If they oppress anyone, they oppress men. It all depends on how you'd answer the question, "Do you feel that men-only gyms oppress women?"
And, of course, whether there are many more of one kind than the other. Male-only swimming pools in Saudi Arabia (of which there are many) could be said to oppress women there because of the almost total lack of female-only or mixed-gender pools.
From the fact that leaving certain bodily parts uncovered at all times is unhygenic (e.g. "No shirt, no shoes, no service"... and they don't mention shorts/underwear only because someone walking around with that part uncovered would violate indecent exposure law anyways).
And there can be NO purpose for the Burkha other than to dehumanize women by making them "unseen" in society.
Given that many common diseases are spread through the mouth and nose, some kind of facial covering does make some hygienic sense. And Muslims take hygiene very seriously, even if much of what they do is based on ritual rather than actual hygiene.
You also have to take into account that, when your society is based on the culture of desert-inhabiting tribes, some kind of full-body covering, including facial covering, is almost inevitable.
As far as I can tell Google have never said anything about it potentially being mandatory in the future. That's just something some blogger wrote.
And it's no more true that this might be mandatory in the future now than it was, say, two years ago. It might also be the case that Google might require fingerprints and an iris scan to log in to Gmail in the future (true both before or after any announcement of it being an optional feature).
It's not a good reason to get your panties in a bunch now about something that might never happen.
The iPhone will never have a full hardware keyboard, despite the improvements made with software keyboard they will never match the accuracy and feel of a physical keyboard, anyone who wants a keyboard on their phone is going to have to get a non-iPhone.
Funny, because I would be all over Palm's phones if only they'd release a model with a virtual keyboard. A keyboard that I can't fit at least six fingers on at a time is worthless to me, and I haven't found a single phone-sized Qwerty keyboard that could match the speed and ease of use of the iPhone virtual keyboard.
I agree with your final point though, and I hope that HP makes a success of WebOS. Much as I love Android, I worry that it will eventually turn into the Windows of the phone/tablet world without some decent competition.
Umm, dude, there's a lot of Android tablets around *now*.
That depends how far you're willing to stretch the definition of 'Android tablet'. If you mean it has a tablet form factor, and Android is in there somewhere, then there are loads of them, but that's not a meaningful statistic for anybody other than Android fanboys that want to tout figures.
What matters is the ecosystem, and realistically that means the Android Marketplace being pre-installed on the device. Without it, Google isn't making any money, and developers will have a hard time selling their software for the platform.
They don't have great resolution, they're slow...
...and proponents of the Android platform would be wise to pretend they don't exist, as they give Android a bad name. Better to highlight the quality devices once the appear, that run Android Marketplace and actually contribute something back to the ecosystem.
How are you defining 'solid'? By the construction itself and the materials used, or its ability to withstand misuse?
If it's the former, I don't think you can get more solid than the glass and metal construction of the iPhone 4. Just about every other phone feels flimsy and flexible by comparison.
On the other hand, that construction means that it's not built to withstand shocks. The lack of solidity in the plastic of other phones gives them an added degree of shock absorbance that means that they're more likely to survive a fall than an iPhone 4.
Personally I would go with the first definition, and say that the iPhone 4 is the most solidly built phone out there. But that's not necessarily a good thing.
Up-to-the-minute news isn't necessarily valuable to everyone. A lot of the time it's utterly devoid of information because the headline has been pushed out before anybody has had a chance to establish the facts. Other times it doesn't really matter if the news reaches you today, tomorrow or the next day. Slashdot isn't anywhere near up-to-the-minute, for example. And depending on how you organise your time, having news come out in dribs and drabs isn't necessarily useful.
That said, newspapers have to come to terms with the fact that they're not the source of breaking news for anybody other than the elderly. Where they need to shine is in quality in-depth coverage, comment and opinion. This is true of traditional newspapers as well as ventures such as The Daily.
I actually feel the same way about 24 hour TV news channels, especially the BBC News channel. They try to offer constant rolling news coverage, and it's painful to watch. The newsreaders stammer through items utterly devoid of information, repeat themselves every 15 minutes, and don't really offer anything that isn't on offer on the 1, 6 and 10pm bulletins. It's a tragedy because the channel could be put to such better use if it had scheduled, in-depth programmes, and all the up-to-date stuff was just bumped off to the website.
The thing that most people are missing is that The Daily is cheap. $3.96 a month is less than the cost of a large cup of takeaway coffee. At that price, it doesn't need to be spectacularly better than the free content on the internet, it just needs to be slightly better for it to be appealing.
