You must have missed the parts of my post where I explained how it displayed and interacted with web pages better. Perhaps you would like to back up you claim with specifics.
In the web pages I design, I have a server side variable called IsIE6 to spit out different HTML code to make Internet Explorer usable. I have now had to add an IsiPhone variable to show different HTML tags to make it usable. I didn't have to do that for Opera Mobile (nor even Safari on OS X or Windows). The standard desktop version of my web pages displayed perfectly without any custom code. IE6 is sad company for any web browser!
Frankly your post looks as fanboyish as the sarcastic Anonymous Coward who replied to me saying that Apple invented web browsers, mobile phones and the Internet. The difference being that the coward's post was obviously a parody.
I still don't understand the reason for the delay in airing North American shows in Australia.
The content provides would not want their shows appearing in the small Australian market prior to it being broadcast in the much larger (and more lucrative) US market. Staying too close the the US shedules (eg. within a week of the US broadcast) mean that the any interruption in the schedule would have to be mirrored in the Australian schedule (including the bizarre "lets-cut-the-season-in-half" that is so annoying). If they provide themselves with a buffer of a couple of weeks delay, then people will just download the shows anyway.
Australian networks have experimented with "fast-tracked" broadcasting. They don't seem to do it much now, which suggests that it didn't have a large impact on the viewing figures. I guess it is still easier to download shows and watch them when and where you want than have to bother with live broadcast (with ads), although a PVR solved that problem for me.
And yet Safari on the iPhone was the first usable mobile web browser.
No, it wasn't. Opera Mobile on my old Nokia phone was vastly superior to Safari on the iPhone. It displayed web pages in full like a desktop browser (with CSS, Javascript etc), but also had a mode that would reflow the page so that it maintained the layout but looked better on small screen. It was very cleverly done, and it made for a much more readable webpage than Safari which requires constant rezooming/scrolling. Double tapping on a section to automatically zoom in Safari is nice, but with Opera's reflowing techniques you wouldn't need to do this to be able to read the text clearly.
It could also open 10 windows at once rather than the iPhone's 8. If you try to open more than 10 windows it gives an error message. Safari just reused an existing window with no way of returning to the page that was overwritten.
Also, Opera could keep all of the windows in memory. This means you could load up 10 Slashdot articles with all the comments expanded and then read them all on a plane in Airplane mode. Safari can barely manage having a couple of windows open before it is forced to refresh pages when you switch between windows. I have lost count of the number of times I have lost a long Slashdot posting because I looked up a definition of a word in another window and then had to comment page refresh to blank when I switched back. Very annoying.
Opera will reflow paragraphs if you enlarge the font size. Safari will just show a tiny viewport onto the page you are reading. Opera can also fill in forms without zooming in to ludicrous font sizes when editing a field. Forms on Safari require constant zooming in and out to navigate around the various fields.
Opera could find text within a page. I couldn't believe it when I moved to the iPhone that it could not do this basic function. Apple have improved things with each version, but I still sometimes long for the browser I used to have.
If someone still wants to buy an old version that has only limited support then why should Microsoft knock them back? You know they didn't stop selling Windows 3.11 until 2008!
Instead of mandating vaccinations, make spreading a preventable disease a crime.
You really do not want people hiding their symptoms to avoid getting arrested. Once there is a breakout of a disease then the only priority must be to contain it.
This is no different from when Windows 2000 reached its end of life, or 98, or NT4. The life cycles of Microsoft products tend to be consistent and well known.
Anyone using Windows on a SCADA system should not just rely on Microsoft's updates for security. Lock them down, limit Internet access to a minimum, don't use Administrator accounts, don't install any Adobe products, don't use the systems for general purpose web browsing and don't feed them after midnight. Most security holes require some active interaction to work.
I still have a bunch of Win2000 systems in use and they chug along fine.
iTunes was released before the iPod. I think you're a little confused between iTunes (the application) and iTunes Store (the online music store).
You are quite right, I did just think of the store. To be honest, it never occurred to me that anyone would think of the iTunes client as a positive feature!
