Rampant corruption and criminal activities of many unions aside, I don't have a problem with unions (even at federal level) existing to help workers avoid being abused and mistreated, but I do have a problem with them then becoming something that politicians at every level have to maintain employment for, even when they're no longer needed. Cutting government spending then always becomes a battle over "they took're jerbs!". Kind of like letting a family member move into your home and then kicking them out years later.
Of course, I don't even know that unions serve a real purpose, anymore. We no longer employ twelve year old kids for sixteen hours a day in dangerous machine shops for a nickel an hour and anyone who has been wronged can seek out legal representation.
However, in the tech industry, I would certainly not ever want a union to represent me and I would not want to be forced to belong to one. I would rather find a new career.
Don't you know that if Unions went away it would be merely 10 minutes before all the fat cat industrialists immediately forced 12 year old kids into working in their newly built dangerous factors for nickles!:D
The solution isn't government regulation. The solution is to encourage more corporations to start and grow in this country.
Corporations are a government-created entity that allows investors to concentrate their wealth. If the government is going to create them, it must regulate them in the public interest. If you want more corporations, in order to allow more competition, you have to create a regulatory environment that prevents them from eating each other or getting too big to allow competition.
That is incorrect. The Government does not create corporations, individuals do. Government recognizes them and provides a legal framework. That is a very big difference.
Those thrillers and spy stories are at least sold as fiction.
This proposal would cover fictional accounts of child abuse. In fact, I think that's the primary target.
The precise scenario the MP has in mind:
- Person A writes detailed fictional story in which a child is sexually abused; the purpose of the story is to arouse a reader who fantasises about being the abuser.
- Person B reads the story, is aroused, fantasises about it
- Person B may go on to abuse in real life
So he wants to ban the possession of such fictional stories. Having a big disclaimer at the top of the text file saying "THIS IS A FICTIONAL WORK INTENDED FOR ENTERTAINMENT ONLY" would not be a defence.
Or to put it another way, it's thoughtcrime. No actual crime has been committed. No actions done. Merely thoughts expressed and committed to 'paper' which society, right or wrong, has deemed doubleplusungood. I want to clarify that I'm not saying such stories are awesome. I am saying that we're talking about criminalizing thought and expression of a particular sort on the dubious theory that if you read/view X, you'll do X. I believe we've heard that line somewhere else....
Agreed. In fact as soon as we move to do everything via browser an OS will be as talked about as a BIOS...it's there, it allocated memory, the drivers load it runs a browser, win.
The days of the desktop OS are numbered, even if it's still a few years off. Microsoft see it, this is why they are moving all the office package "to the cloud". OS independent. Innovate or die.
Innovate or die is a good idea. The rest, not so much. It reminds me of the person that recently said to me that we could move all our servers to "the cloud" and never have to worry about hardware again. It isn't for everyone or everything. Little apps, relatively speaking, can run in the browser and such. Big heavy apps which need real power cannot or if they can they end up needing far more power on the client side to run well.
Slashdot community, how is an anti-Apple post rated 5 Insightful, and an Apple defence post rated 0 Troll?
While not being sure as to which posts you're referring to, it might have something to do with Apple acting like a bunch of egotistical asses for the last few years (more so than usual).
Insulting much? The OP claimed that "free internet" should be a human right. Never mind that providing Internet access is hugely expensive and requires massive investments in time and resources. He says they should just have it for free, as if it falls off a tree and someone has but to gather it up. The idea is preposterous on its face.
Absolutely nothing in life is free. So what gives him the right to demand that others pay for his services? If they refuse, what then? I think that the thing most people forget is what exactly government is and what they're really asking for when they ask the government to do anything. In most civilized countries the government is, in theory, nice and more or less law abiding. Under it all though government is power. The power to pull guns and shoot you if you don't do what they want and tell you. So the answer to "what if they refuse?" is that the government tosses them in jail and takes everything they own. If they resist that, they shoot them.
As to the EU, you really think it is just currency manipulation? Sky rocketing debt caused nearly entirely by out of control social spending has nothing at all to do with it? It isn't the US and you can't just point at the Military Strawman and say it's all defense spending that's causing it. The government is broke! I know what will fix it! More Government spending!!
I am European, and I think that fast Internet for free should be available to anyone in EU, as part of basic human rights. I don't care how it is technically done, but this should be long-term goal, especially for social parties, in order to prevent new kind of illiteracy of poor people.
