If that's really all you want, then the iPhone is obviously not for you. I was never interested in a phone with a camera and tons of other useless gimmicks. I have always been interested in a tiny portable computer, however. And that's exactly what an iPhone is (or would have been, had it not been locked down).
And it just so happens that the crappy, unreasonably limited photo camera in my iPhone actually makes better pictures indoors than my beautiful Olympus 4 megapixel camera.
What do you do to pay that much? Or is that in New Zealand dollars?
In Netherland, a T-Mobile iPhone subscription costs EUR 30 per month, which would convert to about US$40.
I would never in my life pay $90 for any phone subscription that doesn't come standard with tethering plus lots of spectacular extras. Many years ago, when UMTS was still new, my UMTS PCMCIA card cost EUR 70 per month. Nowadays it costs about EUR 30 or less.
Any the EUR 30 per month subscription is still profitable enough to pay for much of the iPhone itself; if you ignore the price of a subscription, an iPhone is way cheaper than an iPhone Touch which can do less. So the subscription could have been even cheaper than that.
Speaking of Geocaching, the iPhone's "GPS" sucks so much you have to have another GPS device anyway. Yes, I'm speaking from experience.
I can confirm this. iPhone's GPS certainly doesn't work indoors, but my impression is that even the leaves of trees are enough to stop the GPS signal. It's also way too slow to use the iPhone as a TomTom replacement.
Solar power is generally not put in the city So it will suffer the same loss.
Why? Covering city rooftops in solar cells is the most practical way to deal with clean energy. Doesn't cost you any space that might be used for something nicer, and it's close to where it's used, so you get a lot of efficiency right there.
That said, there's also something to be said for solar power plants in the desert.
Now look at the deaths from coal mining, coal power, coal pollution. How many lives would have been saved if we had built enough nuclear plants(post TMI designs) that instead of our electricity being 20% nuclear, 60% coal, it was 20% coal, 60% nuclear?
I think it's obvious to most people that coal is even worse than nuclear. However, being better than the worst option doesn't automatically make nuclear the best option. As long as the majority of your electricity comes from coal, it might make it a viable option, though.
Still, to me, it sounds like a temporary solution at best. I prefer safer, fool-proof, small-scale energy production.
On a scale of 1-10 there is still a huge, huge gap between TMI and Chernobyl. The two can't be compared at all.
Of course they can be compared. Saying Chernobyl was 100 times worse than TMI is still a comparison.
More importantly though, is that both of them mean that nuclear power doesn't have a perfect track record at all. It's been proven to be unsafe when (some) experts claimed it was safe.
nuclear power's overwhelmingly positive track record on safety when viewed over the long term.
How long term are you really looking at? Are you looking at the generation of sick and deformed children caused by Chernobyl? Or at the 10,000 years that much radioactive waste will remain dangerous? Even if you discount Chernobyl as a fluke (it's still on the track record, though), there's still plenty of radioactive leaks in civilised western countries.
You might credibly claim that nuclear power will be perfectly safe in the future. You might even claim that nuclear power has a mostly positive track record. But claiming the track record is overwhelmingly positive sends what little credibility you had down the drain.
And you didn't have a lot of credibility left after demanding that others do your failed homework for you.
From what I hear, houses in Germany are still very big, luxurious and cheap in comparison to Dutch houses. A friend's mother moved to Germany and had a new house built with 4 bathrooms, for less money than a standard 90 square meter apartment.
Why anyone would even need 4 bathrooms is still a mystery to me.
However, it's not just the climate but also the perception of what a house is suposed to be worth. I'm not entirely sure how the Dutch view things but for a German the average American home is a garden shack with a really nice TV set - a wood construction without ~20 cm of insulation doesn't really qualify as a house.