The only tablets I remember before the iPad were laptops with touchscreens.
There have been plenty of tablets before the iPad. Even Apple had a model that predated the iPad.
A polished convergence of the touchscreen PDAs and cell phones, without a stylus.
So in other words quite original.
Not really. The convergence of PDA and phone had been done before, by Nokia in 1996, Microsoft in 2000 and Handspring (later Palm) in 2002. You could argue that it was the iPhone interface that made it so original, but if you compare the screenshots in the picture above you will see that it is not much different to what they had in the previous decade.
But it was sleek, slim, nice to use, and integrated with iTunes.
The wheel interface was definitely original, but iTunes didn't appear until the third generation iPod, two years later.
What market did Apple create, other than the App Store, again?
Basically all of the above plus iTunes.
Well, I'm not sure about the other things you mentioned, but you have to give credit to Apple about iTunes. While it wasn't the first download-music store, they had the weight to bully the labels into playing ball, with low prices and (eventually) DRM free tracks. The integration with their devices was great, although it was a step backwards not being able to just drag and drop your music files onto your computer without installing the iTunes software. I do miss that feature that I had with my $20 MP3 player!
What is interesting is that two of these things are problems that, for better or worse, and maybe for good reason, were designed into the system. 'My Computer' is a stupid name for the stuff on a computer.
True, but it is such an obvious source for confusion that anyone doing tech support should have made sure they spelt it out in full: minimise the window to see the desktop, find the icon named "My Computer" and double click it. Depending on the person who called for support, you may need to specify to double click with the left mouse button. Some older people can have problems with the double click action, so a right click and select "Open" from the menu works too.
If the user thinks that you are talking down to them then you just explain that this makes it easier for you to envisage what is currently on the screen, and that speaking the steps out loud is to help you rather than them.
Really? Well then I guess that the answer is no, this will not launch a gaming Renaissance. So far in my scans of these posts, I have seen a sequel, a remake, people fixated on return on investment, and the established developers getting priority over new, unproven programmers.
That sounds just like our existing games industry to me! The established industry still has an avenue for potentially unprofitable ideas. It's called indie developers.
Also, the idea of giving money to games you want to see made is not new, as people do the same with pre-orders. Some people had Duke Nukem Forever on pre-order for a decade!
Yes, that is true. I am using it the way they do. If I called them denialists then they attempt to derail the discussion by feigning offense at being called that term, even though they fit the dictionary definition perfectly.
So you read the entire article and didn't manage to see the ENTIRE ARTICLE saying it will get warmer?
That was not what the grandparent said. The actual quote was 'You can't simply say, "It will get warmer", be off by as much as 30% and get credit for good science'. This misrepresents the original paper by reducing 10 pages of discussion to "simply say" something, and then claiming that it not good science because of this. The paper had full discussion, did not make a single, simple claim, and backed up what it did say with facts & figures.
If you can predict the climate, publish your predictions for each and every weather station so we can compare predicted values to actual values. (Oh, and yes, I do know the difference between weather and climate.) But no, we get some hazy predictions for something in 100 years, yet nothing for next year.
It's funny. You claim that you know the difference between weather and climate, and yet you repeatedly mix up the concepts the rest of the time. If you know the difference, why do you want to be given a prediction for a specific location? If you know the difference, why do you want to be given a prediction for the coming year?
The bizarre thing is that if you look at the graph you can see what they thought it would be next year, and indeed all years to the end of the graph. As it gets further into the future then the error range gets bigger because they can't know what the human response to this problem would be.
Moronic arguments about weather vs. climate are not science.
And moronic arguments that get weather vs climate wrong are also not science. This doesn't change merely because you keep mistakenly claiming that you do know the difference.
I see no evidence that you even read this paper. All you are doing it spouting the standard denialist memes: it's cherry picked; it's not science; it's not falsifiable, etc. You say there is no error analysis, but does that mean that they gave a single temperature prediction? No, even just looking at the graph in the article you can see there is quite a wide range to their prediction with different areas based on what the human response to this problem was.
