Still stemming from the implication being that people aren't riding bikes because they have to wear helmets. I don't bike because I work too far away from wear I live, and I don't want to have to take a shower when I get to work. Not to mention, unlike a lot of people, I take time out of the day for exercise separate from my commute.
I also don't buy that a lot of drivers miss bikers because, just as anecdotally as the article, I have seen far more bikers--both with and without helmets--riding like morons both in and out of traffic. With very few exceptions, bikers appear to expect the best of both worlds: respect on the road, as if they were moving remotely the same speed as traffic, and the ability to act as a pedestrian whenever it's convenient, thus enabling them to run red lights and similar signs. That last bit is why bikers need to wear helmets: in practice, they appear both in-and-out of traffic as they see fit.
It's incredibly risky business, and you are not going to fix the drivers that are texting any time soon.
Me thinks you misunderstood my entire post. I was not attacking the use of the word illegal in the GP post, nor was I getting into whether the OP actually used the word, which he clearly and literally did not.
I was attacking your definition of free speech, and how it applies to the United States, which was flatly wrong. Finally, I was separately attacking the idiocy of your last statement regarding a lack of Muslim hypocrisy.
It makes sense that you did not get it, as you did not refute a single point that I made, nor do you coherently make any of your own. For example:
So I point out that this poster is missing any claim that the original poster has said he's a scumbag and this is illegal.
The original poster literally called the person a dirtbag in the title of his post, which is synonymous with scumbag. The poster that you responded too was making the--apparently to you--audacious point that simply being a dirtbag is not illegal in-and-of-itself, linking the idea that him being locked up because of making a film that has incited Muslim rage goes against free speech. Then you made a series of misinformed, or downright wrong points.
In summary, you were wrong in your last post on all but one thing: the OP never literally said "illegal." And you're still wrong about everything, except that.
As I ended my last post, continue moving forward with your blinders on.
You misunderstood my stance on the matter. I think even the founders would agree that the WBC stands on the unfortunate side of free speech. They are protected, when clearly no one wants them to be, simply to protect everything else. But, I still think, like the founders, that they are a necessary evil to put up with to avoid the slippery slope that it would otherwise create.
It's not particularly clear from the story, nor is it clear from the abstract on how they actually differentiated for natural bias in the random selection. Did each professor receive the same candidate twice, once as a male and once as a female (hopefully far apart)?
It sounds like the data set was randomly generated once, and then used to push through the study. It's quite possible that the data set simply had a lopsided pool of better qualified "males" versus "females." Considering that they do not state the number of students in the pool in either the story or the abstract, it also seems plausible that the results are from a very small pool of students, which makes the bad random data bias much more likely regardless of a large pool of graders (the 127 professors).
Of course, it could also be that the mandating of gender equality, where they are otherwise not equal, has led to a worse perception of actually qualified female candidates due to bad past experiences. Anyone in a decent engineering program has seen women coast through when they otherwise should have failed like many of their male peers, and I suspect that happens in science as well, where the number of women in the programs is simply far lower than the number of males. This, in effect, results in an immense quality bias given the same academic record, so when women have a certain academic record, it will be called into question due to past experiences.
Now, with that said, I would like to believe that people would rate people as equals from paper until the actual interview process differentiates them. Without seeing the random applicant data (specifically the quantity, and the randomization of it), then it's impossible to say. Just as we've seen women coasting where they shouldn't, literally this week, I heard of a professor in academia that still hold the age-old idea that women are only good for dictation and secretarial duties.
Clearly you see the word "illegal" everywhere, even when it hasn't been written.
The trouble with freedom of speech is that speech isn't just words...
That doesn't change the definition of Free Speech. That just means that if you have threats along with your Free Speech, then it changes the issue entirely. It's the threat that is the issue, and not the speech itself.
The issue at hand is from a terribly low budget movie's trailer, which is insulting to Muslims. It is not threatening. Calling for the destruction of Israel is threatening, particularly when said Imam is calling upon his followers to make it happen.
This is no different than the Westboro Baptists that go around protesting at military funerals. They can get away with it it because it's not threatening anybody, and that's why it is the unfortunate side of acceptable Free Speech.
