Um... normal use? My mother can use her iDevice to read her email, take pictures, email those pictures to friends, read the news, and play games. Basically, everything she wants to do with a computer.
What is she being denied by the evil man in the garden? Access to pirated content? Tethering? Fancier background images or lock screens?
If her iDevice were as complicated as her PC, she'd use it the same way she uses her PC: to keep the desk warm.
It isn't about every user being able to write software. That is never going to happen. What it's about is the ability of the millions of independent developers to give users software the gatekeepers don't approve. If there are billions of people with Windows 7 or Snow Leopard or Ubuntu, I can write a piece of software and sell it or give it away to those users and there isn't anything Microsoft, Apple or Canonical can do to stop me.
Yup. MS, Apple and Canonical can't stop you... from giving them a virus, from snooping their address book entries, from sucking down RAM and making their system unresponsive, from using system widgets in non-standard and confusion-inducing ways, from silently installing bloated adware that has nothing to do with your actual "application," from having broken or weird updating mechanisms, from producing objectionable content that skirts OS-level parental controls and so on.
Look, this is Slashdot. I'm a programmer. You might well be one too. We tend to have a problem understanding this fact, but... most users CANNOT USE THEIR COMPUTERS. They lack the the ability to protect themselves from scammers, phishers, spyware and the rest. I used to tell folks that the only people smart enough to keep a Windows box virus free... were smart enough not to use Windows.
For a normal user, the choice isn't "walled garden" vs "open and free and innovative and awesome." It's "walled garden" or "pile of confusing and expensive fail."
I don't know why we ever expected users to be experts at operating general purpose computers, but that was a mistake. If we gave folks that kind of control with their microwave, they'd all get cancer. Passengers on United don't tend to sit in the cockpit, and a modern computer is more complicated than a 747 (it's actually a superset, since a modern computer can actually simulate a 747 pretty accurately).
It takes time and effort to learn computers as well as you and I have, and some folks would rather expend that time and effort in other ways. Then they let a trusted 3rd party like Apple or Google handle the messy work of keeping their electronics functional. Sounds reasonable to me.
Lol, Solyndra doesn't even get to play in this discussion. Why argue about pennies when we're burning hundreds? Solyndra is low millions, F35 is billions. Do you understand the difference? It's more than a thousand times more. As in, you'd need a thousand Solyndras for them to matter as much as this.
How long does it take for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to spend the entire Solyndra loan? 12 hours?
Re:The next new airplane to get axed...
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The F-35 Story
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I think the idea good sir is that if you do the diplomacy right, you don't NEED the armed forces. =)
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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The F-35 Story
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Could you name an "economic value" that's being served by spending billions on a fighter that we don't need and haven't got?
Would someone like you or me, if we had the money, choose to spend it on this as opposed to other alternatives? What is the economic rational behind the cronyism of the military-industrial complex?
Economics is about maximizing the benefit of scarce resources. This feels like the opposite of that. It feels like wasting money in order to pad the pockets of the friends of politicians and bureaucrats.
What's the economic benefit here? Are you trying to say that this is some kind of Keynesian stimulus? How is it better than the same money going to things we actually need? Little help here?
Out of curiosity, what's your level of expertise in econ? Undergrad? Grad? PhD?
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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The F-35 Story
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· Score: 1
Economics is about efficient allocation of scant resources. Spending more on soldiers than we need to spend, in a war we don't need to have, is not economically justified.
We are in Iraq for political reasons, not economic reasons. Political in the sense that elected officials made the decision to go.
Sure, there are companies making money, but not through making things that people want in a free market supply-and-demand sense. The companies are making money by being in bed with the politicians who are creating the wars.
There's no point in this process where the kind of rational cost-benefit analysis you'd learn in an econ class is being attempted by anyone involved.
Apparently you use "economics" as a stand-in for "using the muscle of a national government to bully others and forcibly extract money which is then given to cronies." I'm sad for you, and for us if there are many others like you.
Dude, if you've got to spank your 16 year old to make a point, you've long ago failed as a parent.
Heck, even dog trainers have figured out how to train without beating, and dogs aren't really that capable of higher level reasoning.
Beating isn't the only way. It's *a* way, and very rarely is it the best way. Those who rely on it are either too dumb to figure out how to train using positive reinforcement, or just plain evil.
Why would you want to take your phone apart? If you don't want to add weight, use a skin. If you want added protection, use a case. The phone's casing is built out of functional stuff like metal for the antennas and mic covers and stuff. Probably best to leave that to the handset manufacturers and make jobs easier for the case companies?