You cannot reasonably claim a Right to be given a service for free. As there is no such thing as anything for free, what you're really demanding is that the government use force of arms to take from one set of people and give to another.
And people wonder why the EU is falling apart financially....
Given that he's still walking around and was walking around openly for a good two years before he ran off the Ecuador's embassy, yeah I'd say that is unimportant. Plus, given who made those comments is no one who could order anything.
If he's so unimportant, why does the U.S. ambassador to Australia negotiate the terms of an extradition - just in case? If he's so unimportant, why insists Sweden on a witness statement given on swedish soil? (Yes, the extradition request is for a witness! It's not as if the state attorney already has filed charges.) If he's so unimportant, why does the UK government threats to storm the Ecuadorian embassy over him?
Somehow none of this sounds as if there is something completely unimportant happening. And somehow it doesn't sound as if Julian Assange is the one trying to inflate the importance.
If he's such a great threat to the global order the Evil US is pushing on the world, why not just make him disappear quietly somewhere along the way instead of doing things out in the open for all the world to see?
There could only be two logical reasons for that, the US is incapable to act or they just don't have the hard-on for Assange that people think he does.
Either all that or it is exactly what it appears to be. A egotistical douchebag did things with a woman he probably shouldn't have and is now trying to run away from the charges under a pretense that the evil US is out to get him.
The US want to legally jail him up for life and parade him around on TV as an example to everyone else. It's not about getting revenge it's about using him as an example to the rest of us.
I think you're vastly inflating his importance to anyone outside the wikileaks/Assange fan club. He could turned inside out on international TV and it wouldn't stop truly brave and non-attention seeking people from doing what's right.
You're missing a number of rather important details.
First off, the founders of the USA made an open statement of their problems with King George, having worked to resolve them.
Second, instead of publishing who King George had agreements with, or who his spies in France are, or some other embarassing detail, they simply started their own country and said: if you don't like it, this is who we are; come get some.
Third, they took up arms and resisted the people the King sent after them, when he did indeed come after the people who signed the Declaration of Independence.
If you're trying to say Bradley Manning has the balls or integrity to do any of the above, then you're not paying attention or you're willfully lying. He's a little jag who had a temper tantrum because his boyfriend dumped him, and then got demoted for having that temper tantrum at work. Since he was demoted, he grabbed everything he could get his hands on and gave it to where he thought it could do the most damage, while trying desperately to stay anonymous.
Bradley Manning is a coward, a whiner, and a drama Queen. And you are an idiot for comparing him to anyone who ever actually put himself on the line for anything.
Truth.
Though, clearly you didn't get the memo. Since the US == Supreme Evil of the Universe it only makes sense that anything that may possibly put it or anything it stands for in a good light is bad, unless it can be tied to someone/something the group think has deemed as "good". In which case the US was only doing whatever it was out of some 'evil' self interest.
Also, we're supposed to worship the drama queen Assange and anyone or anything associated to him. Sorry, the people responsible for getting you your memos will now be sacked.
Not going to happen. Since Amtrak is government underfunded and mismanaged it uses freight rails and has to pull over for any freight traffic, and every congressdick in the country makes sure that it stops in their district so they can tell their constituents that they're bringing home the tax dollars.
Aside from that, rail will probably never be fixable. The environmentalists pushing it live in abject terror of cars, and the people they want to use it live in abject terror of having to walk 10 feet unaided. Despite the fact that the Chunnel seems to operate just fine, the two groups won't meet in the middle with drive-on carriages, because of course that would come from them evil european socialists.
Actually, being one of those people who despise socialism and everything it stands for I still think drive-on carriages would be absolutely awesome. Drive on in Indiana, ride an Amtrak train down to the Gulf Coast, drive off down there. Awesome.
The real problem is that Amtrak blows for various reasons which have already been covered here. It's slow and expensive outside the commuter lines of the north east.
It is clear the reopening of Sweden's investigation into Assange, and the extradition proceedings, were at the behest of the Americans, but I am puzzled. Why does the US want to eventually extradite Assange from Sweden rather than more quickly from the UK? In this kind of political case, the UK is likely to be at least as cooperative as Sweden. Who has a good theory?