At least the Muslims demanding this movie be banned aren't being hypocrites over it.
The issue to them is very cut and dry, but it is far from not being hypocritical. You cannot insult Islam in any way. But the reverse is completely acceptable; they can insult your nation (e.g, Great Satan, which also associates religious aspects to it), or your religion (e.g, Jews), and you had better accept it. And they're going to do it while they destroy your embassy, even if your nation wasn't involved at all (e.g., German Embassy protests).
But you're right, I guess I don't see any hypocrisy in there. Keep running around with your blinders on.
I realize that this is Slashdot, and no one reads the original article, but this woman was mocking the fact that she got a DUI on Facebook, which is what caught the attention of the judge in the first place.
She was laughing it off as a status update, after hitting another car with, I believe (I read this somewhere else), 4 people in it.
Under normal circumstances, I would agree that the judge was looking for a power grab, but in this case, I think that the judge was trying to make a point to a person that simply did not understand the ramifications of the situation.
Oh, that's why the latest OS service pack (Mountain Lion) has caused a two hour drop in my battery life.
Battery life is why I actually liked my Mac because the OS is far behind both Windows and Linux, except for a few nice-to-haves. Guess my next laptop will be my favorite PC alternative: Asus.
I often see this statistic thrown around, but I rarely see anything more than the percentage. As an engineer, I have found that women earn the same amount that I do, if not more when they get to the same level of experience.
But then I wonder: are they comparing every job equally, and the averaging the pay? Clearly, there are more men in engineering, so I wonder how this is balanced in these averages, if it is at all? And then, do they equally not balance based on other female-dominated fields such as education.
I say this as a male that is ready to eat his own words, but I am tired of being accused of having it easy simply because I am a male. I have literally never seen a woman being shorted in their paycheck because of anything except experience or talent, and even in those situations it seems that many women have been given more leeway out of fear.
I don't like discrimination for anything beyond experience and talent, and maybe it's because I do not accept it for any other reason that I don't let the people around me commit it.
The authors acknowledge funding from the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth at the Northwestern University School of Law.
The source of the problem has proclaimed that it is not a problem at all.
In a nation where lawyers advertise on television to increase the cost of such lawsuits while they regularly recoup hugely significant double digit percentages from such malpractice cases, as well as donate heavily to fund the politicians that refuse to pass, or even consider tort reform, I find it a bit unconvincing when they choose to fund anti-tort reform research.
I think having the taxpayer pay for expensive fertility treatments should be an option of last resort. It would make more sense to empty out all the orphanages first.
Aren't we messing with natural selection when we enable people to beat cancer when their body cannot do so on their own? If their risk of cancer is genetic, won't that mean we'll be carrying that risk forward?
Anyway, I'd rather have people that don't get cancer. Also, cancer can be largely a product of the host body's environment. Genetics only play so much of a role. Why not kill the person?
I think having the taxpayer pay for expensive cancer treatments should be an option of last resort. It would make more sense to empty out all of the hospital beds first.
Funny how suddenly you will be against this idea.
More seriously, infertility may be the only genetic limitation in a couple, and you cannot pick "better" genotypes from the litter when adopting anyway. What if the two brilliant people, who happen to be Olympic athletes, decide to breed, but then they run into these issues?
In your world view, their "inferior" genes should be cut off before they can continue simply because they have a single, very obvious issue. In my world view, both the cancer plagued person, and the infertile person should be able to seek medical help. And, most importantly, it's this slanted view that is the basis for rejecting the notion that government's should decide what qualifies as acceptable treatment.
That does not mean that people like me believe that the status quo is acceptable, nor do we believe that the current system in the United States was acceptable. We believe that the the government should actually break the monopolistic holds that certain insurance agencies have on certain states, thus opening up the market to a significant level of competition. At the exact same time, tort reform needs to occur to limit the cost of litigation due to things that are not even remotely reasonable--the always-relevant Hot Coffee incident comes to mind. Unlike the measures that have currently been taken, those would actually cause an immediate decrease in the cost of health care, and doctors could work toward getting out of the CYA business and move toward total care, such as the care provided by DO's.
