretend not to be a 12 year old kid.
I needed a computer that could be packed into its box very quickly, was easy to transport, could run Windows, could run OS X and had a large LCD screen. The iMac fit that niche perfectly. I put a bigger HD in it recently, but it is otherwise the same machine I bought in 2006. Best £1100 I ever spent, and while I do file my income tax online I do not look up recipes. I do my cooking like my chemistry: bucket style.
You are trying to equate a used Honda with a Lamborghini - presumably to state that the Lambo is way more expensive and less practical than the Honda as an analogy for Mac vs other options. I believe it fails because the Mac itself is just as capable (if not moreso in some areas for things it can do specifically that other OSes can't). It's not a 2 seater sports supercar with a gigantic V10 engine compared to a 7 seater MPV with an economical 4 cylinder. I would say the analogy is better between a used Honda and a used VW Touran/Passat - you will pay more for the VW that does the same job (same number of seats, same boot space, same engine performance, same size) but some people just prefer the VW and will pay more for it. And hey, perhaps that VW comes ready with that radio with the iPod dock connector built in without the need for a 3rd party head unit or a 3.5mm cable that plugs into the front.
Unless you're claiming that Macs are like supercars: the best performance you can buy? I didn't think so somehow.
(Incidentally, as an unintentionally hilarious side note, I drive a diesel Citroen Xsara Picasso - just about the most practical, unexciting, fuel efficient, un-flashy, unhip Eurobox out there. I call it the MomBus, because that's what it is. I'm a 29 year old guy who drives a soccer mom van because I like the practicality and the 50mpg combined mpg).
I personally bear no ill will towards people who use alternate operating systems. You seem to have an enormous axe to grind against Apple users for some reason.
"much easier to install"?
I can't see how difficult it would be to download the codec pack you need (say, Perian for example, although there are others) and double click it (that will start the installer) and click "install" (that will install the codecs) and then "quit" when it finishes (that will quit the installer). Then double click your movie file, or drag it onto the Quicktime icon.
It's no more difficult than installing VLC or Mplayer.
Choosing not to use Quicktime Player is one thing, but claiming it is "easier" to install a different media player is just... inaccurate, unless you seriously don't know how to use google, and there's really no "futzing around" unless you have trouble downloading and installing something.
So, what you're saying is that anyone who doesn't share your exact opinions on what technology they want to buy is being coerced or tricked into spending money on junk?
I suppose it;s only natural though. You think we've been duped into buying Apple products, I think you have been duped into using a free, unpolished, clunky, maybe-it'll-work, operating system by RMS, but it's free so it doesn't matter!
*disclaimer, I also use Linux, but free free not to believe me since I am one of those "lemmings who buys things just because adverts say so".
You realise quicktime is not a single type of video right? It's a framework that plays back many different types of container with myriad different codecs. Hell, Quicktime on OS X plays back WMV (although not on the iPhone, since you need the [free] codec).
Point is, there's no "quicktime video" - there are just videos (in containers like .avi, .mkv, .mp4, .wmv, in various codecs like H.264, WMV and so on) that the quicktime framework plays back.
Xenon is a noble gas too, and it reacts with Fluorine to form stable XeF2 and XeF4 (just don't get the solid form of it wet), and can also form oxides - XeO3 and XeO4 are two of the stable forms.
A bold-face, italic is a big word to throw around casually. Just because your high school science teacher told you that noble group elements are totally unreactive does not mean it's entirely true.
Either way, noble group elements can form oxides. Yes sir, with oxygen.
I can see now why you posted AC. How embarrassing!
See, you are attributing malice where none exists. I heard the "OS X is likely to get closed up like the iPhone" argument from someone else here and there is absolutely no evidence for it - in fact, it is the exact opposite.
They have made big strides with Boot Camp, even going as far as making an elegant driver CD (on the windows side) - it was the most painless XP driver setup I've ever done! It has come a long way from the beta software that it once was, and it freely distributed with 10.5 and 10.6. They put a lot of work into it. Why on earth would they prevent you booting alternate OSes after doing that? They make their money on the hardware, so if you buy an Apple to run Windows (and I know people that have done exactly that) then why would they want to stop you?
Apple are going out of their way to make OS X a dev-friendly environment, with free dev tools, large amounts of documentation, large pushes with OSS projects that are core to OS X (rather than keeping them closed). Their model for OS X is totally different to the iPhone and iPad, and the steps they have taken with OS X as it has matured suggest the exact opposite of closing it up like the iPhone OS.
Someone suggested that Apple was "very likely" to go to an app store model for OS X, with a single purchase point and inability to install software from any other source. The evidence was "that's how it works on the iPhone, so they must want to do it".
There is no way OS X will change to that model - not after all the effort put into it to make it totally opposite to that. They are two different products.
MS sells a video game console with a closed up OS that is difficult (impossible currently?) to alter to install your own software on there, with a closed up XB Live online game store/multiplayer thing. This clearly means that they are going to do that to Windows....
Yeah, right.
You are projecting an agenda onto Apple. I don;t think it's anything that sinister, much in the way that people project agendas onto Google or MS, plotting out the most Machiavellian business plans. It's not all villainous guys with outrageous moustaches.