You're wrong about ringtones. You can make your own. GarageBand (Apple's music-editing program) actually has a feature that will export stuff directly to iTunes as a ringtone. It even has a sample ringtone project as well. You're also twice wrong about text message alerts. First, you can change them to a custom sound if you want. Second, that's a terrible idea since having a long ringtone-like text alert would be incredibly annoying.
Why? Wouldn't a Siri board member have a pretty good idea about the outlook of the industry? I mean, he'd probably be biased in his account, but you're a slashdot reader! Surely you could account for that while reacting to his comments...
Or do you restrict your information sources to those sufficiently removed from the topic as to guarantee that they'll neither possess an interfering bias nor a clue as to what they're talking about?
Lets see. A visionary who (co)developed a major programming language AND the most used OS (upon which almost all current mobile platforms are based) vs an engineer who developed two computers vs a salesman who sold shiny toys.
Yep - the salesman wins.
Even if we ignore the fact that you're a pretentious tool who's apparently unaware that millions have been getting professional work done on Apple gear for decades and concede that everything Apple makes is just "a toy," well... what's wrong with shiny toys?
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, 10/10 for a nice catchphrase, minus several zillion for failiing to address any of my points. Seriously, you people have got to get away from this idiotic religion that anyone can be successful as long as they work their arse off for it. It's just not true, and it's destroying society.
Working might not be sufficient, but in the average case, it will be necessary. Most millionaires in the US weren't born into wealth. If they'd stayed in all day smoking dope on the couch, it's hard to see how they could have "lucked" into their success.
Ruin Paul's political philosophy seems to be that since government has been unable to completely solve every problem perfectly, we should just stop using it.
*Ruin" Paul?
Anyhoo, government isn't the solution to problems that government creates. Furthermore, government and mega-corps (like lending banks and even large universities) aren't enemies. They're friends.
Government loans are great for Big U, because Big U gets guaranteed money, no matter how high they make the tuition.
I come from limited means, but I was able to pay my way through university without loans by going to a cheap in-state school, working while I was at it and so on.
Now, less than 15 years later, I don't think I could manage. I'd HAVE to get loans. Why has there been this inflation of tuition?
Well, since you've clearly studied economics at great depth, you know that inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. Part of it is probably that there are more students wanting to go - perhaps University slots haven't kept pace with population gain. A big part though is probably that there is far more money chasing those slots due to the ability of anyone to get a loan, regardless of their ability to pay. Baumol's cost disease is definitely a factor, but it doesn't work fast enough to cause such a big rise in such a short time.
If you've got a better explanation for the increase, or a better solution, let's hear it. All the loans are pricing those who would work their way through out of the "market" (there's too much government involvement at this point for it to really be considered a "market"). The loans are basically an arms race against other students. It's indentured servitude. Kids are getting out of school with 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars worth of debt. Is that really the answer?
Anyway, if you want to take some time to address us in words with more than four letters, we'd be happy to hear your solution.
I truly believe Steve cared about his products beyond the profit
If this were true, Apple wouldn't be suing Samsung over who owns the rectangle.
1. Enough of the stupid straw man "can't patent a rectangle bullshit." You're either a retard or a troll if that's the best understanding you can muster. Lady Gaga can't restrict the use of the letters 'l', 'a', 'd', 'y' or 'g', or any of the 12 notes in the scale, so I guess that means someone else can go on tour, call themselves "Lady Gaga" and play all her songs... Trade dress isn't one thing, it's a combination of things. And if you can't see that Samsung copied a combination of things, well you're fanboyism has made you blind.
2. Getting into a legal war with Samsung (a major supplier of Apple's - how do you think Samsung "designed" their stuff?) is probably easier to justify as a commitment to product than profit. A patent war is expensive for everybody, and a loss leaves Apple poorer and still being copied. OTOH, If Steve was passionate about the thing he'd made, he'd be more pissed off when one of his business partners took his notes and then went to market with a clone. A pure profiteer would be happy to have a big slice of a big pie. A product guy would be pissed that all his work was being stolen by the folks he'd trusted to build it.
3. This arm-chair lawyering in the comments is starting to feel like a bunch of pissy apple haters. If you want an iPhone, buy an iPhone. If you want an iPhone but hate Apple and therefore need an iPhone that was made by Samsung? Well, get them while you can, but don't bitch when Apple defends its creations. If you wanted competition in the marketplace, you'd get something that could, at a distance of 10 feet, actually be distinguished from the thing that you say you hate.