If I were any other country, I would probably ask myself that too. Then, I would look at one of the most corruptible global organizations and reconsider, unless I was one of the countries hoping to corrupt the process to begin with: e.g., Russia, China, India, or any of the Middle Eastern nations.
I agree with the sentiment, but I fear that this is throwing resources at a problem that is not going to help anyone.
The Source engine is not making any new games that really strain hardware. Certainly not in a manner than having 3% less hardware utilization will make any difference.
To put it differently, I have not had a computer for the past 6 years that could not easily run every Source Engine-based game. What's the point of extending the hardware utilization further when the engine is already at its end of life? I realize that's a somewhat terse way to interpret that, but it's incredibly relevant to the discussion at hand.
I think people should ask themselves when the last time Valve seriously looked into updating the Source engine on Windows.
The last major support shift was for Mac OS X, when they pushed Steam onto that OS. Clearly, they are looking into supporting Linux now and they are tweaking code to get the most out of it.
When was the last time that the Steam engine even needed this kind of look on Windows? 2006 or 2007? As someone pointed out in a post further down: OpenGL is beating DirectX 9. Windows 8 is about to push out very real performance improvements, as well as DirectX 11.1.
Besides, when talking about 270+ fps, there are probably a lot of other things that should be looked at rather than pushing more wasted cycles onto your CPU/GPU for rendering another frame that you, as a person, can't even perceive it happens 9-times over.
While amusing, I thought about this during the WP8 announcement. Prior to WP8, everyone said "Windows Phone 7" during announcements. Everyone except Nokia at their big announcement. They specifically called out "Windows Phone."
Even more importantly, if they really wanted too, they could keep their WP7 lineup alive for as long as they see fit because they have the ability to make changes. In doing so, they could maintain their faithful customers and continue on with WP8.
And without a second thought about quality assurance to make sure that each phone wasn't filled with lead, coated with mercury, and broken immediately.
Between this story and the notion that Facebook, a corporation that produces nothing, employs almost nobody, and whose users are not their customers is now worth >$100billion, and the fact that the young founder of Facebook is has greater net worth than the bottom 1/5th (!) of the entire US population, I think a picture of an economic system in its death throes starts to take shape. I can't see how it can last much longer, nor can I think of a reason why it should.
If today's incredibly disappointing trading is anything to go by, then we are about to see Facebook worth far less than the $100 billion amount that it is today, come next week when the underwriters are not forcing the price to stay at, or above $38 per share.
I think we're at a point where we simply disagree, but I do want to throw in my last two cents (and I'll even let you have the last word if you want).
I don't think this is Apple's way of trying to prevent people from making money. On the contrary, I think it's about both parties making money. However, it's most importantly about Apple making money, and scarily, it's about Apple making all of the profit. Receiving a 30% cut of anything beyond an in-game, all-digital good is almost certainly going to eat up the profit margin for any real business.
And all of that just so that you can provide the same experience as a company's existing website? As a business, I think this is Apple abusing its position, but I do not believe that Apple qualifies as a monopoly (so no one can slap them for it). I think my point is driven home by the fact that Apple does not even let apps link to a website allowing users to purchase something outside of the Apple system, nor can they even reference how to do it within their app. With that in mind, I would say that that provides an incredibly broken system when a company refuses to give Apple a 30% cut, or when a company simply cannot afford to do it even if they wanted to join. The app loses expected functionality, and it creates a poor experience across the board.
It is Apple's App Store, and therefore they do make the rules about what gets hosted. But this boils purely down to greed. Apple should provide such an API, and I still think they are free to take whatever percentage cut (although I still think 30% is ridiculous at best), but they should also provide an API that allows the collection of payment information in a consistent, and similarly compelling manner. Considering how generic of a process the collection of a credit card is, they could easily do it. The only reason that Apple refuses to do it is pure greed while protecting themselves from any-and-all competition at the same time considering that both PayPal and Google Checkout could both swoop in and provide a much more attractive model that is also consistent for users across apps, while actually enabling a company to make a profit from a sale.