You say some of the assumptions are false? Which ones? Why did you not include even a single example of how they got it wrong? And here is the my biggest problem:
You can't simply say, "It will get warmer", be off by as much as 30% and get credit for good science.
I did a search in the article for the text "It will get warmer" and could not find a match. It seems that the scientists behind the paper agreed with you, and so they didn't just make a single proclaimation without showing any supporting evidence.
Climate change *could* be a serious thing but it gets washed up with politically driven junk from activists. They are doing more harm than good.
Surely it is the skeptics that are doing the most harm. You know the ones. They have claimed over the past decade that global warming is false because it is actually getting cooler (although they have had to change this to claim that the temperature has remained steady once it became obvious that it was not getting cooler). They are the ones who make claims about climate changes without providing any supporting evidence, but will also deride scientists (who do actually show their working and their data) as doing the same.
One of the biggest patent trolls in the world is acknowledged to be Intellectual Ventures. And they do original research of their own too.
But Intellectual Ventures buy patents too. That is the part that makes people call them a patent troll.
The CSIRO did invent this patent to solve a very real problem, and the technology was then used in the WiFi standards. They didn't just sit back and wait for other people to have the same idea so they could sue them (like patent trolls do). They actively promoted it to various companies/organisations.
As far as I am concerned, this is the patent system working as it was designed. The only problem that I have is with this that I don't think that this government organisation should be run as a business. The CSIRO do some amazing science that will never reap any rewards (eg. astronomy). They do this to make the world a better place. The WiFi patents should have been the same thing - something to make the world a better place.
The only argument against this is that it becomes unfair on the competing commercial companies that may make a other patents to achieve a similar outcome. It is hard to compete when the government funded opposition gives it all away. While I can have some sympathy for this argument, if it comes down to a choice between making the world a better place and allowing big companies to make large profits, then I will take the former option.
As far as the general public us concerned, HSPA, HSPA+, DC-HSDPA is just meaningless nonsense. And they won't know what "4G LTE" is in comparison to just "4G". All the average person will read from that page is that the iPad supports 4G. It is in the heading. It is in the URL.
As far as the ACCC is concerned, an advertisement can be 100% accurate and still be deemed to be misleading. You should not have to read footnotes to find that the main, prominent claim is a lie.
If Aus/NZ has a technically better (lower noise, larger area etc) proposal, what other factors should be taken into account by the scientific panel?
Did you even read the part that I quoted? It lists some of the factors that were considered. Yes, there are some non-scientific things on the list, but scientists are not so insular from the realities of the world that they cannot consider cost, access etc. Do you really believe that a scientific panel would not consider things like the cost to build the site, but would actually be more guided by what you described as the "feel good" factor they get from giving money to African nations?
I notice that you forgot to include any citation for your "feel good" factor claim too. You probably should try backing up your claim that the Australian site is "apparently" technically better too, and preferably neither citation should be from the Australian camp either.
As the anonymous coward (dom) pointed out, and as was also stated in my quote, the South African site "sits at a higher altitude" than the Australian site. There is not a huge advantage of one site over the other. We know that this is true, because it is exactly what the panel said! I think that I will take their word for this over your "apparently it is technically better" remark.
It just costs a bit more and noone can get the "feel good" factor they get from giving money to African nations.
I cited my quote about the pros and cons considered by the SKA board for each country. Perhaps you can cite your quote about this "feel good" factor to which you refer. Otherwise I shall just have to assume that you are filling in the blanks with your own biases like Taco Cowboy did.
Nevertheless, I'm sticking to my original statement - Whatever decision they want to make, make it according to one criteria, and ONE CRITERIA ONLY -
What is best for the program, which will last for the next 50 years
Fair enough, but I shall stick to my assertion that this is exactly what the SKA board is doing.
You say that we all have eyes, but I cannot see any evidence of political correctness going on here. You say that political correctness has influenced the psyche of the Europeans, and yet I don't know of any multi-billion dollar project that has been unduly influenced by such things. And even if they had, the SKA member countries include Australia, Canada, India, China, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA which should be a diverse enough group to rise above the PC level.