Your question is flawed as it is based on the presumption that the US is "behind it all". If the US were behind it all, then you're right in that it would make far more sense to just directly charge him with espionage or whatever and extradite him to the US. There would be no need to go through Sweden and complicate the hell out of things.
The other idea, that the charges against him are serious and need to be investigated and are the real reason for all this is far more logical and simple. Either that or it's just a giant conspiracy against against poor little Assange.
This is the central point that many, nearly all, willfully fail to acknowledge. If the US just wanted him why bother trumping up charges in Sweden, involving all these extra people and complicate things to no end instead of just charging him with the crime they would actually try to get him for? They wouldn't. They'd just charge him and be done with it.
It's not his opinion, he works in information warfare aka he's a paid troll. It's not about disagreeing with his position it's about the fact that we once again have an official propaganda office which is targeting American citizens.
You say propaganda, but did you read any of the links posted or did you just switch to groupthink mode and decide that anything that is pro-Assange is good and anything that is anti-him is bad?
In the end, the douchebag Assange requested asylum purely to avoid his day in court. If the US wanted to nail him so bad and this was all just a conspiracy against more little Julian, don't you think they would have come up with a far less complicated method? Car wreck? Mugging gone wrong?
Given his extremely strong egotistical tendencies plus his reported disregard for women, what is more likely: That he may have done exactly what he's been accused of or that it is all a giant US government plot to get him to US soil to put him on trial for X.
But, it's cool. Many in the slashdot ground and others will continue to worship this attention seeking douchebag and hold him up as the champion of free speech.
Never mind that he/they have only "over turned power and exposed secrets" when it negatively impacted the West and/or the US. Unless, of course we're supposed to believe that he/they were never handed any embarrassing information or secrets about China/Iran/Russia/whoever. Nope, just the US and the West. No agenda there, is there?
Yup, they only release secrets about Western allies such as Syria.
It is odd that they've never really done such things much before. Also, you may notice that there is a strong emphasis on embarrassing "the west" even on that page. My point still stands.
And it definitely has nothing to do with having sex with a sleeping person (in violation of the terms set when they were awake, not like that matters), pinning down another and trying to force her legs open to have sex without a condom, etc. It's all about Assange. It's always all about Assange. After all, he's God. Actually, that's not my favorite of Assange's diary entries; that has to be the one where he says that there will be no great breakthroughs by women in the field of mathematics because " they need a male type brain to thrive in the existing mathematical world..", but he hopes that a (presumably male) neuroscientist will create a new "female" mathematics for them to help them out.
This. This right fucking here.
The downright worship of this attention seeking, egotistical and (possibly) rapist here and on other websites is just mind blowing. He didn't do a damned thing for the good of humanity and he never has. It has always been about attention for Julian Assange. People on here act like he's such a brave guy. Never mind all the people who may have been killed, directly or indirectly, by wikileaks blasting diplomatic cables all over the place. Never mind that he/they have only "over turned power and exposed secrets" when it negatively impacted the West and/or the US. Unless, of course we're supposed to believe that he/they were never handed any embarrassing information or secrets about China/Iran/Russia/whoever. Nope, just the US and the West. No agenda there, is there?
As Rei here said too, this isn't about making an example out of the douchebag. This is about him having been accused of a pretty serious crime, which many around here just want to say is no big deal, and him trying to dodge his day in court. Like a douchebag.
If the US, being the "super evil country" it is, wanted him gone they would have done it far more quietly than all this crap. Odd that never occurs to people...
I.e. Samsung alone shipped almost twice as many smartphones as Apple.
Apple makes over 70% of industry profit. And Samsung is the only other phone maker making any significant profit at all in the smartphone. (HTC apparently makes a small operating profit) Pretty much every other phone maker including Research In Motion, Nokia, Motorola and Sony all posted losses. Because Samsung ships a lot more units (feature phones + smart phones) but still only has half the profit of Apple over the same period, that means that Samsung is competing with Apple primarily on price. Yes they are selling a lot of units but people (mostly) aren't buying them for the features - they are buying Samsung because of the price. It's unclear if Samsung will be able to continue its price leadership since there isn't all that much much to differentiate Samsung's Android phone from anyone else's.
Yeah, those 10 million odd people who jumped on the SGSIII were only doing it because it was cheaper than the iPhone. No other reason is possible, right?