Would you want to live in a world where China was the only global super power?
We like to view China as an up-and-comer, but they're really a been-there-done-that situation. It's a 3000 year old country. They have a lot of strife and violence in their history for sure. That said, when it comes down to it, they've demonstrated the ability to have size and resources and power without letting it get to their head. Relative to their size and might, they've not demonstrated Britain's colonization drive, or the US's preference for invading random countries from time to time just to stay in shape.
Now, I'd rather be a US citizen than a Chinese citizen, don't get me wrong. It's just that if I were a resident of some small weak country that was neither? I'd be more afraid of the US than the Chinese.
You've been trolled, my friend. The halo car was made in Finland, but the loan money wasn't for that. It was for the Nina, a cheaper version which is to be produced in Delaware. That may or may not result in a repayment of the loan, but the Finnish situation is a red herring. Now take a deep breath and step away from the keyboard.
I really have a bad feeling about this. It's like people are using environmental issues to launder massive amounts of cash.
That sucks, but I'd prefer that to the previous method, which was using wars to launder WAY more massive amounts of cash. A half a billion is a day or two in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Man, the number of things wrong with your statement is astonishing. Like truly impressive error-to-sentence ratio...
The car goes a bit faster than the first electrics and has the added weight of modern amenities like airbags and pillars and all that. The relevant stat when comparing to your F150 is the mpge, and in that area it dominates your truck. The company is American, not Finnish, so any low Finnish standards wouldn't have anything to do with anything.. The R&D and design were done in the US, only the manufacturing was done in Finland, so there are US jobs. The loan was not for the halo car, it was for a cheaper version which is to be constructed at a plant in Delaware. Finally the half a billion for Solyndra, while totally shitty, can be put in perspective as the cost of a day or two in our 10 year old wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So Jobs got angry by failing to capture the whole market by simply licensing iOS ( others would give arms and legs
back then for it) so decides to try to destroy Android by lawsuits. Too late. Google took the opportunity to strike where
the Apple's grant strategy had a weak link.
I think Jobs got angry because one of his board members (that just so happened to be Google's CEO) took the info he'd heard in Apple's board room and fed it to a competing company.
I don't think that you can use Android for more than 5 or 10 minutes and think that it's only a minor difference from Apple
Everything's relative. If you look at earlier stuff like Symbian or PalmOS and then later stuff like Palm's WebOS and MS's WinMo, Android and iOS will start looking really similar. I've used Android up to but not including Ice Cream Sandwich.
Sure there are a bunch of one-off differences. Settings and notifications work a bit differently. Unlock screens function differently. No scroll bounce on Android =). The "back" concept is in that erie similar-but-not-quite-identical-so-its-kinda-annoying land. Android allows/forces you to deal more with the actual file system. Etc. But the look, feel and concepts are pretty darned similar.
I'm reasonably familiar with the iOS's. I'm honestly the most impressed with WinMo (and relatedly Metro), but not enough to ever buy MS.
Well, we could all leave this country and then it wouldn't have any money to pay for NOAA (or any people to staff it for that matter). Really, it sounds to me like you are arguing for no government whatsoever.
I'm not arguing for anything at all. I'm explaining why NOAA has no private sector equivalents. You asked a question, I answered it. A private sector alternative would need to actually convince users to pay it money. The NOAA has no such obligation.
It's my idea. Don't you dare to use MY idea. No, I don't care if somebody just came up with it. It was MY idea.
In fairness, it was pretty easy for Google to have the same idea when their CEO had been sitting on Apple's board. It's not like they stumbled into the same thing in a vacuum. This is a much more literal case of idea "borrowing" than folks seem willing to acknowledge.
If Android had launched like that, the iPhone would've destroyed it. Yes, phones before the iPhone had capacitive touch, but no one was doing multitouch. Or at least, not on a wide scale like Apple did.
Good comparison, except those are completely different phones, you idiot. Hint: Android still looks like that on some really crappy HTC models. Even more odd is that the UI on my Motorolla DROID looks nothing like either of those two! You might almost say that the UI is... CUSTOMIZABLE.
Of course they're different phones, dumbass! Just like the OS looked different before it had iOS to copy off of, the phones looked different before they had the iPhone to copy off of!
Slashdot Mirror
Um... normal use? My mother can use her iDevice to read her email, take pictures, email those pictures to friends, read the news, and play games. Basically, everything she wants to do with a computer.