While it does *NOT* mean that the so-called "Panel" made their decision based on PC alone - the suspicion is unfortunately, unavoidable.
It is only unavoidable if you base your opinion on your pre-conceived prejudices rather than looking at the facts. And what is with calling the SKA panel a so-called "Panel"? Is there something about the make-up of the Square Kilometre Array organisation that you are not telling us? Perhaps you have more "unavoidable suspicions" ready to rock the world of astronomy!
Political correctness has no place in Science research
What makes you think that political correctness has anything to do with the decision? Apparently the scientific board didn't have an "enormous preference for one over the other". According to a article linked in TFA:
Since 2006, South Africa has competed against a joint bid from Australia and New Zealand to host the project. The South African site has some compelling advantages: construction costs are lower, and it sits at a higher altitude. But the Australian site would be cheaper to insure, and is less likely to be encroached on by future development. The margin in favour of the winner was extremely narrow, the source says.
It looks like they were making the decision on very practical concerns. They are weighing the cheaper initial costs verses the running costs and practicalities over time. I can see no reason to complain about the process. The idea that political correctness had a part merely because South Africa is the favourite is in itself a form a political correctness.
How does anything in this new story conflict with the earlier/. story? To quote the original summary:
A scientific panel has narrowly recommended South Africa over Australia as the best site for the proposed Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an enormous US$2.1-billion radio telescope. While the project's member states have yet to make a final decision on where the telescope will go, the odds are now that the African bid will ultimately win out against the joint bid from Australia and New Zealand to host the project.
So to summarise the summary, the scientific panel recommended South Africa by a narrow margin, but the member states are still to make a final decision.
But this new story says that the the scientific panel recommended South Africa by a narrow margin, but the board of directors is still to make a final decision.
This is simply a dupe. Actually, that is not quite true. It is probably more accurate to say that it is simply a dupe. A dupe, simply.
At the moment they're offering Hard Reset, which is quality wise an AAA game.
No they are not. The St Patrick's Day Bundle is over. But you are right, Hard Reset is a polished product. They also had Jolly Roger (I already owned this) in the recent bundle, which was a fun little old-school point and click adventure.
I find the lack of a charity aspect to the Indy Royale means that I don't spend anywhere near as much as I do on the Humble Bundle. I spend 5 times more on the HB, and then split the proceeds half to the game developers and half to the charity. So that means the developers get more money from me when there is an opportunity to give away money to a worthy cause too.
I wonder if other people are like that? Would it be worth it for the other bundles like Indy Royale to get a cause attached to themselves?
We think we have all this "technology" but we are really only good at a few things. Burning fossil fuels in a turbine, mass-producing items and putting transistors on a tiny chip so we can play video games
Really? That is how you sum up all of human endevour? We have come so far and acheived so much since we came down from the trees. We have sent space ships out beyond our solar system, and explored the depths of the ocean that would crush a man if he ventured that far down. We can repair our bodies in extrodinary ways that were unheard of even 50 years ago. Doctors can use robots to perform surgery on people half a world away. We can make a robotic hand for someone. We made the world a smaller place by allowing us to talk to each other anywhere we want. We made Jersey Shore.
OK, we still have a long way to go, but why not see that as an exciting opportunity rather than bitch and moan that we haven't invented everything yet.
Why can't we fix a few grams of living matter? Because we aren't nearly as clever as we think we are.
Do you really think that the doctors in this case are so deluded that they think that they can fix this woman's hand? Obviously not, otherwise we would not be talking about fitting a bionic hand. Do you think the woman thinks that we are so clever that we can fix her hand? Obviously not, otherwise we would not be talking about fitting a bionic hand (again).
So who is it that thinks we are more clever than we really are? Not the people in the story. Not the people posting here. I know that it is certainly not you. You are too busy seeing the negative in everything around you. Maybe you are just still bitter that we don't all have flying cars like the old science fiction stories promised you when you were a child.
Slashdot Mirror
You must have missed the parts of my post where I explained how it displayed and interacted with web pages better. Perhaps you would like to back up you claim with specifics.