That's true. Occasionally I see an American TV show like Extrem Home Makeover, and they tear down a family's house and build a completely new one out of wood. I'd expect the family to be upset about that, but they're not. I'm frankly rather surprised anyone would even consider that normal. It sounds rather medieval to me, but apparently it's very common in much of the US.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if lack of good insulation had a big impact on the heating/AC cost.
Proper insulation can go a long way towards lowering one's heating/cooling cost and even in the hotter regions of Germany A/C is rarely found in private homes...
Keep in mind that the hotter areas in Germany are still nowhere near as hot as half of the US states.
Unfortunately, building a house out of aerated autoclaved concrete is fairly expensive and I don't think most Americans would be cool with paying 200k dollars for a normal-sized house. Hence active cooling.
And if TV is to be believed, American houses aren't anywhere near normal-sized.
Because we can't maintain our existing energy consumption level using "clean and inexhaustible" sources. We can't even come close.
Not right now, obviously. But if we're willing to invest in more capacity, we only need to dedicate a tiny percentage of the Earth's deserts to energy production in order to produce more clean energy than we're currently using.
You know what's really funny? Sailors all over the world use small wind generators to charge their batteries while at anchor.
It sounds like sea-based micro-turbines have a proven track record.
The article is bunk.
Nowhere does the article claim that micro-turbines don't work at all. It just claims they're not economical in comparison with other types of energy production.
For a ship it's completely different, mostly because powerlines and 80m wind turbines are somewhat impractical if you want your boat to be able to move.
No, there's evidence that the computer used to send the email belongs to Riccardo. The thing is, the affidavit says what Riccardo allegedly did is illegal, but the EFF claims that sending that email is not illegal and thus not not probable cause for a search.
There's more than just the email. The roommate claims real illegal activities: changing grades (sounds unlikely, but pretty serious if true), and downloading movies and music (likely, easily provable, but who the hell doesn't do that?).
Whether claims by a roommate who obviously has an axe to grind is good enough for probable cause, I have no idea. The only physical evidence is related to the email.
The charge doesn't fit the crime, if any.
There I agree. It looks likely that the student really did something wrong, but seizing all his stuff based on claims by an angry roommate is a bit extreme.
Mostly, the warrant looks like a confused mess, but maybe that's usual for these kind of documents. I have no experience with that.
I just read it, and there is definitely a bit more to it than the EFF claims, although all evidence except for one bit is all testimony from the roommate.
The most serious thing he's apparently done is change grades. It sounds to me like typical schoolboy fantasy hacking, but if he's done that, he's in trouble. Other than that, his main problem is that he has apparently illegally downloaded quite a lot of movies and music. The prosecution would do well to get the RIAA on their side, because this may be the only thing they have.
Also, the email that outs the roommate as being gay has been traced to our hacker. Evidence is convincing enough (and not just dependent on statements by the roommate). No idea if that's illegal, though.
Mostly it's just a disagreement between two roommates, and one of them got lucky by getting law enforcement on his side, and the other might be screwed for having illegal downloads on his machine.
Ther last part of the warrant request looks really amateurish about his layman's opinion that people store passwords on their computer and about a sergeant who taught him some indisputable facts of computer crime, but I skipped most of that.
Yes. You read that correctly. He kidnapped about 8 people.
I had no family at the time so I thought it was all great fun. But some of the married people were less excited to be forced to work the weekend. The conditions weren't terrible, but no one likes to work anywhere there is no choice.
No surprise but the upshot: Many programmers quit, boss was fired, company soon folded.
I hope those people quit right then and there? Or at least broke down a door or window and called the police? Nobody actually did work during the weekend for a kidnapper, right?
At some point my brother used to get a call from his boss around 11:30 asking if he was still coming in today. My brother still works there, many years later.
Exactly! Chasing devoted developers and users to the competition would be the stupidest thing Apple can do.
They have good reasons to keep the iPhone locked, and for legal reasons they probably don't want to have to support unlocked iPhones, but the ability to unlock it and do awesome things with it adds a lot of value to the iPhone. If Apple didn't quietly condone jailbreaking, people who like the added value would switch to Android.
