I'd rather have a lossy image format that supports 8-bit alpha channels, first. PNG is great, don't get me wrong, but when people post 500 kB PNG screenshots of their desktops, I really do have to ask "Why... why did you do that when you could've used a JPEG?" A lot of people have mistaken PNG as a new format for everything. Sorry, but it's not appropriate for graphics where your limitations are very well-defined.
Because here in the US, we're not a communist dictatorship. We're kind of used to being able to call someone or something anything we damn well please without punishment. I'm not surprised at all that the idea didn't occur to the programmers at all. That's not the kind of thing that they're supposed to consider. They were too busy testing the code and making sure it worked to worry about whether or not China would get its panties in a bunch if Taiwan was referred to as a country in a drop-down menu with 500 other entries.
If there was ever a job for management and marketing, it would be spotting things like this that might piss off other governments.
No shit. Talk about a bunch of thin-skinned pussy governments. "OMG! J00 SAID TAIWAN WAS A COUNTRY!! DIEEEEE!!!" How exactly is geography going to help programmers become acquainted with all the obscure and senseless laws in existence around the world?
I wasn't attacking anything. Only pointing out that I saw an explanation for you initial wildly inaccurate post.
What a crock of shit. You offered no rebuttal to my post. You just said, "Oh you're only 20, so you must be wrong. Hahahah." That's an ad hominem. Do I have to spell this out for you?
While you may not like to hear it, you're still a kid, even at 20. All of us at 20 thought we had the world figured out at 20, and at 25 and at 30 etc. Suprisingly, except to anyone whose gone through the transition themselves, our world view changed radically several times throughout that period. I realize this isn't the case for all 20 year olds, just as all neo-cons aren't jews, and I'm sure there are a few black Russians out there, but to the extent we can generalize, I will.
I don't give a shit if I'm a kid or not. I give a shit that people automatically dismiss my views based solely upon age without even addressing what I say, which is exactly what you did. That's an argumentative fallacy.
It's fantastic that you'd rather cut spending then raise taxes, even though you don't say for what ends you'd do this, the former is expansionary and the later contractionary. It wasn't until I got my degree in economics and got a job in finance that I abandoned the views of economic conservatism.
You talk a lot about your own credentials and other people's age, but I have yet to see anything of substance.
PS I voted for Nader last time.
Good for you. I don't care.
PPS Churchill's quote isn't so much that conservatives are smart and liberals dumb, but kids really don't have anything constructive to add to the debate becasue the world view is so narrow.
Oh, and all the 80 year-olds out there who vote Bush based solely upon his anti-abortion stance and "upstanding Christian morals" have such a broad world view? Puh-leeze.
PPPS I really don't care about your politics, my main point was just to correct you corruption of the term neo-con. Neo-con's are Jews, either secular or practicing. Yes the moniker is incorrectly applied to others, sometimes by themselves. However as I said, they were liberal Jews who became conservatives. Without the transformation the neo prefix really doen't make any sense.
Actually, it makes perfect sense. Old-school conservatives stand for lesser government, period. They want less government in the economy and in the home. Neo-cons like Bush and Cheney want to look in everyone's bedroom and force their religion down everyone's throats. Not to mention that they'll spend like drunken sailors if it'll fund their religious crusades.
PPPPS Michael Novak (one of the ones whom you cited as a gentile neo-con) is a Jew.
So what does that say about the source? You're the one who originally cited it, remember?
His point is that Real would pull the exact same shit if Apple suddenly reverse-engineered the Real streaming file format, incorporated it into the next QuickTime and advertised QuickTime as "FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH REAL MEDIA." What Real is doing right now stands to hurt Apple more from an image standpoint. What happens when people download a song from Real's store and put it on their iPods, but then update the firmware, and the song no longer works? Who are people going to bitch to? Apple. After all, it was their change that broke the song, right? It was working fine before the firmware update, after all. Who has to handle all the calls to tech support? That would be Apple.
A 70% marketshare does not foist an obligation on to Apple to license its technology, especially when that marketshare is in a nascent market that's still growing and has just barely become profitable. No one has a monopoly in online music yet. It's just getting started. Furthermore, Apple has no obligation to support someone else's reverse-engineered implementation of their DRM system, but that's exactly what Real is trying to imply: that their stuff works with the iPod and will keep doing so. Or is "Not approved of, endorsed or supported by Apple Computer" somewhere on their ads in readable type?