In the web pages I design, I have a server side variable called IsIE6 to spit out different HTML code to make Internet Explorer usable. I have now had to add an IsiPhone variable to show different HTML tags to make it usable. I didn't have to do that for Opera Mobile (nor even Safari on OS X or Windows). The standard desktop version of my web pages displayed perfectly without any custom code. IE6 is sad company for any web browser!
Frankly your post looks as fanboyish as the sarcastic Anonymous Coward who replied to me saying that Apple invented web browsers, mobile phones and the Internet. The difference being that the coward's post was obviously a parody.
I still don't understand the reason for the delay in airing North American shows in Australia.
The content provides would not want their shows appearing in the small Australian market prior to it being broadcast in the much larger (and more lucrative) US market. Staying too close the the US shedules (eg. within a week of the US broadcast) mean that the any interruption in the schedule would have to be mirrored in the Australian schedule (including the bizarre "lets-cut-the-season-in-half" that is so annoying). If they provide themselves with a buffer of a couple of weeks delay, then people will just download the shows anyway.
Australian networks have experimented with "fast-tracked" broadcasting. They don't seem to do it much now, which suggests that it didn't have a large impact on the viewing figures. I guess it is still easier to download shows and watch them when and where you want than have to bother with live broadcast (with ads), although a PVR solved that problem for me.
And yet Safari on the iPhone was the first usable mobile web browser.
No, it wasn't. Opera Mobile on my old Nokia phone was vastly superior to Safari on the iPhone. It displayed web pages in full like a desktop browser (with CSS, Javascript etc), but also had a mode that would reflow the page so that it maintained the layout but looked better on small screen. It was very cleverly done, and it made for a much more readable webpage than Safari which requires constant rezooming/scrolling. Double tapping on a section to automatically zoom in Safari is nice, but with Opera's reflowing techniques you wouldn't need to do this to be able to read the text clearly.
It could also open 10 windows at once rather than the iPhone's 8. If you try to open more than 10 windows it gives an error message. Safari just reused an existing window with no way of returning to the page that was overwritten.
Also, Opera could keep all of the windows in memory. This means you could load up 10 Slashdot articles with all the comments expanded and then read them all on a plane in Airplane mode. Safari can barely manage having a couple of windows open before it is forced to refresh pages when you switch between windows. I have lost count of the number of times I have lost a long Slashdot posting because I looked up a definition of a word in another window and then had to comment page refresh to blank when I switched back. Very annoying.
Opera will reflow paragraphs if you enlarge the font size. Safari will just show a tiny viewport onto the page you are reading. Opera can also fill in forms without zooming in to ludicrous font sizes when editing a field. Forms on Safari require constant zooming in and out to navigate around the various fields.
Opera could find text within a page. I couldn't believe it when I moved to the iPhone that it could not do this basic function. Apple have improved things with each version, but I still sometimes long for the browser I used to have.
If someone still wants to buy an old version that has only limited support then why should Microsoft knock them back? You know they didn't stop selling Windows 3.11 until 2008!
Instead of mandating vaccinations, make spreading a preventable disease a crime.
You really do not want people hiding their symptoms to avoid getting arrested. Once there is a breakout of a disease then the only priority must be to contain it.
This is no different from when Windows 2000 reached its end of life, or 98, or NT4. The life cycles of Microsoft products tend to be consistent and well known.
Anyone using Windows on a SCADA system should not just rely on Microsoft's updates for security. Lock them down, limit Internet access to a minimum, don't use Administrator accounts, don't install any Adobe products, don't use the systems for general purpose web browsing and don't feed them after midnight. Most security holes require some active interaction to work.
I still have a bunch of Win2000 systems in use and they chug along fine.
iTunes was released before the iPod. I think you're a little confused between iTunes (the application) and iTunes Store (the online music store).
You are quite right, I did just think of the store. To be honest, it never occurred to me that anyone would think of the iTunes client as a positive feature!
The only tablets I remember before the iPad were laptops with touchscreens.
There have been plenty of tablets before the iPad. Even Apple had a model that predated the iPad.