As I mentioned in the other tablet thread, Apple better worry about the Nexus
umm... sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the ipad mini is going to eat the nex7's lunch. also, way to complain about fantasy stock worries. also, fyi you come across as a big douche.
And you base this on what? The inherent magic that is Apple? The presumption that as soon as Apple enters a product space, they immediately own it and everything else is crap? On your last sentence, you may wish you look in a mirror.
But, the iPhone design images are from 2005, a year before the Samsung sketches. Samsung's design could have been created independently, but it could have also been based on information leaked by hardware suppliers in Asia. Who knows.
So in the face of the above you seem to be claiming that Samsung was so crap scared of the 'awesome innovation' of the unreleased iPhone that they used their spy network to get the details so they can design one that was similar?
Either that or design convergence around common technology was at work. So, either spy network or "design a phone with a massive touch screen" leads to similar designs. I prefer spy network. It leads to Bond women or something.
What I'm saying is that she clearly didn't know the difference, and physically similar designs, in my estimation, bear an implicit message of similar functionality to people who are not technically savvy enough to understand the underpinnings.
I would counter and say that there is no evidence at hand that she didn't know what she was getting. Further, from the perspective of "can play angry birds, write emails, browse web" they are functionally identical. In any case, she could simply have said "tablet A is 250, tablet B is 150 and both will do what I want".
Result, pretty much what every tablet is. Or a PADD...
And.. here's where your argument falls apart. There are no PADD designs that are confusable for an iPad. They all look like... wait for it... a prop from Star Trek.
Also, I can do magic. If I hold a Galaxy Tab in the perspective it is designed to be used in, it suddenly doesn't look like an iPad. Magic!
I've accidentally reached for my Tab when intending to reach for my iPad. People I work with have asked me what I put on my iPad to make it look 'cooler', not realizing I was holding the Galaxy Tab. (I think the people I work with ache for Android's most sophisticated home screen.) This has never happened with my HP TouchPad.
You're confusing "Meets a small handful of broad requirements" with "one can be confused for another." Samsung copied Apple, the other competition has not, it is *very* obvious.
Oddly, I'd find the HP Touchpad far easier to confuse to the iPad and have had the opposite experience with people. I suppose I just don't see it. The Galaxy Tab is larger, and clearly designed to be used primarily in landscape. The iPad is is smaller and clearly designed for portrait mode.
oh come on, dont pretend you dont get it, its not just the corners its the idea of clean simple and focused design of the tablet. look at tablets before and after the ipad.
i'm all in favor of competition its just that making knockoffs isnt competition its making knock offs.
let the other guys _actually_ invent new stuff, like microsoft are actually attempting to do, and we as consumers _will_ have a choice.
right now all samsung is offering is a choice between an ipad and a cheaper knock off. thats not a choice i want to have as a consumer.
Look at the design of tablets before and after good quality and affordable capacitive touch screens.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The design of the iPad, and practically ever other post-Capacitive tablet, is dictated by the dual considerations of human interface and the screen. If you set out a design goal of: Use a capacitive screen with a touch based UI and make it pleasant to hold, then you end up with something substantially similar to the iPad or the Galaxy Tab. There is no real great innovation in either of them. It is simply a matter of form following function.
Either that or only Apple innovates and everyone else just watches them. Clearly the 10 million odd people who snapped of SGSIIIs just thought they were buying a cheap iPhone or something.
She also clearly didn't think the Apple Magic was worth the extra 100 bucks. Unless you're saying she was so completely stupid as to walk over and try the Galaxy Tab and still manage to confuse them because they were both similar shapes? Which would make her blind and stupid?
I honestly do not believe anyone could buy a Galaxy Tab by mistake and think it was an iPad. I further don't believe, like in this case, that a decision was made based on similar shape and no other consideration. Next, you'll be saying that people buy Ultrabooks and not MacBooks because they're cheaper and couldn't tell the difference between MacOS and Windows.
I love how you dismiss marketing as an invalid answer without any reason or citation for doing so. Just because you don't want it to be part of the argument it doesn't mean it isn't a prime factor.
It has to be dismissed as the prime factor because otherwise one couldn't hail Apple as the great innovators and accuse everyone else of just slovenly copying them.