And I do not want you to get the impression that I hate Apple. I have owned multiple iPhones, and I own a Sandy Bridge-based MacBook Pro (which is still the current generation, for now). I love their hardware quality, as well as their support, and I even like the ecosystem of apps. Even with that, I still think that this is overstepping by a large and unreasonable amount (referencing the idea that you must go through them, not even the amount that they take).
The US cannot surprise a nation that has nuclear-tipped ICBMs scattered across its massive surface area, along with their nuclear submarines around our coast, with a first strike. They will always have the ability to respond in kind, even if it is just to erase us from the planet, as we would be theoretically doing to them.
The US missile defense is to protect against rogue generals, and rogue nations. There is no hope, nor expectation that it will protect against an onslaught from Russia.
Wait, what? Nokia just released their first Windows Phones in November 2011, neither were released in the United States. At some point they released the Lumia 710 in the United States, and it sold pretty well, but it was on the smallest of the big carriers: T-Mobile. Now, Nokia has added the Lumia 900 to AT&T and it is supposedly selling pretty well (I live near a Microsoft Store, and I can honestly say that the store itself has been recently more popular than the Apple Store in the mall, but that mostly has to do with location within the mall; I have also seen a lot of people walking out with new Lumia 900 phones).
Anyway, all of this is to say that you have no idea what you are talking about when you are talking about financial reporting. Two phones are not going to save a company, and at least two bad quarters were expected. Nokia is just now getting back into the swing of things, and people looking for instant success are both naive and represent what is wrong with investors in general these days.
Otherwise, Motorola Mobility going with that "Android" platform is really proving to be a sinking ship, right? Because they've had two bad quarters too.
Learn a thing or two about corporate financial reporting.
If you drove a Lexus, then why did you switch to the Yugo? The only serious answer that you can give is that the old-Lexus brand that you knew had failed.
There are plenty of flavors of Linux, BSD and even Mac OS X if that floats your boat. Being "stuck" with Windows is your own fault, or you if it has applications that you require, then whose fault is that (hint: not the company that wrote the operating system)?
WP7 does allow apps to run in the background. It does not allow apps to access certain APIs while running in the background, such as VOIP controls (e.g., Skype). That's not too dissimilar from what Apple does on iOS.
Slashdot Mirror
Still stemming from the implication being that people aren't riding bikes because they have to wear helmets. I don't bike because I work too far away from wear I live, and I don't want to have to take a shower when I get to work. Not to mention, unlike a lot of people, I take time out of the day for exercise separate from my commute.
I also don't buy that a lot of drivers miss bikers because, just as anecdotally as the article, I have seen far more bikers--both with and without helmets--riding like morons both in and out of traffic. With very few exceptions, bikers appear to expect the best of both worlds: respect on the road, as if they were moving remotely the same speed as traffic, and the ability to act as a pedestrian whenever it's convenient, thus enabling them to run red lights and similar signs. That last bit is why bikers need to wear helmets: in practice, they appear both in-and-out of traffic as they see fit.
It's incredibly risky business, and you are not going to fix the drivers that are texting any time soon.
Me thinks you misunderstood my entire post. I was not attacking the use of the word illegal in the GP post, nor was I getting into whether the OP actually used the word, which he clearly and literally did not.
I was attacking your definition of free speech, and how it applies to the United States, which was flatly wrong. Finally, I was separately attacking the idiocy of your last statement regarding a lack of Muslim hypocrisy.
It makes sense that you did not get it, as you did not refute a single point that I made, nor do you coherently make any of your own. For example:
The original poster literally called the person a dirtbag in the title of his post, which is synonymous with scumbag. The poster that you responded too was making the--apparently to you--audacious point that simply being a dirtbag is not illegal in-and-of-itself, linking the idea that him being locked up because of making a film that has incited Muslim rage goes against free speech. Then you made a series of misinformed, or downright wrong points.
In summary, you were wrong in your last post on all but one thing: the OP never literally said "illegal." And you're still wrong about everything, except that.
As I ended my last post, continue moving forward with your blinders on.