What is she being denied by the evil man in the garden? Access to pirated content? Tethering? Fancier background images or lock screens?
If her iDevice were as complicated as her PC, she'd use it the same way she uses her PC: to keep the desk warm.
It isn't about every user being able to write software. That is never going to happen. What it's about is the ability of the millions of independent developers to give users software the gatekeepers don't approve. If there are billions of people with Windows 7 or Snow Leopard or Ubuntu, I can write a piece of software and sell it or give it away to those users and there isn't anything Microsoft, Apple or Canonical can do to stop me.
Yup. MS, Apple and Canonical can't stop you... from giving them a virus, from snooping their address book entries, from sucking down RAM and making their system unresponsive, from using system widgets in non-standard and confusion-inducing ways, from silently installing bloated adware that has nothing to do with your actual "application," from having broken or weird updating mechanisms, from producing objectionable content that skirts OS-level parental controls and so on.
Look, this is Slashdot. I'm a programmer. You might well be one too. We tend to have a problem understanding this fact, but... most users CANNOT USE THEIR COMPUTERS. They lack the the ability to protect themselves from scammers, phishers, spyware and the rest. I used to tell folks that the only people smart enough to keep a Windows box virus free... were smart enough not to use Windows.
For a normal user, the choice isn't "walled garden" vs "open and free and innovative and awesome." It's "walled garden" or "pile of confusing and expensive fail."
I don't know why we ever expected users to be experts at operating general purpose computers, but that was a mistake. If we gave folks that kind of control with their microwave, they'd all get cancer. Passengers on United don't tend to sit in the cockpit, and a modern computer is more complicated than a 747 (it's actually a superset, since a modern computer can actually simulate a 747 pretty accurately).
It takes time and effort to learn computers as well as you and I have, and some folks would rather expend that time and effort in other ways. Then they let a trusted 3rd party like Apple or Google handle the messy work of keeping their electronics functional. Sounds reasonable to me.
Lol, Solyndra doesn't even get to play in this discussion. Why argue about pennies when we're burning hundreds? Solyndra is low millions, F35 is billions. Do you understand the difference? It's more than a thousand times more. As in, you'd need a thousand Solyndras for them to matter as much as this.
How long does it take for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to spend the entire Solyndra loan? 12 hours?
I think the idea good sir is that if you do the diplomacy right, you don't NEED the armed forces. =)
Could you name an "economic value" that's being served by spending billions on a fighter that we don't need and haven't got?
Would someone like you or me, if we had the money, choose to spend it on this as opposed to other alternatives? What is the economic rational behind the cronyism of the military-industrial complex?
Economics is about maximizing the benefit of scarce resources. This feels like the opposite of that. It feels like wasting money in order to pad the pockets of the friends of politicians and bureaucrats.
What's the economic benefit here? Are you trying to say that this is some kind of Keynesian stimulus? How is it better than the same money going to things we actually need? Little help here?
Out of curiosity, what's your level of expertise in econ? Undergrad? Grad? PhD?
Economics is about efficient allocation of scant resources. Spending more on soldiers than we need to spend, in a war we don't need to have, is not economically justified.
We are in Iraq for political reasons, not economic reasons. Political in the sense that elected officials made the decision to go.
Sure, there are companies making money, but not through making things that people want in a free market supply-and-demand sense. The companies are making money by being in bed with the politicians who are creating the wars.
There's no point in this process where the kind of rational cost-benefit analysis you'd learn in an econ class is being attempted by anyone involved.
Apparently you use "economics" as a stand-in for "using the muscle of a national government to bully others and forcibly extract money which is then given to cronies." I'm sad for you, and for us if there are many others like you.
Dude, if you've got to spank your 16 year old to make a point, you've long ago failed as a parent.
Heck, even dog trainers have figured out how to train without beating, and dogs aren't really that capable of higher level reasoning.
Beating isn't the only way. It's *a* way, and very rarely is it the best way. Those who rely on it are either too dumb to figure out how to train using positive reinforcement, or just plain evil.
Why would you want to take your phone apart? If you don't want to add weight, use a skin. If you want added protection, use a case. The phone's casing is built out of functional stuff like metal for the antennas and mic covers and stuff. Probably best to leave that to the handset manufacturers and make jobs easier for the case companies?
You're wrong about ringtones. You can make your own. GarageBand (Apple's music-editing program) actually has a feature that will export stuff directly to iTunes as a ringtone. It even has a sample ringtone project as well. You're also twice wrong about text message alerts. First, you can change them to a custom sound if you want. Second, that's a terrible idea since having a long ringtone-like text alert would be incredibly annoying.