Slashdot Mirror
Rampant corruption and criminal activities of many unions aside, I don't have a problem with unions (even at federal level) existing to help workers avoid being abused and mistreated, but I do have a problem with them then becoming something that politicians at every level have to maintain employment for, even when they're no longer needed. Cutting government spending then always becomes a battle over "they took're jerbs!". Kind of like letting a family member move into your home and then kicking them out years later.
Of course, I don't even know that unions serve a real purpose, anymore. We no longer employ twelve year old kids for sixteen hours a day in dangerous machine shops for a nickel an hour and anyone who has been wronged can seek out legal representation.
However, in the tech industry, I would certainly not ever want a union to represent me and I would not want to be forced to belong to one. I would rather find a new career.
Don't you know that if Unions went away it would be merely 10 minutes before all the fat cat industrialists immediately forced 12 year old kids into working in their newly built dangerous factors for nickles! :D
Corporations are a government-created entity that allows investors to concentrate their wealth. If the government is going to create them, it must regulate them in the public interest. If you want more corporations, in order to allow more competition, you have to create a regulatory environment that prevents them from eating each other or getting too big to allow competition.
That is incorrect. The Government does not create corporations, individuals do. Government recognizes them and provides a legal framework. That is a very big difference.
Those thrillers and spy stories are at least sold as fiction.
This proposal would cover fictional accounts of child abuse. In fact, I think that's the primary target.
The precise scenario the MP has in mind:
- Person A writes detailed fictional story in which a child is sexually abused; the purpose of the story is to arouse a reader who fantasises about being the abuser.
- Person B reads the story, is aroused, fantasises about it
- Person B may go on to abuse in real life
So he wants to ban the possession of such fictional stories. Having a big disclaimer at the top of the text file saying "THIS IS A FICTIONAL WORK INTENDED FOR ENTERTAINMENT ONLY" would not be a defence.
Or to put it another way, it's thoughtcrime. No actual crime has been committed. No actions done. Merely thoughts expressed and committed to 'paper' which society, right or wrong, has deemed doubleplusungood. I want to clarify that I'm not saying such stories are awesome. I am saying that we're talking about criminalizing thought and expression of a particular sort on the dubious theory that if you read/view X, you'll do X. I believe we've heard that line somewhere else....
Agreed. In fact as soon as we move to do everything via browser an OS will be as talked about as a BIOS...it's there, it allocated memory, the drivers load it runs a browser, win.
The days of the desktop OS are numbered, even if it's still a few years off. Microsoft see it, this is why they are moving all the office package "to the cloud". OS independent. Innovate or die.
Innovate or die is a good idea. The rest, not so much. It reminds me of the person that recently said to me that we could move all our servers to "the cloud" and never have to worry about hardware again. It isn't for everyone or everything. Little apps, relatively speaking, can run in the browser and such. Big heavy apps which need real power cannot or if they can they end up needing far more power on the client side to run well.
Slashdot community, how is an anti-Apple post rated 5 Insightful, and an Apple defence post rated 0 Troll?
While not being sure as to which posts you're referring to, it might have something to do with Apple acting like a bunch of egotistical asses for the last few years (more so than usual).
Insulting much? The OP claimed that "free internet" should be a human right. Never mind that providing Internet access is hugely expensive and requires massive investments in time and resources. He says they should just have it for free, as if it falls off a tree and someone has but to gather it up. The idea is preposterous on its face.
Absolutely nothing in life is free. So what gives him the right to demand that others pay for his services? If they refuse, what then? I think that the thing most people forget is what exactly government is and what they're really asking for when they ask the government to do anything. In most civilized countries the government is, in theory, nice and more or less law abiding. Under it all though government is power. The power to pull guns and shoot you if you don't do what they want and tell you. So the answer to "what if they refuse?" is that the government tosses them in jail and takes everything they own. If they resist that, they shoot them.
As to the EU, you really think it is just currency manipulation? Sky rocketing debt caused nearly entirely by out of control social spending has nothing at all to do with it? It isn't the US and you can't just point at the Military Strawman and say it's all defense spending that's causing it. The government is broke! I know what will fix it! More Government spending!!
Try to learn from history, okay?
I am European, and I think that fast Internet for free should be available to anyone in EU, as part of basic human rights. I don't care how it is technically done, but this should be long-term goal, especially for social parties, in order to prevent new kind of illiteracy of poor people.
You cannot reasonably claim a Right to be given a service for free. As there is no such thing as anything for free, what you're really demanding is that the government use force of arms to take from one set of people and give to another.