You misunderstood my stance on the matter. I think even the founders would agree that the WBC stands on the unfortunate side of free speech. They are protected, when clearly no one wants them to be, simply to protect everything else. But, I still think, like the founders, that they are a necessary evil to put up with to avoid the slippery slope that it would otherwise create.
It's not particularly clear from the story, nor is it clear from the abstract on how they actually differentiated for natural bias in the random selection. Did each professor receive the same candidate twice, once as a male and once as a female (hopefully far apart)?
It sounds like the data set was randomly generated once, and then used to push through the study. It's quite possible that the data set simply had a lopsided pool of better qualified "males" versus "females." Considering that they do not state the number of students in the pool in either the story or the abstract, it also seems plausible that the results are from a very small pool of students, which makes the bad random data bias much more likely regardless of a large pool of graders (the 127 professors).
Of course, it could also be that the mandating of gender equality, where they are otherwise not equal, has led to a worse perception of actually qualified female candidates due to bad past experiences. Anyone in a decent engineering program has seen women coast through when they otherwise should have failed like many of their male peers, and I suspect that happens in science as well, where the number of women in the programs is simply far lower than the number of males. This, in effect, results in an immense quality bias given the same academic record, so when women have a certain academic record, it will be called into question due to past experiences.
Now, with that said, I would like to believe that people would rate people as equals from paper until the actual interview process differentiates them. Without seeing the random applicant data (specifically the quantity, and the randomization of it), then it's impossible to say. Just as we've seen women coasting where they shouldn't, literally this week, I heard of a professor in academia that still hold the age-old idea that women are only good for dictation and secretarial duties.
Ah, the apologist logic here is pathetic.
That doesn't change the definition of Free Speech. That just means that if you have threats along with your Free Speech, then it changes the issue entirely. It's the threat that is the issue, and not the speech itself.
The issue at hand is from a terribly low budget movie's trailer, which is insulting to Muslims. It is not threatening. Calling for the destruction of Israel is threatening, particularly when said Imam is calling upon his followers to make it happen.
This is no different than the Westboro Baptists that go around protesting at military funerals. They can get away with it it because it's not threatening anybody, and that's why it is the unfortunate side of acceptable Free Speech.
The issue to them is very cut and dry, but it is far from not being hypocritical. You cannot insult Islam in any way. But the reverse is completely acceptable; they can insult your nation (e.g, Great Satan, which also associates religious aspects to it), or your religion (e.g, Jews), and you had better accept it. And they're going to do it while they destroy your embassy, even if your nation wasn't involved at all (e.g., German Embassy protests).
But you're right, I guess I don't see any hypocrisy in there. Keep running around with your blinders on.
I realize that this is Slashdot, and no one reads the original article, but this woman was mocking the fact that she got a DUI on Facebook, which is what caught the attention of the judge in the first place.
She was laughing it off as a status update, after hitting another car with, I believe (I read this somewhere else), 4 people in it.
Under normal circumstances, I would agree that the judge was looking for a power grab, but in this case, I think that the judge was trying to make a point to a person that simply did not understand the ramifications of the situation.
Oh, that's why the latest OS service pack (Mountain Lion) has caused a two hour drop in my battery life.
Battery life is why I actually liked my Mac because the OS is far behind both Windows and Linux, except for a few nice-to-haves. Guess my next laptop will be my favorite PC alternative: Asus.
It's the need to describe something in a more embellished fashion to sound more intelligent that creates most of the loopholes in law.
Peeing in a cup is literally what happened. How about urinating in a hollow, topless cylindrical container?
I often see this statistic thrown around, but I rarely see anything more than the percentage. As an engineer, I have found that women earn the same amount that I do, if not more when they get to the same level of experience.
But then I wonder: are they comparing every job equally, and the averaging the pay? Clearly, there are more men in engineering, so I wonder how this is balanced in these averages, if it is at all? And then, do they equally not balance based on other female-dominated fields such as education.
I say this as a male that is ready to eat his own words, but I am tired of being accused of having it easy simply because I am a male. I have literally never seen a woman being shorted in their paycheck because of anything except experience or talent, and even in those situations it seems that many women have been given more leeway out of fear.