Stopped reading after that
Why? Wouldn't a Siri board member have a pretty good idea about the outlook of the industry? I mean, he'd probably be biased in his account, but you're a slashdot reader! Surely you could account for that while reacting to his comments...
Or do you restrict your information sources to those sufficiently removed from the topic as to guarantee that they'll neither possess an interfering bias nor a clue as to what they're talking about?
Lets see. A visionary who (co)developed a major programming language AND the most used OS (upon which almost all current mobile platforms are based) vs an engineer who developed two computers vs a salesman who sold shiny toys.
Yep - the salesman wins.
Even if we ignore the fact that you're a pretentious tool who's apparently unaware that millions have been getting professional work done on Apple gear for decades and concede that everything Apple makes is just "a toy," well... what's wrong with shiny toys?
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, 10/10 for a nice catchphrase, minus several zillion for failiing to address any of my points. Seriously, you people have got to get away from this idiotic religion that anyone can be successful as long as they work their arse off for it. It's just not true, and it's destroying society.
Working might not be sufficient, but in the average case, it will be necessary. Most millionaires in the US weren't born into wealth. If they'd stayed in all day smoking dope on the couch, it's hard to see how they could have "lucked" into their success.
Bullshit. It's just luck
No, it's not. False dichotomy. Success requires effort and opportunity. You guys are both right and you're both wrong.
and still has a crappy 3.5" screen.
I thought it was the 4S that had the higher resolution?
From where I sit it's a lot of fanboi Apple apologists. Guess everything's relative and we all suffer from confirmation bias.
--Jeremy
It's the one fighting the other, when neither are adding value or information to the system.
Ruin Paul's political philosophy seems to be that since government has been unable to completely solve every problem perfectly, we should just stop using it.
*Ruin" Paul?
Anyhoo, government isn't the solution to problems that government creates. Furthermore, government and mega-corps (like lending banks and even large universities) aren't enemies. They're friends.
Government loans are great for Big U, because Big U gets guaranteed money, no matter how high they make the tuition.
I come from limited means, but I was able to pay my way through university without loans by going to a cheap in-state school, working while I was at it and so on.
Now, less than 15 years later, I don't think I could manage. I'd HAVE to get loans. Why has there been this inflation of tuition?
Well, since you've clearly studied economics at great depth, you know that inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. Part of it is probably that there are more students wanting to go - perhaps University slots haven't kept pace with population gain. A big part though is probably that there is far more money chasing those slots due to the ability of anyone to get a loan, regardless of their ability to pay. Baumol's cost disease is definitely a factor, but it doesn't work fast enough to cause such a big rise in such a short time.
If you've got a better explanation for the increase, or a better solution, let's hear it. All the loans are pricing those who would work their way through out of the "market" (there's too much government involvement at this point for it to really be considered a "market"). The loans are basically an arms race against other students. It's indentured servitude. Kids are getting out of school with 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars worth of debt. Is that really the answer?
Anyway, if you want to take some time to address us in words with more than four letters, we'd be happy to hear your solution.
I truly believe Steve cared about his products beyond the profit
If this were true, Apple wouldn't be suing Samsung over who owns the rectangle.
1. Enough of the stupid straw man "can't patent a rectangle bullshit." You're either a retard or a troll if that's the best understanding you can muster. Lady Gaga can't restrict the use of the letters 'l', 'a', 'd', 'y' or 'g', or any of the 12 notes in the scale, so I guess that means someone else can go on tour, call themselves "Lady Gaga" and play all her songs... Trade dress isn't one thing, it's a combination of things. And if you can't see that Samsung copied a combination of things, well you're fanboyism has made you blind.
2. Getting into a legal war with Samsung (a major supplier of Apple's - how do you think Samsung "designed" their stuff?) is probably easier to justify as a commitment to product than profit. A patent war is expensive for everybody, and a loss leaves Apple poorer and still being copied. OTOH, If Steve was passionate about the thing he'd made, he'd be more pissed off when one of his business partners took his notes and then went to market with a clone. A pure profiteer would be happy to have a big slice of a big pie. A product guy would be pissed that all his work was being stolen by the folks he'd trusted to build it.
3. This arm-chair lawyering in the comments is starting to feel like a bunch of pissy apple haters. If you want an iPhone, buy an iPhone. If you want an iPhone but hate Apple and therefore need an iPhone that was made by Samsung? Well, get them while you can, but don't bitch when Apple defends its creations. If you wanted competition in the marketplace, you'd get something that could, at a distance of 10 feet, actually be distinguished from the thing that you say you hate.