And people wonder why the EU is falling apart financially....
I think you're vastly inflating his importance to anyone outside the wikileaks/Assange fan club.
...also known as "everyone except the US military".
Everyone except the US military is in his fan club? Really?
-- Not in the US Military.. thinks that Assnage is an attention seeking douche.
so unimportant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Calls_for_Assange.27s_assassination
Given that he's still walking around and was walking around openly for a good two years before he ran off the Ecuador's embassy, yeah I'd say that is unimportant. Plus, given who made those comments is no one who could order anything.
If he's so unimportant, why does the U.S. ambassador to Australia negotiate the terms of an extradition - just in case?
If he's so unimportant, why insists Sweden on a witness statement given on swedish soil? (Yes, the extradition request is for a witness! It's not as if the state attorney already has filed charges.)
If he's so unimportant, why does the UK government threats to storm the Ecuadorian embassy over him?
Somehow none of this sounds as if there is something completely unimportant happening. And somehow it doesn't sound as if Julian Assange is the one trying to inflate the importance.
If he's such a great threat to the global order the Evil US is pushing on the world, why not just make him disappear quietly somewhere along the way instead of doing things out in the open for all the world to see?
There could only be two logical reasons for that, the US is incapable to act or they just don't have the hard-on for Assange that people think he does.
Either all that or it is exactly what it appears to be. A egotistical douchebag did things with a woman he probably shouldn't have and is now trying to run away from the charges under a pretense that the evil US is out to get him.
The US want to legally jail him up for life and parade him around on TV as an example to everyone else. It's not about getting revenge it's about using him as an example to the rest of us.
I think you're vastly inflating his importance to anyone outside the wikileaks/Assange fan club. He could turned inside out on international TV and it wouldn't stop truly brave and non-attention seeking people from doing what's right.
You're missing a number of rather important details.
First off, the founders of the USA made an open statement of their problems with King George, having worked to resolve them.
Second, instead of publishing who King George had agreements with, or who his spies in France are, or some other embarassing detail, they simply started their own country and said: if you don't like it, this is who we are; come get some.
Third, they took up arms and resisted the people the King sent after them, when he did indeed come after the people who signed the Declaration of Independence.
If you're trying to say Bradley Manning has the balls or integrity to do any of the above, then you're not paying attention or you're willfully lying.
He's a little jag who had a temper tantrum because his boyfriend dumped him, and then got demoted for having that temper tantrum at work. Since he was demoted, he grabbed everything he could get his hands on and gave it to where he thought it could do the most damage, while trying desperately to stay anonymous.
Bradley Manning is a coward, a whiner, and a drama Queen. And you are an idiot for comparing him to anyone who ever actually put himself on the line for anything.
Truth.
Though, clearly you didn't get the memo. Since the US == Supreme Evil of the Universe it only makes sense that anything that may possibly put it or anything it stands for in a good light is bad, unless it can be tied to someone/something the group think has deemed as "good". In which case the US was only doing whatever it was out of some 'evil' self interest.
Also, we're supposed to worship the drama queen Assange and anyone or anything associated to him. Sorry, the people responsible for getting you your memos will now be sacked.
Non-stop routes
Not going to happen. Since Amtrak is government underfunded and mismanaged it uses freight rails and has to pull over for any freight traffic, and every congressdick in the country makes sure that it stops in their district so they can tell their constituents that they're bringing home the tax dollars.
Aside from that, rail will probably never be fixable. The environmentalists pushing it live in abject terror of cars, and the people they want to use it live in abject terror of having to walk 10 feet unaided. Despite the fact that the Chunnel seems to operate just fine, the two groups won't meet in the middle with drive-on carriages, because of course that would come from them evil european socialists.
Actually, being one of those people who despise socialism and everything it stands for I still think drive-on carriages would be absolutely awesome. Drive on in Indiana, ride an Amtrak train down to the Gulf Coast, drive off down there. Awesome.
The real problem is that Amtrak blows for various reasons which have already been covered here. It's slow and expensive outside the commuter lines of the north east.
It is clear the reopening of Sweden's investigation into Assange, and the extradition proceedings, were at the behest of the Americans, but I am puzzled. Why does the US want to eventually extradite Assange from Sweden rather than more quickly from the UK? In this kind of political case, the UK is likely to be at least as cooperative as Sweden. Who has a good theory?