It's different when the VLC group or the Mplayer folks reverse-engineer formats because they're open source and not guaranteeing reliability, and everyone who uses those applications knows that compatibility with future versions of reverse-engineered protocols is not guaranteed, or really even expected. But Real is a corporation with a good measure of mindshare and some credibility. They have to live up to higher advertising standards, and they're not doing that.
Ad hominems don't have to be insults. They are any instance of attacking the man instead of the argument, which is exactly what you were doing. But surely you knew that, since I'm only 21 and you're presumably older and therefore must be wiser than I am.
Looking at your website I see your only 20. That brings to mind the famous quote from Churchill(although its attribution is disputed).
"If you aren't a liberal at 20 you don't have a heart; if you arent a conservative at 40 you don't have a brain."
What kind of conservative/liberal do you think Churchill is referring to? You did know that it's perfectly possible to be a social liberal (probably the type referred to in the quote) but a fiscal conservative (also probably the type referred to in the quote)... don't you? You do realize that most people are moderates... right? I mean, you must be so smart, being older than me and all. Surely you knew these two basic political realities.
I myself am a social liberal (liberal stances on civil rights issues, separation of church and state, etc) and am more of a moderate economically. I'd rather cut spending than raise taxes, but don't think that you can lower taxes and keep all your programs while the budget is growing faster than tax revenue can sustain it all while blissfully expecting Ronald, the Patron Saint of the Right Wing, to bless the economy with a balanced budget.
Oh sorry, did I interrupt your attempt to pigeon-hole me as some liberal, 21 year-old airhead who doesn't know anything? My apologies for possibly initiating a spark of thought in that senile old brain of yours.
that the neo-cons are Jews. The term means Jews who were liberals, realized the error of their ways, and became conservative. Hence neo (new) conservatives.
Why don't you read the whole entry you linked? It says that many famous neo-cons are Jewish, not that all neo-cons are Jewish, you fucking idiot. Why the Hell would Dick Cheney be listed as a prominent neo-con if they were all Jewish?
You babbling about their Christianity just makes you look like an idiot. Let me guess, you're a Democrat?
Let me guess, you're an asshole? I'm an independent. I wasn't commenting on Christianity; I was commenting on the neo-cons' well-known ties with the radical Christian right. The Jews on that side don't particularly care since they agree with the Christian right on many of their stances (government-religious displays, banning gay marriage, that "family values" crap, which is secret fundamentalist Christian code-speak for "Keep titties off TV"). Or am I just imagining things when George W. Bush energizes his base by trying to pass amendments outlawing gay marriage, promoting government funding for religious institutions under the "faith-based charities" program, invoking the Christian God in every damn speech he makes and declares "crusades" on terrorism without catching an ounce of flak from his neo-conservative base?
From Wikipedia
"Many of today's most famous neocons are from Eastern European Jewish immigrant families, who were frequently on the edge of poverty. The Great Depression radicalized many immigrants, and introduced them to the new and revolutionary ideas of socialism and communism."
From that same entry:
However, one should note that many prominent neoconservatives are
not Jewish, such as Michael Novak, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Frank Gaffney, and Max Boot. Furthermore, neoconservatives in the 1960s were much less interested in Israel before the June 1967 Six Day War. It has only been since this conflict, which has raised the specter of Israel's military invincibility, that the neoconservatives have become preoccupied by Israel's security interests. They promote the view that Israel be the US's strongest ally in the Middle East as the sole Western-style democracy in the region.
And for the neo-cons, "tolerance" and "open-mindedness" only apply to ideas that they say Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ would agree with. Everything else is heresy or a danger to family values and thus deserving of complete extermination.
It grants you the right to make backups, but it does not grant you the right to make perfect backups. There is a legal distinction there. With iTunes, you can burn your music to a CD and re-rip it to any DRM-free format you like. However, there will be a quality loss. Furthermore, iTunes allows you to burn a single compilation of your music up to 7 times, which you can do with what you please. This of course, ignores the fact that you can just duplicate the DRM-free CD as many times as you want and bypass the 7-burn limit entirely (with no quality loss), if you want to make a CD for your family members and give it out at Christmas or something.
iTunes strikes a very fair balance between consumer rights and protection against illegal distribution.