Compare that to the cost of a Times subscription on a UK Kindle, which costs £9.99 a month, and that's still less than half the cost of a dead tree, postal subscription. And these papers typically cost per daily issue what The Daily costs per week.
I still see 'app' as an abbreviation of 'application' - wouldn't 'applet' be a more appropriate word for a tiny application? Or does that already have too specific a meaning?
3G support is a reasonable requirement, at this point no smart phone should be without it
No smartphone should be without 3G, sure, but the point is that Google is missing out on marketshare on a whole class of devices that aren't smartphones.
iPod Touches are cheaper than the equivalent smartphone, and can be obtained without a contract even in markets like the US where it's nigh on impossible to get a SIM-free smartphone. If Android was available on this class of devices then it would open up a whole new market that at the moment is in Apple's hands. Google needs market share to attract developers to Android and bring revenue back, and right now it's given up an entire market on a technicality (while allowing iOS's market share in that sector a free reign). It's utterly idiotic.
You kid, but the only way they know that the kg reference is getting 'lighter' is by comparing it to the copies handed out to countries' standards agencies. These copies are handled more often than the reference, so it's entirety possible that they have gained mass, and that the reference hasn't changed.
Microsoft is, I think, implementing the standard (slowly) rather than defining it. And I'd argue that the same is true of Mozilla and Opera to some extent.
It seems to me that it's Webkit that's pushing the standard, with Apple and Google as the major contributors but with a whole load of other companies along for the ride. The Webkit project is becoming a de-facto standards body with a members list that includes every smartphone platform builder except Microsoft.
I agree that there's too much whitespace in the area around the summary. I vehemently disagree that there's too much whitespace in the comments area - I think it's just about perfect.
I'm not sure what you mean by low contrast text on white. I'm seeing the same black sans-serif font on the same white background that I see on every other website.
I'm wondering if it's been quietly fixed since I posted last, actually. It's now sitting at 4.8% utilisation, although it jumps up whenever I interact with the page.
I don't think they ever actually started putting passport applicants on the system. It was meant to start in 2008, but the date got pushed back to 2011/2012, so the system was scrapped before it started.
Airside airport workers were the only people ever to be added to the system against their will, I think. Foreign nationals were also added, as a condition of being allowed to live in the country.
I said it would be difficult to solve, not that I was proposing a solution.
My point is that as far as I can tell from the article, there's no intelligence built into the system that's been demoed, aside from the human driver of the lead vehicle. Once you get into a situation where the commands received from the vehicle in front are no longer appropriate for the following vehicle, there's nothing to fall back on other than the coffee-sipping driver.
What's being demoed here is essentially the easy part of the system. The difficult part will be building the automation required to safely stop a car in an emergency situation.
Thinking about it, with our current level of technology, this kind of system would be an ideal way to introduce automation into regular road cars. You probably wouldn't trust the system to do all of your driving for you, so you'd have platoons headed by a human driver, but it's probably sufficient to stop you safely at the side of the road in an emergency such as this.
Then, once greater automation becomes practical, the software in existing cars can be updated to take advantage of it.
If I remember correctly, 4C is the point where water is at its densest. Below that temperature, water starts to expand again as the molecules begin to arrange themselves in an ice-like formation. It's due to the fact that the temperature of a substance is never absolutely uniform, with some parts being hotter and others cooler. It's the same reason that you get steam coming off a hot cup of water that is nevertheless below 100C.
The other factor is that most people in the UK use summer tyres all year round, which don't provide the same level of grip at 4C that they do at higher temperatures.
The only crash I've ever had was due to an oil spill, which I hit at night and couldn't see. I've also driven on roads where the road surface suddenly deteriorated and grip reduced drastically, causing me to skid. I'm not sure if these count as 'human error' or not. If I drove in anticipation of these conditions all the time, I'd never get anywhere.
The protocol for leaving the platoon and returning manual control to the driver is going to be the most difficult thing to solve I think, particularly where it occurs in a emergency situation. A blowout on the motorway is dangerous enough, but a blowout on the motorway where control of a car is suddenly returned to a driver in the middle of drinking a coffee and reading a newspaper could be disastrous.
Only if the added utility is insufficient to outweigh the potential risk. Assuming your phone has a remote wipe feature, and the other security features on the phone buy you enough time to use it, then having your data in the cloud is useful because you haven't lost any data, only the physical phone.
I've had my mobile number on my Facebook profile for a couple of years now. I've never had a single call from anybody who could have conceivably bought my number from Facebook. Not a single one.
Likewise my home address. I get a bit of snail mail spam, but it's all either hand delivered, addressed to 'The Occupier', or addressed to previous occupants of my flat.