I don't like discrimination for anything beyond experience and talent, and maybe it's because I do not accept it for any other reason that I don't let the people around me commit it.
I like how there's two jokes in there: the obvious sexist one, and the one where Iranian's votes actually count regardless of gender.
http://www.nber.org/bah/2009no3/w15371.html
The source of the problem has proclaimed that it is not a problem at all.
In a nation where lawyers advertise on television to increase the cost of such lawsuits while they regularly recoup hugely significant double digit percentages from such malpractice cases, as well as donate heavily to fund the politicians that refuse to pass, or even consider tort reform, I find it a bit unconvincing when they choose to fund anti-tort reform research.
Aren't we messing with natural selection when we enable people to beat cancer when their body cannot do so on their own? If their risk of cancer is genetic, won't that mean we'll be carrying that risk forward?
Anyway, I'd rather have people that don't get cancer. Also, cancer can be largely a product of the host body's environment. Genetics only play so much of a role. Why not kill the person?
I think having the taxpayer pay for expensive cancer treatments should be an option of last resort. It would make more sense to empty out all of the hospital beds first.
Funny how suddenly you will be against this idea.
More seriously, infertility may be the only genetic limitation in a couple, and you cannot pick "better" genotypes from the litter when adopting anyway. What if the two brilliant people, who happen to be Olympic athletes, decide to breed, but then they run into these issues?
In your world view, their "inferior" genes should be cut off before they can continue simply because they have a single, very obvious issue. In my world view, both the cancer plagued person, and the infertile person should be able to seek medical help. And, most importantly, it's this slanted view that is the basis for rejecting the notion that government's should decide what qualifies as acceptable treatment.
That does not mean that people like me believe that the status quo is acceptable, nor do we believe that the current system in the United States was acceptable. We believe that the the government should actually break the monopolistic holds that certain insurance agencies have on certain states, thus opening up the market to a significant level of competition. At the exact same time, tort reform needs to occur to limit the cost of litigation due to things that are not even remotely reasonable--the always-relevant Hot Coffee incident comes to mind. Unlike the measures that have currently been taken, those would actually cause an immediate decrease in the cost of health care, and doctors could work toward getting out of the CYA business and move toward total care, such as the care provided by DO's.
If I were any other country, I would probably ask myself that too. Then, I would look at one of the most corruptible global organizations and reconsider, unless I was one of the countries hoping to corrupt the process to begin with: e.g., Russia, China, India, or any of the Middle Eastern nations.
I agree with the sentiment, but I fear that this is throwing resources at a problem that is not going to help anyone.
The Source engine is not making any new games that really strain hardware. Certainly not in a manner than having 3% less hardware utilization will make any difference.
To put it differently, I have not had a computer for the past 6 years that could not easily run every Source Engine-based game. What's the point of extending the hardware utilization further when the engine is already at its end of life? I realize that's a somewhat terse way to interpret that, but it's incredibly relevant to the discussion at hand.
Yes, I had a brain fart. I earlier referred to it as the Source engine as appropriate.
I think people should ask themselves when the last time Valve seriously looked into updating the Source engine on Windows.
The last major support shift was for Mac OS X, when they pushed Steam onto that OS. Clearly, they are looking into supporting Linux now and they are tweaking code to get the most out of it.
When was the last time that the Steam engine even needed this kind of look on Windows? 2006 or 2007? As someone pointed out in a post further down: OpenGL is beating DirectX 9. Windows 8 is about to push out very real performance improvements, as well as DirectX 11.1.
Besides, when talking about 270+ fps, there are probably a lot of other things that should be looked at rather than pushing more wasted cycles onto your CPU/GPU for rendering another frame that you, as a person, can't even perceive it happens 9-times over.
While amusing, I thought about this during the WP8 announcement. Prior to WP8, everyone said "Windows Phone 7" during announcements. Everyone except Nokia at their big announcement. They specifically called out "Windows Phone."
Even more importantly, if they really wanted too, they could keep their WP7 lineup alive for as long as they see fit because they have the ability to make changes. In doing so, they could maintain their faithful customers and continue on with WP8.
And without a second thought about quality assurance to make sure that each phone wasn't filled with lead, coated with mercury, and broken immediately.