My girlfriend's aunt's computer was acting up, and they asked if I could fix it. They complained about pop-ups mainly. When I sat down at the computer, it was just excruciatingly slow. After I finally got the hardware properties to display, I saw that they were running a 2.6 GHz P4 with 512 MB of RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro. But spyware alone had brought that computer to its knees. It was a mess.
I installed Ad-Aware and Spybot and let both of them run, and just got rid of everything. I removed a ton of crap with Add/Remove Programs, as well (lots of online casino shit and other useless garbage). I then removed those irritating TVMedia pop-ups by booting into Safe Mode and removing the necessary programs and running Hijack This.
I explained to them that, by running Spybot and Ad-Aware regularly, as well as keeping Windows up to date with Windows Update, they could keep their computer mostly clean. But one point I made very clear to them was never to use Internet Explorer unless absolutely necessary. I downloaded Firefox for them and set it as the default browser. I explained that Internet Explorer was probably the cause of 90% of their problems, because it's possible for websites to install things silently by using it or any number of other undesirable things. So I made it very clear that they should stick with Firefox. I also uninstalled Kazaa and installed Kazaa Lite for the kids.
Now their computer is running as it should. No more pop-ups or any shit like that. It took about 3 hours, but I did a damn fine job with that box, and they were grateful. All throughout that ordeal, I was thinking, "God I'm so glad I'm a Mac user."
Oh give me a break. Are you seriously suggesting that there isn't anything in the world we can be reasonably certain of? Gee, I guess you'd better not drive your car today, because you don't know, for sure, whether or not it'll spontaneously explode.
It's easy to spout this kind of anti-intellectual trash when it has no real implications on your daily life, but when you take this same kind of idiotic attitude and apply it to technology, suddenly we can't trust anything. The evolution of our understanding of how the universe works and the sometimes drastic changes that occur in that understanding mean that we should be open to new ideas, but that does not mean that everyone's dumb-ass pet theory about how things happen holds water. Scientists are interested in theories which fit the facts, and creationism doesn't fit any facts aside from, "Uh, here's the universe." It doesn't explain anything; it just asserts the existence of an entity which created the universe via unknown methods. Yeah, really scientific, there. You can't even demonstrate the existence of this entity, much less show that it's behind the universe's creation.
Bullshit. Virgin is claiming that it is impossible to sell legal music that will play on the iPod. That's simply ridiculous. They could sell vanilla MP3 or AAC files. So there goes their entire argument. The RIAA's policies on who to license their music to simply is not Apple's problem.
What's stopping other stores from selling their music in MP3 format? That plays on iPods just fine. Oh, the record labels won't license unless you use DRM? Well I don't really see how the record labels' policy is Apple's problem.
In addition, the FCC has decided that the push-to-talk, or walkie-talkie, functions available on phones from Nextel should also be subject to the same tapping regulations that regular phones are.
What the fuck do you need to tap these people for? Just follow them around. Everyone within a god damn mile can already hear the conversation perfectly anyway.
Over terrain rough enough to make tank-travel impossible, I doubt a giant walking person would do much better. Terrain that rough would present no flat areas large enough for the mech to put its foot.
And say you could manage to get a mech through. Then what? The whole point of negotiating harsh terrain is to get troops from one point to another. Where are you going to store troops on a mech? No designer in his right mind would sit 12 soldiers in the bowels of something that can just fall over from the shockwave generated by a near-miss explosion, especially since any available storage on the mech would have to given to ammunition. Where else are you going to put it?
I was referring to mechs in an all-encompassing fashion. Battletech and Mechwarrior are both more realistic than crap like Gundam, but that's like saying Star Trek is more realistic than Care Bears. Mechs would still be an engineering and maintenance nightmare and still be inferior to modern-day tanks in almost every respect. They have a higher center of gravity, will topple more easily and have shitloads of moving parts, making for a complex design with multiple points of failure. Take out the thing's knees, and it goes down.
Compare this to a modern tank. It's a big, metal box on treads. It can shrug off explosions without having to worry about falling over because it has a very low center of gravity. In case of an emergency, the crew can safely exit without the need for pilot ejection seats (which would be a requirement for a mech, yet another system which can be damaged, resulting in the pilot being fucked).
Did all of these mecha fan-bois suddenly forget why we invented the wheel? It's because our legs are ridiculously inefficient compared to it! No matter how big and heavy you make a leg, a wheel of equivalent size will still be a more efficient way of moving around. That's why troops use tanks and transports to navigate harsh terrain: they can't do it on their legs without extreme amounts of work, if at all.