A polished convergence of the touchscreen PDAs and cell phones, without a stylus.
So in other words quite original.
Not really. The convergence of PDA and phone had been done before, by Nokia in 1996, Microsoft in 2000 and Handspring (later Palm) in 2002. You could argue that it was the iPhone interface that made it so original, but if you compare the screenshots in the picture above you will see that it is not much different to what they had in the previous decade.
But it was sleek, slim, nice to use, and integrated with iTunes.
The wheel interface was definitely original, but iTunes didn't appear until the third generation iPod, two years later.
What market did Apple create, other than the App Store, again?
Basically all of the above plus iTunes.
Well, I'm not sure about the other things you mentioned, but you have to give credit to Apple about iTunes. While it wasn't the first download-music store, they had the weight to bully the labels into playing ball, with low prices and (eventually) DRM free tracks. The integration with their devices was great, although it was a step backwards not being able to just drag and drop your music files onto your computer without installing the iTunes software. I do miss that feature that I had with my $20 MP3 player!
Wait, so did Apple innovate or not? How did they get that (supposed) patent if someone else had done it before?
It is called acquisition. They purchased the company Fingerworks for all their patents.
What is interesting is that two of these things are problems that, for better or worse, and maybe for good reason, were designed into the system. 'My Computer' is a stupid name for the stuff on a computer.
True, but it is such an obvious source for confusion that anyone doing tech support should have made sure they spelt it out in full: minimise the window to see the desktop, find the icon named "My Computer" and double click it. Depending on the person who called for support, you may need to specify to double click with the left mouse button. Some older people can have problems with the double click action, so a right click and select "Open" from the menu works too.
If the user thinks that you are talking down to them then you just explain that this makes it easier for you to envisage what is currently on the screen, and that speaking the steps out loud is to help you rather than them.
Really? Well then I guess that the answer is no, this will not launch a gaming Renaissance. So far in my scans of these posts, I have seen a sequel, a remake, people fixated on return on investment, and the established developers getting priority over new, unproven programmers.
That sounds just like our existing games industry to me! The established industry still has an avenue for potentially unprofitable ideas. It's called indie developers.
Also, the idea of giving money to games you want to see made is not new, as people do the same with pre-orders. Some people had Duke Nukem Forever on pre-order for a decade!
i think youre using the word 'skeptic' wrong.
Yes, that is true. I am using it the way they do. If I called them denialists then they attempt to derail the discussion by feigning offense at being called that term, even though they fit the dictionary definition perfectly.
So you read the entire article and didn't manage to see the ENTIRE ARTICLE saying it will get warmer?
That was not what the grandparent said. The actual quote was 'You can't simply say, "It will get warmer", be off by as much as 30% and get credit for good science'. This misrepresents the original paper by reducing 10 pages of discussion to "simply say" something, and then claiming that it not good science because of this. The paper had full discussion, did not make a single, simple claim, and backed up what it did say with facts & figures.
If you can predict the climate, publish your predictions for each and every weather station so we can compare predicted values to actual values. (Oh, and yes, I do know the difference between weather and climate.) But no, we get some hazy predictions for something in 100 years, yet nothing for next year.
It's funny. You claim that you know the difference between weather and climate, and yet you repeatedly mix up the concepts the rest of the time. If you know the difference, why do you want to be given a prediction for a specific location? If you know the difference, why do you want to be given a prediction for the coming year?
The bizarre thing is that if you look at the graph you can see what they thought it would be next year, and indeed all years to the end of the graph. As it gets further into the future then the error range gets bigger because they can't know what the human response to this problem would be.
Moronic arguments about weather vs. climate are not science.
And moronic arguments that get weather vs climate wrong are also not science. This doesn't change merely because you keep mistakenly claiming that you do know the difference.
I see no evidence that you even read this paper. All you are doing it spouting the standard denialist memes: it's cherry picked; it's not science; it's not falsifiable, etc. You say there is no error analysis, but does that mean that they gave a single temperature prediction? No, even just looking at the graph in the article you can see there is quite a wide range to their prediction with different areas based on what the human response to this problem was.