I don't see any issue here.
Maybe it helps that I never, ever use apps on Facebook. I just use it for communicating with people that I know in real life.
Slashdot Mirror
If they oppress anyone, they oppress men. It all depends on how you'd answer the question, "Do you feel that men-only gyms oppress women?"
And, of course, whether there are many more of one kind than the other. Male-only swimming pools in Saudi Arabia (of which there are many) could be said to oppress women there because of the almost total lack of female-only or mixed-gender pools.
Given that many common diseases are spread through the mouth and nose, some kind of facial covering does make some hygienic sense. And Muslims take hygiene very seriously, even if much of what they do is based on ritual rather than actual hygiene.
You also have to take into account that, when your society is based on the culture of desert-inhabiting tribes, some kind of full-body covering, including facial covering, is almost inevitable.
How will the US pay for this assistance? By borrowing a few more billion dollars from China?
As far as I can tell Google have never said anything about it potentially being mandatory in the future. That's just something some blogger wrote.
And it's no more true that this might be mandatory in the future now than it was, say, two years ago. It might also be the case that Google might require fingerprints and an iris scan to log in to Gmail in the future (true both before or after any announcement of it being an optional feature).
It's not a good reason to get your panties in a bunch now about something that might never happen.
Funny, because I would be all over Palm's phones if only they'd release a model with a virtual keyboard. A keyboard that I can't fit at least six fingers on at a time is worthless to me, and I haven't found a single phone-sized Qwerty keyboard that could match the speed and ease of use of the iPhone virtual keyboard.
I agree with your final point though, and I hope that HP makes a success of WebOS. Much as I love Android, I worry that it will eventually turn into the Windows of the phone/tablet world without some decent competition.
That depends how far you're willing to stretch the definition of 'Android tablet'. If you mean it has a tablet form factor, and Android is in there somewhere, then there are loads of them, but that's not a meaningful statistic for anybody other than Android fanboys that want to tout figures.
What matters is the ecosystem, and realistically that means the Android Marketplace being pre-installed on the device. Without it, Google isn't making any money, and developers will have a hard time selling their software for the platform.
...and proponents of the Android platform would be wise to pretend they don't exist, as they give Android a bad name. Better to highlight the quality devices once the appear, that run Android Marketplace and actually contribute something back to the ecosystem.
How are you defining 'solid'? By the construction itself and the materials used, or its ability to withstand misuse?
If it's the former, I don't think you can get more solid than the glass and metal construction of the iPhone 4. Just about every other phone feels flimsy and flexible by comparison.
On the other hand, that construction means that it's not built to withstand shocks. The lack of solidity in the plastic of other phones gives them an added degree of shock absorbance that means that they're more likely to survive a fall than an iPhone 4.
Personally I would go with the first definition, and say that the iPhone 4 is the most solidly built phone out there. But that's not necessarily a good thing.
Up-to-the-minute news isn't necessarily valuable to everyone. A lot of the time it's utterly devoid of information because the headline has been pushed out before anybody has had a chance to establish the facts. Other times it doesn't really matter if the news reaches you today, tomorrow or the next day. Slashdot isn't anywhere near up-to-the-minute, for example. And depending on how you organise your time, having news come out in dribs and drabs isn't necessarily useful.
That said, newspapers have to come to terms with the fact that they're not the source of breaking news for anybody other than the elderly. Where they need to shine is in quality in-depth coverage, comment and opinion. This is true of traditional newspapers as well as ventures such as The Daily.
I actually feel the same way about 24 hour TV news channels, especially the BBC News channel. They try to offer constant rolling news coverage, and it's painful to watch. The newsreaders stammer through items utterly devoid of information, repeat themselves every 15 minutes, and don't really offer anything that isn't on offer on the 1, 6 and 10pm bulletins. It's a tragedy because the channel could be put to such better use if it had scheduled, in-depth programmes, and all the up-to-date stuff was just bumped off to the website.
The thing that most people are missing is that The Daily is cheap. $3.96 a month is less than the cost of a large cup of takeaway coffee. At that price, it doesn't need to be spectacularly better than the free content on the internet, it just needs to be slightly better for it to be appealing.
Compare that to the cost of a Times subscription on a UK Kindle, which costs £9.99 a month, and that's still less than half the cost of a dead tree, postal subscription. And these papers typically cost per daily issue what The Daily costs per week.
I still see 'app' as an abbreviation of 'application' - wouldn't 'applet' be a more appropriate word for a tiny application? Or does that already have too specific a meaning?