Your question is flawed as it is based on the presumption that the US is "behind it all". If the US were behind it all, then you're right in that it would make far more sense to just directly charge him with espionage or whatever and extradite him to the US. There would be no need to go through Sweden and complicate the hell out of things.
The other idea, that the charges against him are serious and need to be investigated and are the real reason for all this is far more logical and simple. Either that or it's just a giant conspiracy against against poor little Assange.
This is the central point that many, nearly all, willfully fail to acknowledge. If the US just wanted him why bother trumping up charges in Sweden, involving all these extra people and complicate things to no end instead of just charging him with the crime they would actually try to get him for? They wouldn't. They'd just charge him and be done with it.
It's not his opinion, he works in information warfare aka he's a paid troll. It's not about disagreeing with his position it's about the fact that we once again have an official propaganda office which is targeting American citizens.
You say propaganda, but did you read any of the links posted or did you just switch to groupthink mode and decide that anything that is pro-Assange is good and anything that is anti-him is bad?
In the end, the douchebag Assange requested asylum purely to avoid his day in court. If the US wanted to nail him so bad and this was all just a conspiracy against more little Julian, don't you think they would have come up with a far less complicated method? Car wreck? Mugging gone wrong?
Given his extremely strong egotistical tendencies plus his reported disregard for women, what is more likely: That he may have done exactly what he's been accused of or that it is all a giant US government plot to get him to US soil to put him on trial for X.
But, it's cool. Many in the slashdot ground and others will continue to worship this attention seeking douchebag and hold him up as the champion of free speech.
Never mind that he/they have only "over turned power and exposed secrets" when it negatively impacted the West and/or the US. Unless, of course we're supposed to believe that he/they were never handed any embarrassing information or secrets about China/Iran/Russia/whoever. Nope, just the US and the West. No agenda there, is there?
Yup, they only release secrets about Western allies such as Syria.
It is odd that they've never really done such things much before. Also, you may notice that there is a strong emphasis on embarrassing "the west" even on that page. My point still stands.
And it definitely has nothing to do with having sex with a sleeping person (in violation of the terms set when they were awake, not like that matters), pinning down another and trying to force her legs open to have sex without a condom, etc. It's all about Assange. It's always all about Assange. After all, he's God. Actually, that's not my favorite of Assange's diary entries; that has to be the one where he says that there will be no great breakthroughs by women in the field of mathematics because " they need a male type brain to thrive in the existing mathematical world..", but he hopes that a (presumably male) neuroscientist will create a new "female" mathematics for them to help them out.
This. This right fucking here.
The downright worship of this attention seeking, egotistical and (possibly) rapist here and on other websites is just mind blowing. He didn't do a damned thing for the good of humanity and he never has. It has always been about attention for Julian Assange. People on here act like he's such a brave guy. Never mind all the people who may have been killed, directly or indirectly, by wikileaks blasting diplomatic cables all over the place. Never mind that he/they have only "over turned power and exposed secrets" when it negatively impacted the West and/or the US. Unless, of course we're supposed to believe that he/they were never handed any embarrassing information or secrets about China/Iran/Russia/whoever. Nope, just the US and the West. No agenda there, is there?
As Rei here said too, this isn't about making an example out of the douchebag. This is about him having been accused of a pretty serious crime, which many around here just want to say is no big deal, and him trying to dodge his day in court. Like a douchebag.
If the US, being the "super evil country" it is, wanted him gone they would have done it far more quietly than all this crap. Odd that never occurs to people...
I.e. Samsung alone shipped almost twice as many smartphones as Apple.
Apple makes over 70% of industry profit. And Samsung is the only other phone maker making any significant profit at all in the smartphone. (HTC apparently makes a small operating profit) Pretty much every other phone maker including Research In Motion, Nokia, Motorola and Sony all posted losses. Because Samsung ships a lot more units (feature phones + smart phones) but still only has half the profit of Apple over the same period, that means that Samsung is competing with Apple primarily on price. Yes they are selling a lot of units but people (mostly) aren't buying them for the features - they are buying Samsung because of the price. It's unclear if Samsung will be able to continue its price leadership since there isn't all that much much to differentiate Samsung's Android phone from anyone else's.