Seriously, what need is there for a Battletech-like mech in the US military? What specific purpose does it fulfill? None. It's got a geeky allure to it, but that's it. They may seem cool and futuristic compared to boring, modern-day ground support vehicles, but our current stuff get the job done, and way better than mechs could ever hope to.
I wonder how long it'll be before we see Mecha Warriors in real life...
Hopefully never. Mechs have high centers of gravity, too many moving parts and points of failure, topple easily and would incapable of navigating harsh terrain the way a tank or troop transport can. Developing a mech robot would be a complete waste of time and money.
As to putting a heavy weapon and making a soldier a walking gun platform, that's just ridiculous. We already have mobile artillery, and that artillery is far more mobile than a human being could ever dream of being. If artillery needs to be tucked away in a small space under cover, we have rocket launchers and RPGs. This DeGay guy sounds like an anime fan-boy wanker. The problem with fan-boys is that they want something to do everything, when engineering has shown, time and time again, that specialization is the most efficient way of doing things. We already have mobile artillery that does the job better than a soldier ever could, so why do we want to turn soldiers into mobile artillery?
Anyone ever seen Pentagon Wars with Kelsey Grammar? Great satire on the bureaucratic bullshit that turned the originally cheap, efficient and fast Bradley Fighting Vehicle into a colossal disaster (something like 17 years and $14 billion had been wasted on it) that would have been a horrible danger to the troops traveling inside it had it ever been deployed without the revisions that were prompted by a live-fire demonstration. The same fundamental problem existed: Some idiot getting all excited and saying, "Let's make it do this too!"
He wants a "scratch" playlist, a little like an On-The-Go playlist on an iPod. You just load it up with songs you want to hear for that particular listening session. Then when you relaunch iTunes, you can load it up again with whatever you want to hear for that time. Not an unreasonable request, in my opinion.
I doubt Apple intends for the iTunes Store to be an iPod sales driver forever. As the market grows, iTMS will be able to profit on its own without having to drive sales for another product. By that time, iPod sales will be a fringe benefit for having the store.
Do you honestly think that Apple created iTMS to be an iPod seller for its entire span of existence and that Apple never intended it to become appreciably profitable on its own? Give me a break. The iPod is helping iTMS get off its feet and turn into a money maker. Come on, if there was no money to be had in online downloading, do you think that big names like WalMart, Coca Cola and Microsoft would be hopping onboard?
No, the iTMS will eventually grow to become a nice contributor to Apple's bottom line. But it isn't quite there yet, which is why Apple's keeping the iPod + iTMS killer combination going. Right now they feed off of each other. Apple doesn't want some punk-ass like Real coming in and reverse-engineering their stuff to take sales away from iTMS because they want iTMS to grow. When it's grown up and making good money, then they will probably start talking about licensing. But the market's too young at this point. Apple is waiting for its bazillion or so competitors to die out before they talk about strategic alliances.
Why don't they just sell non-DRM songs? That's what everyone here wants, right? "Apple is wrong for not licensing FairPlay" and "Apple is wrong for putting DRM on their songs." Funny how everyone here realizes that DRM is a necessary compromise in order for the legal online music business to take off the minute Apple does something they don't like.
The online music business is just starting out, and Apple wants to cement its place there. Real knows that its only chance at surviving the initial culling of the online music stores was to partner with Apple, and Apple knows that too. The problem is that Real is a competitor, and Apple doesn't want them to survive. Right now, iTunes and the iPod feed off each other. Let's think about what would happen if Apple licensed FairPlay to other music stores.
First of all, the small profits from the iTunes Music Store vanish. Second of all, Apple becomes responsible for making sure that future iPod firmware revisions will work correctly with everyone else's stuff. If they just say, "Screw it, we'll leave it to the licensees to check," then customers get pissed at Apple for issuing a firmware update which breaks their music purchased from other stores. Thirdly, Apple's massive marketshare in the nascent market goes starts trickling away. So can anyone tell me exactly what they stand to gain by doing this?
Now, licensing FairPlay for use by other portable players could be beneficial later on. Right now, the iPod and iTunes complement each other, but I don't think that act will keep up. The iPod is helping iTMS get off the ground and become an online music giant. Once iTMS gets on its feet, it won't really need to be an iPod-selling vehicle. Everyone and his mother wouldn't be jumping into this business if they didn't think there was a money-maker in the long-term. Once iTMS becomes a profitable entity by itself, then Apple can invite everyone who doesn't use an iPod in.