You're possibly not missing anything - the iPad may end up like the Apple TV and not quite hit the potential that it could have.
I think it will be a hit with a lot of people who loved the iPod Touch (or iPhone) and just wished occasionally that it had bigger screen for things like facebook, popcap games, browsing, IM and watching TV shows. I doubt it will be a success if that's all it can do at that price point it is at, but it will come down.
There is a specially designed version of iWork available for it, so homework could indeed be a possibility (even opening and saving Office formats, depending on the content of the document, but iWork > Office is pretty much assured to work), and who knows, MS might actually port a version of Mac Office onto it if it becomes popular enough. The Mac Business Unit may already be working on it internally to see if it's feasible.
Library books or course textbooks - I would kill to be able to carry around my copy of Warren. It's a monster, like most comprehensive core science textbooks, so being able to flip through it on the iPad would be great, especially with searching and links to external sites. Multiply that by all the course textbooks I have and I don;t have to worry about where I'm working since I have all the books with me for reference.
It has great potential, and could be excellent. If it was just another tablet (but running OS X instead of Windows) then it would almost certainly fail - I just don;t think the market is there for a tablet. I also do not think that it is a replacement for a netbook, as much as Jobs would like to believe, I just think it is an alternative way to do *some* of the things a netbook could do, but not all.
They don;t go after people for hackintoshes either - my point was that if I don;t add some sort of disclaimer, someone will respond that "it is all locked down, there is no way to use an alternate store" when there is, you just have to play outside the box - which is what you want to do anyway!
Well, there are about 10 pages of alternate browsers on the App Store. Did you even check?
A "100C" dilution is divided by more than the number of atoms in the universe. Quite literally.
1x10^60 the dilution factor for a "30C" remedy. That's ten to the sixty.
So what is it this week? The a wildly popular, monopoly-position smartphone or a "tiny slim percentage of the smartphone market, it is so insignificant"? - I have heard both arguments on slashdot, often in the same article.
Either way, there are strong competitors to the iPhone - there were before it arrived, and there are even more now. No one platform is gigantically ahead of the other, and antitrust requires using your monopoly to leverage an unfair advantage in another market (eg, using OS monopoly to subvert competitors and force your browser into the number 1 spot). If people don;t like the iPhone they have several options to move to.
So jailbreak the phone and do what you want.
The app store is not the consumer's property - it is a service offered by Apple that is available to your phone. Apple sells you the app on behalf of the third party developer - and it can choose not to at any time - a fact that the developer is well aware of. There is no "sticking their nose where it doesn't belong" - THEY OWN THE APP STORE so it is very much their business and they can choose what products to carry.
If you want to exercise your consumer rights, you can jailbreak your phone (which Apple is not prosecuting consumers for) and get your deep-linking porn apps from other sources, or just use the built in browser.
I hate coffee. I like the smell of it, but despise the taste. I don't own any branded clothes, I'm not "hip" by any stretch of the imagination. I have an engineering degree, and am halfway through a chemistry degree. I drive a diesel soccer mom car (a xsara picasso in fact) because it is cheap to run and tax, and is very practical. I listen to BBC Radio 2. I don't watch much TV at all. This whole "reality tv" craze has just passed me by.
My iMac is mine - I dual boot OS X and XP (very rarely, for an app that required .Net), and my Powerbook is also mine - it runs Ubuntu (yes, the non-supported PPC version). It is in no way "Theirs".
You, as a windows user clearly have no clue about viruses or malware and you think "the internet" is the blue E. You run your 20"LCD monitor at 800x600 and think that the computer is the screen and the tower is the "modem".
See, I can generalise too.
Here's a bell curve for the iPad user demographic: ...../^\.....x
The x is your data point. If you classify the Mac platform as "weak bang for the buck with limited software availability" then you are very much not the target market.
And it's not really "form over function" if the device does *exactly what you want it to do* better than the alternatives (for me that's Windows or Linux), and in cellphones that's pretty much all the other cellphones I have come across. Even Android is not really showing me anything that I personally am doing right now on the iPhone that I could do better on an Android device, and no, I don't need to listen to streaming radio stations while simultaneously checking my email while driving the car, nor do I need root access on my phone. It just does what I ask it to do.
So the mac platform (mobile and OS X) have "nothing to offer" YOU personally - but this being the case, you must surely see that the Mac itself, the iPhone, the iPod Touch (and when it;s released the iPad) do in fact have "something to offer" a large number of people who find that the products work for them.
You can dismiss them as helpless sheep, wandering blind in the tech wilderness if you like, but that would be somewhat disingenuous and I think you know it. If you're smart enough to use any alternative than Windows as your main OS you are smart enough to understand that just because a product doesn't work for you doesn't make it worthless.
Show me a computer that costs £1225 ($1500) [price of the higher spec 21.5" iMac on UK/US store) that has the same specs - in those specs you must also include the ability to pack it up into a box in 2 minutes (including unplugging cables) and carry it like a suitcase so you can take it to your friend's house and set it up again in under 2 minutes, with a 21" IPS screen and all the other hardware, and the ability to triple boot OS X/Win/Linux as required (hackintoshes are allowed - I know the OS X licence forbids it, but go with it). The computer must be entirely contained in one unit except for the keyboard and mouse.