You say some of the assumptions are false? Which ones? Why did you not include even a single example of how they got it wrong? And here is the my biggest problem:
You can't simply say, "It will get warmer", be off by as much as 30% and get credit for good science.
I did a search in the article for the text "It will get warmer" and could not find a match. It seems that the scientists behind the paper agreed with you, and so they didn't just make a single proclaimation without showing any supporting evidence.
Climate change *could* be a serious thing but it gets washed up with politically driven junk from activists. They are doing more harm than good.
Surely it is the skeptics that are doing the most harm. You know the ones. They have claimed over the past decade that global warming is false because it is actually getting cooler (although they have had to change this to claim that the temperature has remained steady once it became obvious that it was not getting cooler). They are the ones who make claims about climate changes without providing any supporting evidence, but will also deride scientists (who do actually show their working and their data) as doing the same.
One of the biggest patent trolls in the world is acknowledged to be Intellectual Ventures. And they do original research of their own too.
But Intellectual Ventures buy patents too. That is the part that makes people call them a patent troll.
The CSIRO did invent this patent to solve a very real problem, and the technology was then used in the WiFi standards. They didn't just sit back and wait for other people to have the same idea so they could sue them (like patent trolls do). They actively promoted it to various companies/organisations.
As far as I am concerned, this is the patent system working as it was designed. The only problem that I have is with this that I don't think that this government organisation should be run as a business. The CSIRO do some amazing science that will never reap any rewards (eg. astronomy). They do this to make the world a better place. The WiFi patents should have been the same thing - something to make the world a better place.
The only argument against this is that it becomes unfair on the competing commercial companies that may make a other patents to achieve a similar outcome. It is hard to compete when the government funded opposition gives it all away. While I can have some sympathy for this argument, if it comes down to a choice between making the world a better place and allowing big companies to make large profits, then I will take the former option.
As far as the general public us concerned, HSPA, HSPA+, DC-HSDPA is just meaningless nonsense. And they won't know what "4G LTE" is in comparison to just "4G". All the average person will read from that page is that the iPad supports 4G. It is in the heading. It is in the URL.
As far as the ACCC is concerned, an advertisement can be 100% accurate and still be deemed to be misleading. You should not have to read footnotes to find that the main, prominent claim is a lie.
If Aus/NZ has a technically better (lower noise, larger area etc) proposal, what other factors should be taken into account by the scientific panel?
Did you even read the part that I quoted? It lists some of the factors that were considered. Yes, there are some non-scientific things on the list, but scientists are not so insular from the realities of the world that they cannot consider cost, access etc. Do you really believe that a scientific panel would not consider things like the cost to build the site, but would actually be more guided by what you described as the "feel good" factor they get from giving money to African nations?
I notice that you forgot to include any citation for your "feel good" factor claim too. You probably should try backing up your claim that the Australian site is "apparently" technically better too, and preferably neither citation should be from the Australian camp either.
As the anonymous coward (dom) pointed out, and as was also stated in my quote, the South African site "sits at a higher altitude" than the Australian site. There is not a huge advantage of one site over the other. We know that this is true, because it is exactly what the panel said! I think that I will take their word for this over your "apparently it is technically better" remark.
It just costs a bit more and noone can get the "feel good" factor they get from giving money to African nations.
I cited my quote about the pros and cons considered by the SKA board for each country. Perhaps you can cite your quote about this "feel good" factor to which you refer. Otherwise I shall just have to assume that you are filling in the blanks with your own biases like Taco Cowboy did.
Nevertheless, I'm sticking to my original statement - Whatever decision they want to make, make it according to one criteria, and ONE CRITERIA ONLY -
What is best for the program, which will last for the next 50 years
Fair enough, but I shall stick to my assertion that this is exactly what the SKA board is doing.
You say that we all have eyes, but I cannot see any evidence of political correctness going on here. You say that political correctness has influenced the psyche of the Europeans, and yet I don't know of any multi-billion dollar project that has been unduly influenced by such things. And even if they had, the SKA member countries include Australia, Canada, India, China, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA which should be a diverse enough group to rise above the PC level.