That episode was simply insane. It was meant to explain why every species in the Star Trek galaxy looked like humans with some forehead bumps, but the chances of species evolving so similarly, even with identical "seed" material, are astronomically small.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd rather have a lossy image format that supports 8-bit alpha channels, first. PNG is great, don't get me wrong, but when people post 500 kB PNG screenshots of their desktops, I really do have to ask "Why ... why did you do that when you could've used a JPEG?" A lot of people have mistaken PNG as a new format for everything. Sorry, but it's not appropriate for graphics where your limitations are very well-defined.
Because here in the US, we're not a communist dictatorship. We're kind of used to being able to call someone or something anything we damn well please without punishment. I'm not surprised at all that the idea didn't occur to the programmers at all. That's not the kind of thing that they're supposed to consider. They were too busy testing the code and making sure it worked to worry about whether or not China would get its panties in a bunch if Taiwan was referred to as a country in a drop-down menu with 500 other entries.
If there was ever a job for management and marketing, it would be spotting things like this that might piss off other governments.
No shit. Talk about a bunch of thin-skinned pussy governments. "OMG! J00 SAID TAIWAN WAS A COUNTRY!! DIEEEEE!!!" How exactly is geography going to help programmers become acquainted with all the obscure and senseless laws in existence around the world?
It's their DRM. Is Real going to sue them for breaking their own DRM that Real reverse-engineered?
His point is that Real would pull the exact same shit if Apple suddenly reverse-engineered the Real streaming file format, incorporated it into the next QuickTime and advertised QuickTime as "FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH REAL MEDIA." What Real is doing right now stands to hurt Apple more from an image standpoint. What happens when people download a song from Real's store and put it on their iPods, but then update the firmware, and the song no longer works? Who are people going to bitch to? Apple. After all, it was their change that broke the song, right? It was working fine before the firmware update, after all. Who has to handle all the calls to tech support? That would be Apple.
A 70% marketshare does not foist an obligation on to Apple to license its technology, especially when that marketshare is in a nascent market that's still growing and has just barely become profitable. No one has a monopoly in online music yet. It's just getting started. Furthermore, Apple has no obligation to support someone else's reverse-engineered implementation of their DRM system, but that's exactly what Real is trying to imply: that their stuff works with the iPod and will keep doing so. Or is "Not approved of, endorsed or supported by Apple Computer" somewhere on their ads in readable type?
It's different when the VLC group or the Mplayer folks reverse-engineer formats because they're open source and not guaranteeing reliability, and everyone who uses those applications knows that compatibility with future versions of reverse-engineered protocols is not guaranteed, or really even expected. But Real is a corporation with a good measure of mindshare and some credibility. They have to live up to higher advertising standards, and they're not doing that.
I myself am a social liberal (liberal stances on civil rights issues, separation of church and state, etc) and am more of a moderate economically. I'd rather cut spending than raise taxes, but don't think that you can lower taxes and keep all your programs while the budget is growing faster than tax revenue can sustain it all while blissfully expecting Ronald, the Patron Saint of the Right Wing, to bless the economy with a balanced budget.
Oh sorry, did I interrupt your attempt to pigeon-hole me as some liberal, 21 year-old airhead who doesn't know anything? My apologies for possibly initiating a spark of thought in that senile old brain of yours.
And for the neo-cons, "tolerance" and "open-mindedness" only apply to ideas that they say Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ would agree with. Everything else is heresy or a danger to family values and thus deserving of complete extermination.
It grants you the right to make backups, but it does not grant you the right to make perfect backups. There is a legal distinction there. With iTunes, you can burn your music to a CD and re-rip it to any DRM-free format you like. However, there will be a quality loss. Furthermore, iTunes allows you to burn a single compilation of your music up to 7 times, which you can do with what you please. This of course, ignores the fact that you can just duplicate the DRM-free CD as many times as you want and bypass the 7-burn limit entirely (with no quality loss), if you want to make a CD for your family members and give it out at Christmas or something.
iTunes strikes a very fair balance between consumer rights and protection against illegal distribution.