No smartphone should be without 3G, sure, but the point is that Google is missing out on marketshare on a whole class of devices that aren't smartphones.
iPod Touches are cheaper than the equivalent smartphone, and can be obtained without a contract even in markets like the US where it's nigh on impossible to get a SIM-free smartphone. If Android was available on this class of devices then it would open up a whole new market that at the moment is in Apple's hands. Google needs market share to attract developers to Android and bring revenue back, and right now it's given up an entire market on a technicality (while allowing iOS's market share in that sector a free reign). It's utterly idiotic.
You kid, but the only way they know that the kg reference is getting 'lighter' is by comparing it to the copies handed out to countries' standards agencies. These copies are handled more often than the reference, so it's entirety possible that they have gained mass, and that the reference hasn't changed.
They might be able to remove an app from your phone, but they can't remove the backup you made to your PC.
Microsoft is, I think, implementing the standard (slowly) rather than defining it. And I'd argue that the same is true of Mozilla and Opera to some extent.
It seems to me that it's Webkit that's pushing the standard, with Apple and Google as the major contributors but with a whole load of other companies along for the ride. The Webkit project is becoming a de-facto standards body with a members list that includes every smartphone platform builder except Microsoft.
I agree that there's too much whitespace in the area around the summary. I vehemently disagree that there's too much whitespace in the comments area - I think it's just about perfect.
I'm not sure what you mean by low contrast text on white. I'm seeing the same black sans-serif font on the same white background that I see on every other website.
I'm wondering if it's been quietly fixed since I posted last, actually. It's now sitting at 4.8% utilisation, although it jumps up whenever I interact with the page.
Latest Chrome on OS X here, and Chrome is sitting at >80% CPU utilisation with only this page open.
What is it even doing!?
I don't think they ever actually started putting passport applicants on the system. It was meant to start in 2008, but the date got pushed back to 2011/2012, so the system was scrapped before it started.
Airside airport workers were the only people ever to be added to the system against their will, I think. Foreign nationals were also added, as a condition of being allowed to live in the country.
I said it would be difficult to solve, not that I was proposing a solution.
My point is that as far as I can tell from the article, there's no intelligence built into the system that's been demoed, aside from the human driver of the lead vehicle. Once you get into a situation where the commands received from the vehicle in front are no longer appropriate for the following vehicle, there's nothing to fall back on other than the coffee-sipping driver.
What's being demoed here is essentially the easy part of the system. The difficult part will be building the automation required to safely stop a car in an emergency situation.
Thinking about it, with our current level of technology, this kind of system would be an ideal way to introduce automation into regular road cars. You probably wouldn't trust the system to do all of your driving for you, so you'd have platoons headed by a human driver, but it's probably sufficient to stop you safely at the side of the road in an emergency such as this.
Then, once greater automation becomes practical, the software in existing cars can be updated to take advantage of it.
If I remember correctly, 4C is the point where water is at its densest. Below that temperature, water starts to expand again as the molecules begin to arrange themselves in an ice-like formation. It's due to the fact that the temperature of a substance is never absolutely uniform, with some parts being hotter and others cooler. It's the same reason that you get steam coming off a hot cup of water that is nevertheless below 100C.
The other factor is that most people in the UK use summer tyres all year round, which don't provide the same level of grip at 4C that they do at higher temperatures.
The only crash I've ever had was due to an oil spill, which I hit at night and couldn't see. I've also driven on roads where the road surface suddenly deteriorated and grip reduced drastically, causing me to skid. I'm not sure if these count as 'human error' or not. If I drove in anticipation of these conditions all the time, I'd never get anywhere.
The protocol for leaving the platoon and returning manual control to the driver is going to be the most difficult thing to solve I think, particularly where it occurs in a emergency situation. A blowout on the motorway is dangerous enough, but a blowout on the motorway where control of a car is suddenly returned to a driver in the middle of drinking a coffee and reading a newspaper could be disastrous.
It looks like the US is planning on doing something similar as well.
Only if the added utility is insufficient to outweigh the potential risk. Assuming your phone has a remote wipe feature, and the other security features on the phone buy you enough time to use it, then having your data in the cloud is useful because you haven't lost any data, only the physical phone.
I've had my mobile number on my Facebook profile for a couple of years now. I've never had a single call from anybody who could have conceivably bought my number from Facebook. Not a single one.
Likewise my home address. I get a bit of snail mail spam, but it's all either hand delivered, addressed to 'The Occupier', or addressed to previous occupants of my flat.
I don't see any issue here.
Maybe it helps that I never, ever use apps on Facebook. I just use it for communicating with people that I know in real life.