Would you want to live in a world where China was the only global super power?
We like to view China as an up-and-comer, but they're really a been-there-done-that situation. It's a 3000 year old country. They have a lot of strife and violence in their history for sure. That said, when it comes down to it, they've demonstrated the ability to have size and resources and power without letting it get to their head. Relative to their size and might, they've not demonstrated Britain's colonization drive, or the US's preference for invading random countries from time to time just to stay in shape.
Now, I'd rather be a US citizen than a Chinese citizen, don't get me wrong. It's just that if I were a resident of some small weak country that was neither? I'd be more afraid of the US than the Chinese.
You've been trolled, my friend. The halo car was made in Finland, but the loan money wasn't for that. It was for the Nina, a cheaper version which is to be produced in Delaware. That may or may not result in a repayment of the loan, but the Finnish situation is a red herring. Now take a deep breath and step away from the keyboard.
I really have a bad feeling about this. It's like people are using environmental issues to launder massive amounts of cash.
That sucks, but I'd prefer that to the previous method, which was using wars to launder WAY more massive amounts of cash. A half a billion is a day or two in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Man, the number of things wrong with your statement is astonishing. Like truly impressive error-to-sentence ratio...
The car goes a bit faster than the first electrics and has the added weight of modern amenities like airbags and pillars and all that. The relevant stat when comparing to your F150 is the mpge, and in that area it dominates your truck. The company is American, not Finnish, so any low Finnish standards wouldn't have anything to do with anything.. The R&D and design were done in the US, only the manufacturing was done in Finland, so there are US jobs. The loan was not for the halo car, it was for a cheaper version which is to be constructed at a plant in Delaware. Finally the half a billion for Solyndra, while totally shitty, can be put in perspective as the cost of a day or two in our 10 year old wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Did I miss anything?
So Jobs got angry by failing to capture the whole market by simply licensing iOS ( others would give arms and legs back then for it) so decides to try to destroy Android by lawsuits. Too late. Google took the opportunity to strike where the Apple's grant strategy had a weak link.
I think Jobs got angry because one of his board members (that just so happened to be Google's CEO) took the info he'd heard in Apple's board room and fed it to a competing company.
I don't think that you can use Android for more than 5 or 10 minutes and think that it's only a minor difference from Apple
Everything's relative. If you look at earlier stuff like Symbian or PalmOS and then later stuff like Palm's WebOS and MS's WinMo, Android and iOS will start looking really similar. I've used Android up to but not including Ice Cream Sandwich.
Sure there are a bunch of one-off differences. Settings and notifications work a bit differently. Unlock screens function differently. No scroll bounce on Android =). The "back" concept is in that erie similar-but-not-quite-identical-so-its-kinda-annoying land. Android allows/forces you to deal more with the actual file system. Etc. But the look, feel and concepts are pretty darned similar.
I'm reasonably familiar with the iOS's. I'm honestly the most impressed with WinMo (and relatedly Metro), but not enough to ever buy MS.
Well, we could all leave this country and then it wouldn't have any money to pay for NOAA (or any people to staff it for that matter). Really, it sounds to me like you are arguing for no government whatsoever.
I'm not arguing for anything at all. I'm explaining why NOAA has no private sector equivalents. You asked a question, I answered it. A private sector alternative would need to actually convince users to pay it money. The NOAA has no such obligation.
It's my idea. Don't you dare to use MY idea. No, I don't care if somebody just came up with it. It was MY idea.
In fairness, it was pretty easy for Google to have the same idea when their CEO had been sitting on Apple's board. It's not like they stumbled into the same thing in a vacuum. This is a much more literal case of idea "borrowing" than folks seem willing to acknowledge.
Don't forget what Android looked like pre-iPhone
If Android had launched like that, the iPhone would've destroyed it. Yes, phones before the iPhone had capacitive touch, but no one was doing multitouch. Or at least, not on a wide scale like Apple did.
Good comparison, except those are completely different phones, you idiot. Hint: Android still looks like that on some really crappy HTC models. Even more odd is that the UI on my Motorolla DROID looks nothing like either of those two! You might almost say that the UI is ... CUSTOMIZABLE.
Of course they're different phones, dumbass! Just like the OS looked different before it had iOS to copy off of, the phones looked different before they had the iPhone to copy off of!