Go to an AT&T store and tell them you're tethering, they'll be happy to cancel your account for you I'm sure.
I'm not so sure about that. An iPhone is (in Netherland at least) a lot cheaper than an iPod Touch exactly because it comes with a cell phone subscription. The subscription is where they make the real money. If the same is true in the US, then I really doubt AT&T is just going to cancel that subscription. They're more likely to severely restrict your bandwidth while still charging the same amount of money, or something like that.
Plus, better UI on iPhone is a matter of opinion. iPhone always feels to me like running a 30" monitor with 600x480 resolution. Everything is HUGE and CLUNKY (even if not actually pixelated). Like, who's brilliant idea was it to make selection of a date via those stone age wheels? They may be pretty, but it takes forever to set the date you actually want. Was it that hard to use a standard calendar? And why do we need to switch to a separate screen for editing each field?
I actually like the way the calender works on the iPhone. It has a far better UI than iCal on my Macbook, which just doesn't let me edit trivial fields without jumping through all sorts of hoops.
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I want a phone.
If that's really all you want, then the iPhone is obviously not for you. I was never interested in a phone with a camera and tons of other useless gimmicks. I have always been interested in a tiny portable computer, however. And that's exactly what an iPhone is (or would have been, had it not been locked down).
And it just so happens that the crappy, unreasonably limited photo camera in my iPhone actually makes better pictures indoors than my beautiful Olympus 4 megapixel camera.
That's the average? I pay around 75$/month.
What do you do to pay that much? Or is that in New Zealand dollars?
In Netherland, a T-Mobile iPhone subscription costs EUR 30 per month, which would convert to about US$40.
I would never in my life pay $90 for any phone subscription that doesn't come standard with tethering plus lots of spectacular extras. Many years ago, when UMTS was still new, my UMTS PCMCIA card cost EUR 70 per month. Nowadays it costs about EUR 30 or less.
Any the EUR 30 per month subscription is still profitable enough to pay for much of the iPhone itself; if you ignore the price of a subscription, an iPhone is way cheaper than an iPhone Touch which can do less. So the subscription could have been even cheaper than that.
Speaking of Geocaching, the iPhone's "GPS" sucks so much you have to have another GPS device anyway. Yes, I'm speaking from experience.
I can confirm this. iPhone's GPS certainly doesn't work indoors, but my impression is that even the leaves of trees are enough to stop the GPS signal. It's also way too slow to use the iPhone as a TomTom replacement.
I don't know. I just switched from Verizon to an iPhone and everyone I talk to tells me that my iPhone sounds clearer.
That's because of hardware, and has nothing to do with AT&T. The iPhone sounds absolutely fantastic. When it works.
OP makes a fairly decent point. You, on the other hand, are just making a silly slippery slope argument.
And if you start accepting slippery slope arguments, where does it end?
It's a good point. Running barefoot on grass or bare soil isn't a problem. Running barefoot on tarmac or gravel can be rather painful.
I still wonder how the occasional barefoot track runner deals with the gravel. I guess they grow leathery hobbit-feet or something.
Solar power is generally not put in the city So it will suffer the same loss.
Why? Covering city rooftops in solar cells is the most practical way to deal with clean energy. Doesn't cost you any space that might be used for something nicer, and it's close to where it's used, so you get a lot of efficiency right there.
That said, there's also something to be said for solar power plants in the desert.
And killed the total of, what, 60 people? The worst accident in the history of nuclear power was about equivalent to a bad truck accident.
Bad truck accidents cause a generation of children in a wide area around the accident to grow up deformed and sick?
That's got to be the mother of all truck accidents. I'd like to know what was in that truck.
And that exclusion zone is busily turning into a forest with flourishing widllife.
You make it sound like it's a good thing to have large areas that cause cancer.