While it does *NOT* mean that the so-called "Panel" made their decision based on PC alone - the suspicion is unfortunately, unavoidable.
It is only unavoidable if you base your opinion on your pre-conceived prejudices rather than looking at the facts. And what is with calling the SKA panel a so-called "Panel"? Is there something about the make-up of the Square Kilometre Array organisation that you are not telling us? Perhaps you have more "unavoidable suspicions" ready to rock the world of astronomy!
Political correctness has no place in Science research
What makes you think that political correctness has anything to do with the decision? Apparently the scientific board didn't have an "enormous preference for one over the other". According to a article linked in TFA:
Since 2006, South Africa has competed against a joint bid from Australia and New Zealand to host the project. The South African site has some compelling advantages: construction costs are lower, and it sits at a higher altitude. But the Australian site would be cheaper to insure, and is less likely to be encroached on by future development. The margin in favour of the winner was extremely narrow, the source says.
It looks like they were making the decision on very practical concerns. They are weighing the cheaper initial costs verses the running costs and practicalities over time. I can see no reason to complain about the process. The idea that political correctness had a part merely because South Africa is the favourite is in itself a form a political correctness.
How does anything in this new story conflict with the earlier /. story? To quote the original summary:
A scientific panel has narrowly recommended South Africa over Australia as the best site for the proposed Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an enormous US$2.1-billion radio telescope. While the project's member states have yet to make a final decision on where the telescope will go, the odds are now that the African bid will ultimately win out against the joint bid from Australia and New Zealand to host the project.
So to summarise the summary, the scientific panel recommended South Africa by a narrow margin, but the member states are still to make a final decision.
But this new story says that the the scientific panel recommended South Africa by a narrow margin, but the board of directors is still to make a final decision.
This is simply a dupe. Actually, that is not quite true. It is probably more accurate to say that it is simply a dupe. A dupe, simply.
At the moment they're offering Hard Reset, which is quality wise an AAA game.
No they are not. The St Patrick's Day Bundle is over. But you are right, Hard Reset is a polished product. They also had Jolly Roger (I already owned this) in the recent bundle, which was a fun little old-school point and click adventure.
I find the lack of a charity aspect to the Indy Royale means that I don't spend anywhere near as much as I do on the Humble Bundle. I spend 5 times more on the HB, and then split the proceeds half to the game developers and half to the charity. So that means the developers get more money from me when there is an opportunity to give away money to a worthy cause too.
I wonder if other people are like that? Would it be worth it for the other bundles like Indy Royale to get a cause attached to themselves?
You forgot the original devil's music: '20 Jazz!
I guess the '10s would be alcohol, which lead to prohibition in 1919.
We think we have all this "technology" but we are really only good at a few things. Burning fossil fuels in a turbine, mass-producing items and putting transistors on a tiny chip so we can play video games
Really? That is how you sum up all of human endevour? We have come so far and acheived so much since we came down from the trees. We have sent space ships out beyond our solar system, and explored the depths of the ocean that would crush a man if he ventured that far down. We can repair our bodies in extrodinary ways that were unheard of even 50 years ago. Doctors can use robots to perform surgery on people half a world away. We can make a robotic hand for someone. We made the world a smaller place by allowing us to talk to each other anywhere we want. We made Jersey Shore.
OK, we still have a long way to go, but why not see that as an exciting opportunity rather than bitch and moan that we haven't invented everything yet.
Why can't we fix a few grams of living matter? Because we aren't nearly as clever as we think we are.
Do you really think that the doctors in this case are so deluded that they think that they can fix this woman's hand? Obviously not, otherwise we would not be talking about fitting a bionic hand. Do you think the woman thinks that we are so clever that we can fix her hand? Obviously not, otherwise we would not be talking about fitting a bionic hand (again).
So who is it that thinks we are more clever than we really are? Not the people in the story. Not the people posting here. I know that it is certainly not you. You are too busy seeing the negative in everything around you. Maybe you are just still bitter that we don't all have flying cars like the old science fiction stories promised you when you were a child.