There was a reason that one of the best Windows laptops of 2009 was a MacBook Pro - people like the hardware, regardless of OS, and are willing to pay for what they like. If you can afford the extra for the nice case, then why not? What makes a computer any different from any other tool/device/appliance you own? No one bats an eyelid if you buy a slightly more expensive TV set because you preferred the way the case looked, even if the picture quality was the same. I mean, you have to look at the case too for as long as you own the thing.
No one bats an eye when people spend more money on a car that does exactly the same as a perfectly serviceable and good quality boxy car. Raw performance figures, rock bottom price (and the relative open-ness of the OS) are not the sole indicators of a product. "Value for money" doesn't mean "the absolute fastest thing I can buy for the lowest money" - it is a highly subjective thing.
I am very happy with the £1100 I paid for my late-2006 iMac - it was worth every penny I paid for it, and continues to be my main machine and will be for some time.
Well, the US limit is equivalent to 4 rads - which is 1% of background.
So you receive 1% as much radiation from drinking all of that as you get from being alive and on the earth.
"safe" is a relative term.
The strongest "remedies" are diluted more than the total number of atoms in the universe.
But that makes them stronger! Oh yes!
I'd call it snake oil, but that would suggest there's some snake or some oil in that pure, diluted water.
Dammit, this will teach me not to refresh before commenting. I just quoted Ben's dilution argument above, from his article in the Guardian.
Dara O'Briain said it best.
We tested all those vast arrays of herbs and treatments and the ones that worked we called "medicine". The ones that didn't we called "placebos".
Even better, Ben Goldacre in Bad Science talks about the dilution factor of homeopathic remedies, which are diluted so much that a sphere of water with a diameter equal to the distance between the Earth and the Sun would contain about 11 molecules of the original material, with the rest being water. Any benefit conferred by these diluted solutions, which are literally just water, are purely down to the placebo effect.
I can't remember the exact passage, and my copy of the book is on my bookshelf downstairs, but I'm sure it's online somewhere. Ah here we go, google to the rescue - from here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/nov/16/sciencenews.g2
Many people confuse homeopathy with herbalism and do not realise just how far homeopathic remedies are diluted. The typical dilution is called "30C": this means that the original substance has been diluted by 1 drop in 100, 30 times. On the Society of Homeopaths site, in their "What is homeopathy?" section, they say that "30C contains less than 1 part per million of the original substance."
This is an understatement: a 30C homeopathic preparation is a dilution of 1 in 10030, or rather 1 in 1060, which means a 1 followed by 60 zeroes, or - let's be absolutely clear - a dilution of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000.
To phrase that in the Society of Homeopaths' terms, we should say: "30C contains less than one part per million million million million million million million million million million of the original substance."
At a homeopathic dilution of 100C, which they sell routinely, and which homeopaths claim is even more powerful than 30C, the treating substance is diluted by more than the total number of atoms in the universe. Homeopathy was invented before we knew what atoms were, or how many there are, or how big they are. It has not changed its belief system in light of this information.
Homeopathic remedies are *literally* water - they have *no* medical benefit whatsoever apart from as placebos. (and placebos can be pretty powerful - but there is no magic - you could replace all those remedies with tap water and say it was a treatment and the effect would be the same).
While I broadly agree with the subject of your post, the tiny release of tritium here is unlikely to kill anyone. Since 1955 there has only been about 250kg of the stuff produced in the first place, and the release here was on the order of 2 microcuries. You get a *significantly higher* amount of radiation from natural background sources. It's also a beta emmiter, so unless you ingest it (and it's a very light gas that will have dissipated quickly, so unlikely) you are not going to be harmed by it at all.
You're facing more danger crossing the road, or eating a Big Mac.
So they cover up a leak, that to put it into a scale familiar to you, is equivalent to spilling about 10 gallons of gasoline and not telling anyone about it and you think they are running the plant "dangerously"?
Rare, yes, but so insignificant it is just silly.
This leak is akin to me spilling something hazardous at lab scale and just mopping it up without telling anyone.
Because the culture of media sensationalism that has grown up around nuclear power is such that I will bet they made a decision about whether it was better to cover it up (since it really is the equivalent to spilling a gallon of benzene on the floor during a transfer in a chemical plant - not great, but really no big deal as long as it is dealt with effectively) or put it on record.
The very fact that the rad measurement has been given as 2 million picocuries instead of 2 microcuries is a clear indication of the "sensationalism" milage they want out of this - 2 million sounds way more scary than 2! It must have been deadly!
Even if you are drinking it, so what? The level of radiation is so small from this source you will literally be receiving more radiation from background. And while tritium does burn to produce water, it is not a spontaneous process. It is also a gas under atmospheric pressure, so the likelihood of it forming in a large enough fraction to burn in O2 and then condense into a volume of water small enough to be dangerous is... Well, lets just say even the Heart of Gold wouldn't be able to work out the probability of that.