If today's incredibly disappointing trading is anything to go by, then we are about to see Facebook worth far less than the $100 billion amount that it is today, come next week when the underwriters are not forcing the price to stay at, or above $38 per share.
I think we're at a point where we simply disagree, but I do want to throw in my last two cents (and I'll even let you have the last word if you want).
I don't think this is Apple's way of trying to prevent people from making money. On the contrary, I think it's about both parties making money. However, it's most importantly about Apple making money, and scarily, it's about Apple making all of the profit. Receiving a 30% cut of anything beyond an in-game, all-digital good is almost certainly going to eat up the profit margin for any real business.
And all of that just so that you can provide the same experience as a company's existing website? As a business, I think this is Apple abusing its position, but I do not believe that Apple qualifies as a monopoly (so no one can slap them for it). I think my point is driven home by the fact that Apple does not even let apps link to a website allowing users to purchase something outside of the Apple system, nor can they even reference how to do it within their app. With that in mind, I would say that that provides an incredibly broken system when a company refuses to give Apple a 30% cut, or when a company simply cannot afford to do it even if they wanted to join. The app loses expected functionality, and it creates a poor experience across the board.
It is Apple's App Store, and therefore they do make the rules about what gets hosted. But this boils purely down to greed. Apple should provide such an API, and I still think they are free to take whatever percentage cut (although I still think 30% is ridiculous at best), but they should also provide an API that allows the collection of payment information in a consistent, and similarly compelling manner. Considering how generic of a process the collection of a credit card is, they could easily do it. The only reason that Apple refuses to do it is pure greed while protecting themselves from any-and-all competition at the same time considering that both PayPal and Google Checkout could both swoop in and provide a much more attractive model that is also consistent for users across apps, while actually enabling a company to make a profit from a sale.
And I do not want you to get the impression that I hate Apple. I have owned multiple iPhones, and I own a Sandy Bridge-based MacBook Pro (which is still the current generation, for now). I love their hardware quality, as well as their support, and I even like the ecosystem of apps. Even with that, I still think that this is overstepping by a large and unreasonable amount (referencing the idea that you must go through them, not even the amount that they take).
That statement could not be much more ironic given the phrasing of your entire post.
The US cannot surprise a nation that has nuclear-tipped ICBMs scattered across its massive surface area, along with their nuclear submarines around our coast, with a first strike. They will always have the ability to respond in kind, even if it is just to erase us from the planet, as we would be theoretically doing to them.
The US missile defense is to protect against rogue generals, and rogue nations. There is no hope, nor expectation that it will protect against an onslaught from Russia.
Wait, what? Nokia just released their first Windows Phones in November 2011, neither were released in the United States. At some point they released the Lumia 710 in the United States, and it sold pretty well, but it was on the smallest of the big carriers: T-Mobile. Now, Nokia has added the Lumia 900 to AT&T and it is supposedly selling pretty well (I live near a Microsoft Store, and I can honestly say that the store itself has been recently more popular than the Apple Store in the mall, but that mostly has to do with location within the mall; I have also seen a lot of people walking out with new Lumia 900 phones).
Anyway, all of this is to say that you have no idea what you are talking about when you are talking about financial reporting. Two phones are not going to save a company, and at least two bad quarters were expected. Nokia is just now getting back into the swing of things, and people looking for instant success are both naive and represent what is wrong with investors in general these days.
Otherwise, Motorola Mobility going with that "Android" platform is really proving to be a sinking ship, right? Because they've had two bad quarters too.
Learn a thing or two about corporate financial reporting.
If you drove a Lexus, then why did you switch to the Yugo? The only serious answer that you can give is that the old-Lexus brand that you knew had failed.
There are plenty of flavors of Linux, BSD and even Mac OS X if that floats your boat. Being "stuck" with Windows is your own fault, or you if it has applications that you require, then whose fault is that (hint: not the company that wrote the operating system)?
WP7 does allow apps to run in the background. It does not allow apps to access certain APIs while running in the background, such as VOIP controls (e.g., Skype). That's not too dissimilar from what Apple does on iOS.