Yeah, those 10 million odd people who jumped on the SGSIII were only doing it because it was cheaper than the iPhone. No other reason is possible, right?
As I mentioned in the other tablet thread, Apple better worry about the Nexus
umm... sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the ipad mini is going to eat the nex7's lunch. also, way to complain about fantasy stock worries. also, fyi you come across as a big douche.
And you base this on what? The inherent magic that is Apple? The presumption that as soon as Apple enters a product space, they immediately own it and everything else is crap? On your last sentence, you may wish you look in a mirror.
But, the iPhone design images are from 2005, a year before the Samsung sketches. Samsung's design could have been created independently, but it could have also been based on information leaked by hardware suppliers in Asia. Who knows.
So in the face of the above you seem to be claiming that Samsung was so crap scared of the 'awesome innovation' of the unreleased iPhone that they used their spy network to get the details so they can design one that was similar?
Either that or design convergence around common technology was at work. So, either spy network or "design a phone with a massive touch screen" leads to similar designs. I prefer spy network. It leads to Bond women or something.
What I'm saying is that she clearly didn't know the difference, and physically similar designs, in my estimation, bear an implicit message of similar functionality to people who are not technically savvy enough to understand the underpinnings.
I would counter and say that there is no evidence at hand that she didn't know what she was getting. Further, from the perspective of "can play angry birds, write emails, browse web" they are functionally identical. In any case, she could simply have said "tablet A is 250, tablet B is 150 and both will do what I want".
Result, pretty much what every tablet is. Or a PADD...
And.. here's where your argument falls apart. There are no PADD designs that are confusable for an iPad. They all look like... wait for it... a prop from Star Trek.
Also, I can do magic. If I hold a Galaxy Tab in the perspective it is designed to be used in, it suddenly doesn't look like an iPad. Magic!
I've accidentally reached for my Tab when intending to reach for my iPad. People I work with have asked me what I put on my iPad to make it look 'cooler', not realizing I was holding the Galaxy Tab. (I think the people I work with ache for Android's most sophisticated home screen.) This has never happened with my HP TouchPad.
You're confusing "Meets a small handful of broad requirements" with "one can be confused for another." Samsung copied Apple, the other competition has not, it is *very* obvious.
Oddly, I'd find the HP Touchpad far easier to confuse to the iPad and have had the opposite experience with people. I suppose I just don't see it. The Galaxy Tab is larger, and clearly designed to be used primarily in landscape. The iPad is is smaller and clearly designed for portrait mode.
oh come on, dont pretend you dont get it, its not just the corners its the idea of clean simple and focused design of the tablet. look at tablets before and after the ipad.
i'm all in favor of competition its just that making knockoffs isnt competition its making knock offs.
let the other guys _actually_ invent new stuff, like microsoft are actually attempting to do, and we as consumers _will_ have a choice.
right now all samsung is offering is a choice between an ipad and a cheaper knock off. thats not a choice i want to have as a consumer.
Look at the design of tablets before and after good quality and affordable capacitive touch screens.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The design of the iPad, and practically ever other post-Capacitive tablet, is dictated by the dual considerations of human interface and the screen. If you set out a design goal of: Use a capacitive screen with a touch based UI and make it pleasant to hold, then you end up with something substantially similar to the iPad or the Galaxy Tab. There is no real great innovation in either of them. It is simply a matter of form following function.
Either that or only Apple innovates and everyone else just watches them. Clearly the 10 million odd people who snapped of SGSIIIs just thought they were buying a cheap iPhone or something.
She knew one was $100 cheaper. That was all.
She also clearly didn't think the Apple Magic was worth the extra 100 bucks. Unless you're saying she was so completely stupid as to walk over and try the Galaxy Tab and still manage to confuse them because they were both similar shapes? Which would make her blind and stupid?
I honestly do not believe anyone could buy a Galaxy Tab by mistake and think it was an iPad. I further don't believe, like in this case, that a decision was made based on similar shape and no other consideration. Next, you'll be saying that people buy Ultrabooks and not MacBooks because they're cheaper and couldn't tell the difference between MacOS and Windows.
I love how you dismiss marketing as an invalid answer without any reason or citation for doing so. Just because you don't want it to be part of the argument it doesn't mean it isn't a prime factor.
It has to be dismissed as the prime factor because otherwise one couldn't hail Apple as the great innovators and accuse everyone else of just slovenly copying them.