My girlfriend's aunt's computer was acting up, and they asked if I could fix it. They complained about pop-ups mainly. When I sat down at the computer, it was just excruciatingly slow. After I finally got the hardware properties to display, I saw that they were running a 2.6 GHz P4 with 512 MB of RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro. But spyware alone had brought that computer to its knees. It was a mess.
I installed Ad-Aware and Spybot and let both of them run, and just got rid of everything. I removed a ton of crap with Add/Remove Programs, as well (lots of online casino shit and other useless garbage). I then removed those irritating TVMedia pop-ups by booting into Safe Mode and removing the necessary programs and running Hijack This.
I explained to them that, by running Spybot and Ad-Aware regularly, as well as keeping Windows up to date with Windows Update, they could keep their computer mostly clean. But one point I made very clear to them was never to use Internet Explorer unless absolutely necessary. I downloaded Firefox for them and set it as the default browser. I explained that Internet Explorer was probably the cause of 90% of their problems, because it's possible for websites to install things silently by using it or any number of other undesirable things. So I made it very clear that they should stick with Firefox. I also uninstalled Kazaa and installed Kazaa Lite for the kids.
Now their computer is running as it should. No more pop-ups or any shit like that. It took about 3 hours, but I did a damn fine job with that box, and they were grateful. All throughout that ordeal, I was thinking, "God I'm so glad I'm a Mac user."
Oh give me a break. Are you seriously suggesting that there isn't anything in the world we can be reasonably certain of? Gee, I guess you'd better not drive your car today, because you don't know, for sure, whether or not it'll spontaneously explode.
It's easy to spout this kind of anti-intellectual trash when it has no real implications on your daily life, but when you take this same kind of idiotic attitude and apply it to technology, suddenly we can't trust anything. The evolution of our understanding of how the universe works and the sometimes drastic changes that occur in that understanding mean that we should be open to new ideas, but that does not mean that everyone's dumb-ass pet theory about how things happen holds water. Scientists are interested in theories which fit the facts, and creationism doesn't fit any facts aside from, "Uh, here's the universe." It doesn't explain anything; it just asserts the existence of an entity which created the universe via unknown methods. Yeah, really scientific, there. You can't even demonstrate the existence of this entity, much less show that it's behind the universe's creation.
Dumbass.
Paul Davies is a creationist. Sorry, but I'm not going to take the advice of a guy who honestly thinks the universe is 6,500 years old.
Bullshit. Virgin is claiming that it is impossible to sell legal music that will play on the iPod. That's simply ridiculous. They could sell vanilla MP3 or AAC files. So there goes their entire argument. The RIAA's policies on who to license their music to simply is not Apple's problem.
What's stopping other stores from selling their music in MP3 format? That plays on iPods just fine. Oh, the record labels won't license unless you use DRM? Well I don't really see how the record labels' policy is Apple's problem.
Over terrain rough enough to make tank-travel impossible, I doubt a giant walking person would do much better. Terrain that rough would present no flat areas large enough for the mech to put its foot.
And say you could manage to get a mech through. Then what? The whole point of negotiating harsh terrain is to get troops from one point to another. Where are you going to store troops on a mech? No designer in his right mind would sit 12 soldiers in the bowels of something that can just fall over from the shockwave generated by a near-miss explosion, especially since any available storage on the mech would have to given to ammunition. Where else are you going to put it?
I was referring to mechs in an all-encompassing fashion. Battletech and Mechwarrior are both more realistic than crap like Gundam, but that's like saying Star Trek is more realistic than Care Bears. Mechs would still be an engineering and maintenance nightmare and still be inferior to modern-day tanks in almost every respect. They have a higher center of gravity, will topple more easily and have shitloads of moving parts, making for a complex design with multiple points of failure. Take out the thing's knees, and it goes down.
Compare this to a modern tank. It's a big, metal box on treads. It can shrug off explosions without having to worry about falling over because it has a very low center of gravity. In case of an emergency, the crew can safely exit without the need for pilot ejection seats (which would be a requirement for a mech, yet another system which can be damaged, resulting in the pilot being fucked).
Did all of these mecha fan-bois suddenly forget why we invented the wheel? It's because our legs are ridiculously inefficient compared to it! No matter how big and heavy you make a leg, a wheel of equivalent size will still be a more efficient way of moving around. That's why troops use tanks and transports to navigate harsh terrain: they can't do it on their legs without extreme amounts of work, if at all.