And it caused about as much death and destruction. On the other hand, mining coal kills more people every year.
World War 2 caused more deaths than that. Does that mean coal is suddenly okay again?
Now look at the deaths from coal mining, coal power, coal pollution. How many lives would have been saved if we had built enough nuclear plants(post TMI designs) that instead of our electricity being 20% nuclear, 60% coal, it was 20% coal, 60% nuclear?
I think it's obvious to most people that coal is even worse than nuclear. However, being better than the worst option doesn't automatically make nuclear the best option. As long as the majority of your electricity comes from coal, it might make it a viable option, though.
Still, to me, it sounds like a temporary solution at best. I prefer safer, fool-proof, small-scale energy production.
On a scale of 1-10 there is still a huge, huge gap between TMI and Chernobyl. The two can't be compared at all.
Of course they can be compared. Saying Chernobyl was 100 times worse than TMI is still a comparison.
More importantly though, is that both of them mean that nuclear power doesn't have a perfect track record at all. It's been proven to be unsafe when (some) experts claimed it was safe.
nuclear power's overwhelmingly positive track record on safety when viewed over the long term.
How long term are you really looking at? Are you looking at the generation of sick and deformed children caused by Chernobyl? Or at the 10,000 years that much radioactive waste will remain dangerous? Even if you discount Chernobyl as a fluke (it's still on the track record, though), there's still plenty of radioactive leaks in civilised western countries.
You might credibly claim that nuclear power will be perfectly safe in the future. You might even claim that nuclear power has a mostly positive track record. But claiming the track record is overwhelmingly positive sends what little credibility you had down the drain.
And you didn't have a lot of credibility left after demanding that others do your failed homework for you.
From what I hear, houses in Germany are still very big, luxurious and cheap in comparison to Dutch houses. A friend's mother moved to Germany and had a new house built with 4 bathrooms, for less money than a standard 90 square meter apartment.
Why anyone would even need 4 bathrooms is still a mystery to me.
However, it's not just the climate but also the perception of what a house is suposed to be worth. I'm not entirely sure how the Dutch view things but for a German the average American home is a garden shack with a really nice TV set - a wood construction without ~20 cm of insulation doesn't really qualify as a house.
That's true. Occasionally I see an American TV show like Extrem Home Makeover, and they tear down a family's house and build a completely new one out of wood. I'd expect the family to be upset about that, but they're not. I'm frankly rather surprised anyone would even consider that normal. It sounds rather medieval to me, but apparently it's very common in much of the US.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if lack of good insulation had a big impact on the heating/AC cost.
Proper insulation can go a long way towards lowering one's heating/cooling cost and even in the hotter regions of Germany A/C is rarely found in private homes...
Keep in mind that the hotter areas in Germany are still nowhere near as hot as half of the US states.
Unfortunately, building a house out of aerated autoclaved concrete is fairly expensive and I don't think most Americans would be cool with paying 200k dollars for a normal-sized house. Hence active cooling.
And if TV is to be believed, American houses aren't anywhere near normal-sized.
Because we can't maintain our existing energy consumption level using "clean and inexhaustible" sources. We can't even come close.
Not right now, obviously. But if we're willing to invest in more capacity, we only need to dedicate a tiny percentage of the Earth's deserts to energy production in order to produce more clean energy than we're currently using.
You know what's really funny? Sailors all over the world use small wind generators to charge their batteries while at anchor.
It sounds like sea-based micro-turbines have a proven track record.
The article is bunk.
Nowhere does the article claim that micro-turbines don't work at all. It just claims they're not economical in comparison with other types of energy production.
For a ship it's completely different, mostly because powerlines and 80m wind turbines are somewhat impractical if you want your boat to be able to move.
Boston College != Boston University
How many universities does Boston have anyway?
No, there's evidence that the computer used to send the email belongs to Riccardo. The thing is, the affidavit says what Riccardo allegedly did is illegal, but the EFF claims that sending that email is not illegal and thus not not probable cause for a search.