Seriously, what need is there for a Battletech-like mech in the US military? What specific purpose does it fulfill? None. It's got a geeky allure to it, but that's it. They may seem cool and futuristic compared to boring, modern-day ground support vehicles, but our current stuff get the job done, and way better than mechs could ever hope to.
As to putting a heavy weapon and making a soldier a walking gun platform, that's just ridiculous. We already have mobile artillery, and that artillery is far more mobile than a human being could ever dream of being. If artillery needs to be tucked away in a small space under cover, we have rocket launchers and RPGs. This DeGay guy sounds like an anime fan-boy wanker. The problem with fan-boys is that they want something to do everything, when engineering has shown, time and time again, that specialization is the most efficient way of doing things. We already have mobile artillery that does the job better than a soldier ever could, so why do we want to turn soldiers into mobile artillery?
Anyone ever seen Pentagon Wars with Kelsey Grammar? Great satire on the bureaucratic bullshit that turned the originally cheap, efficient and fast Bradley Fighting Vehicle into a colossal disaster (something like 17 years and $14 billion had been wasted on it) that would have been a horrible danger to the troops traveling inside it had it ever been deployed without the revisions that were prompted by a live-fire demonstration. The same fundamental problem existed: Some idiot getting all excited and saying, "Let's make it do this too!"
He wants a "scratch" playlist, a little like an On-The-Go playlist on an iPod. You just load it up with songs you want to hear for that particular listening session. Then when you relaunch iTunes, you can load it up again with whatever you want to hear for that time. Not an unreasonable request, in my opinion.
I doubt Apple intends for the iTunes Store to be an iPod sales driver forever. As the market grows, iTMS will be able to profit on its own without having to drive sales for another product. By that time, iPod sales will be a fringe benefit for having the store.
Do you honestly think that Apple created iTMS to be an iPod seller for its entire span of existence and that Apple never intended it to become appreciably profitable on its own? Give me a break. The iPod is helping iTMS get off its feet and turn into a money maker. Come on, if there was no money to be had in online downloading, do you think that big names like WalMart, Coca Cola and Microsoft would be hopping onboard?
No, the iTMS will eventually grow to become a nice contributor to Apple's bottom line. But it isn't quite there yet, which is why Apple's keeping the iPod + iTMS killer combination going. Right now they feed off of each other. Apple doesn't want some punk-ass like Real coming in and reverse-engineering their stuff to take sales away from iTMS because they want iTMS to grow. When it's grown up and making good money, then they will probably start talking about licensing. But the market's too young at this point. Apple is waiting for its bazillion or so competitors to die out before they talk about strategic alliances.
Why don't they just sell non-DRM songs? That's what everyone here wants, right? "Apple is wrong for not licensing FairPlay" and "Apple is wrong for putting DRM on their songs." Funny how everyone here realizes that DRM is a necessary compromise in order for the legal online music business to take off the minute Apple does something they don't like.
The online music business is just starting out, and Apple wants to cement its place there. Real knows that its only chance at surviving the initial culling of the online music stores was to partner with Apple, and Apple knows that too. The problem is that Real is a competitor, and Apple doesn't want them to survive. Right now, iTunes and the iPod feed off each other. Let's think about what would happen if Apple licensed FairPlay to other music stores.
First of all, the small profits from the iTunes Music Store vanish. Second of all, Apple becomes responsible for making sure that future iPod firmware revisions will work correctly with everyone else's stuff. If they just say, "Screw it, we'll leave it to the licensees to check," then customers get pissed at Apple for issuing a firmware update which breaks their music purchased from other stores. Thirdly, Apple's massive marketshare in the nascent market goes starts trickling away. So can anyone tell me exactly what they stand to gain by doing this?
Now, licensing FairPlay for use by other portable players could be beneficial later on. Right now, the iPod and iTunes complement each other, but I don't think that act will keep up. The iPod is helping iTMS get off the ground and become an online music giant. Once iTMS gets on its feet, it won't really need to be an iPod-selling vehicle. Everyone and his mother wouldn't be jumping into this business if they didn't think there was a money-maker in the long-term. Once iTMS becomes a profitable entity by itself, then Apple can invite everyone who doesn't use an iPod in.
That episode was simply insane. It was meant to explain why every species in the Star Trek galaxy looked like humans with some forehead bumps, but the chances of species evolving so similarly, even with identical "seed" material, are astronomically small.
And Microsoft partners with Fiat. Wow, Microsoft is just ... lame.