There's more than just the email. The roommate claims real illegal activities: changing grades (sounds unlikely, but pretty serious if true), and downloading movies and music (likely, easily provable, but who the hell doesn't do that?).
Whether claims by a roommate who obviously has an axe to grind is good enough for probable cause, I have no idea. The only physical evidence is related to the email.
The charge doesn't fit the crime, if any.
There I agree. It looks likely that the student really did something wrong, but seizing all his stuff based on claims by an angry roommate is a bit extreme.
Mostly, the warrant looks like a confused mess, but maybe that's usual for these kind of documents. I have no experience with that.
Reading the actual warrent request is a hoot.
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/inresearchBC/EXHIBIT-A.pdf
I just read it, and there is definitely a bit more to it than the EFF claims, although all evidence except for one bit is all testimony from the roommate.
The most serious thing he's apparently done is change grades. It sounds to me like typical schoolboy fantasy hacking, but if he's done that, he's in trouble. Other than that, his main problem is that he has apparently illegally downloaded quite a lot of movies and music. The prosecution would do well to get the RIAA on their side, because this may be the only thing they have.
Also, the email that outs the roommate as being gay has been traced to our hacker. Evidence is convincing enough (and not just dependent on statements by the roommate). No idea if that's illegal, though.
Mostly it's just a disagreement between two roommates, and one of them got lucky by getting law enforcement on his side, and the other might be screwed for having illegal downloads on his machine.
Ther last part of the warrant request looks really amateurish about his layman's opinion that people store passwords on their computer and about a sergeant who taught him some indisputable facts of computer crime, but I skipped most of that.
OK, I'm awake and aware of the problem. Now what do I do?
Vote for the other guy! (Oh, you already did. I guess it'll fix itself now.)
Yes. You read that correctly. He kidnapped about 8 people.
I had no family at the time so I thought it was all great fun. But some of the married people were less excited to be forced to work the weekend. The conditions weren't terrible, but no one likes to work anywhere there is no choice.
No surprise but the upshot: Many programmers quit, boss was fired, company soon folded.
I hope those people quit right then and there? Or at least broke down a door or window and called the police? Nobody actually did work during the weekend for a kidnapper, right?
At some point my brother used to get a call from his boss around 11:30 asking if he was still coming in today. My brother still works there, many years later.
So, in order to use this product, I have to partially break it?
You can use it, but if you want to get more use out of it, you need to upgrade it. That's the only good way to look at it.
Exactly! Chasing devoted developers and users to the competition would be the stupidest thing Apple can do.
They have good reasons to keep the iPhone locked, and for legal reasons they probably don't want to have to support unlocked iPhones, but the ability to unlock it and do awesome things with it adds a lot of value to the iPhone. If Apple didn't quietly condone jailbreaking, people who like the added value would switch to Android.
Go to an AT&T store and tell them you're tethering, they'll be happy to cancel your account for you I'm sure.
I'm not so sure about that. An iPhone is (in Netherland at least) a lot cheaper than an iPod Touch exactly because it comes with a cell phone subscription. The subscription is where they make the real money. If the same is true in the US, then I really doubt AT&T is just going to cancel that subscription. They're more likely to severely restrict your bandwidth while still charging the same amount of money, or something like that.
Plus, better UI on iPhone is a matter of opinion. iPhone always feels to me like running a 30" monitor with 600x480 resolution. Everything is HUGE and CLUNKY (even if not actually pixelated). Like, who's brilliant idea was it to make selection of a date via those stone age wheels? They may be pretty, but it takes forever to set the date you actually want. Was it that hard to use a standard calendar? And why do we need to switch to a separate screen for editing each field?
I actually like the way the calender works on the iPhone. It has a far better UI than iCal on my Macbook, which just doesn't let me edit trivial fields without jumping through all sorts of hoops.