Sorry, but with modern US politics in the state it is in, I really can't tell if you're serious or not. If this is satire it is rather poor quality. If this is a representative opinion of part of the US electorate I think it is time to do a really thorough check of the drinking water. There seems to be a lot of lead in it.
Exactly which type of device or devices do you propose to use for your test, and assuming they are safe, how do you know the other gazilion devices out there are safe as well?
Exactly which type of plane or planes do you propose to use for your test, and assuming they are safe, how do you know the other types planes out there are safe as well?
1. Personal electronics are safe, this is just BS.
2. Personal electronics are not safe, thus if a terrorist wants to crash a plane, all they need to do is use an iPad.
How about 3. The safety is unknown, and is utterly impractical to determine for all combinations of airplanes and electronic gadgets.
And your point 2 is of course nonsense: even if some electronic gadget would be known to interfere with the functioning of an airplane, it wouldn't mean that switching on the gadget in the plane would make that plane unavoidably fall out of the sky.
He was on record as saying he thought he could bankrupt the US by dragging us into a war in the Middle East. So no, he wasn't smart, not even a little bit.
Well, the price tag of the Afghan and Iraq war is pretty staggering, and the US is in dire need of money, so he got close, didn't he?
Yeah, I know, it's a question you just don't ask. I'll have to hand in my geek card. But still, I can't help but think of it. Could it be? I mean, is it possible? Could it be that Apple was right, and Flash is just too heavy for a handheld device?
There's no "rational" reason to consider prostitution wrong; isn't it by two consenting adults?
In most western societies prostitution is strongly associated with organized crime and most prostitutes are not really consenting, but are
forced into prostitution by poverty or other external reasons. Also, since sexuality is so strongly tied with emotions, I strongly suspect that the chances of mental problems are high. I'm not aware of hard evidence of this, though.
You're trying to apply modern logic and beliefs on a biblical stance (homosexuality) that's been around for thousands of years. It's your call if you choose to believe in God and the Bible but to make a subjective declaration in rebellion to what's been written for 2000 years is a bit foolhardy.
What do you mean, 'trying'? I am applying logic.
If you chose to base your opinion on a religious text rather than rational thought that's your call, but that doesn't change the conclusion of the logical reasoning. And no, using words like 'subjective', 'foolhardy', or 'rebellion' doesn't change that either.
The "I can't help it" excuse is no more valid for homosexuality than for alcoholism. There are plenty of people for both issues who admit problems and consciously struggle against it.
But there is no rational reason to consider homosexuality as a problem, whereas there are plenty of good reasons to consider alcoholism, violence, and some forms of pedophilia as a problem. Homosexuality doesn't harm anybody, while the others actively harm the person itself and/or other people. For the same reason bigotry is also a problem, but unfortunately very few people admit the problem and consciously struggle against it.
They require a card, but the card that can be an iTunes gift card, which you can get for cash at a number of locations.
Eh? How can you say something like this? Apple hasn't even announced anything, all we know is that Apple wants to hire engineers with experience in NFC. They may not even want to use it for payment, but for something else entirely. And even if this is about payment, why would it have to be coupled with Apple's payment account?
Or perhaps Apple is only hiring these people to catch up with other phones in the Japanese market. NFC phones are so popular in Japan that vendors of current iPhones sometimes put a sticker with a dumb NFC chip on it to close the gap at least a little. For the real thing see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaifu-Keitai. The article lists about 40 different of applications for NFC (specifically: Sony's FeliCa system): loyalty cards, event and airplane tickets, public transport tickets, and yes, electronic money.
Also, electronic money is not necessarily coupled with a credit card or a bank account. I've used the (dumb, stand-alone) Suica card in Tokyo, and it's just a card with some money on it. You charge it at one of the many vending machines in the Tokyo metro (I used cash money), and then you pay your trips with the card. You can also use it to buy drinks and snacks from vending machines or shops in the metro stations, but it's not a nation-wide payment card.
Bears don't believe drawing a picture of them is picking a fight.
Which only proves that Muslims aren't bears. No more, no less.
Hey, we all have our hot buttons. I even know a rather famous tribe somewhere on this globe that has members that consider it a provocation when people burn a piece of cloth. But only if the cloth is painted in a particular pattern with red stripes and a blue decorated rectangle. Most other patterns are fine. Just as with the Muslims, only a few hotheads in this tribe get really angry, but it's still a remarkable phenomena.
As always, there are other people of this tribe that consider that anger silly and stupid, but hey, there are always some hotheads. It also doesn't help when someone stokes the fires by describing the so-called provocation in the most exaggerated possible terms. Despicable, I know, but I'm afraid these people exist, both in Muslim countries and with that famous tribe.
If they were armed they would have shot the person before he killed anyone so no one in the crowd exercised their right to carry a PDW, including the security people. Arizona laws allowing people to carry weapons did not achieve their objective but the solution is simple - make it mandatory for everyone in Arizona to carry firearms!
If I had mod points I would mod this as 'Funny'. Still,
I really think you should clearly label this as sarcasm. Some poor soul might think you are serious.
Socially speaking, the project has been a great failure. But technologically, it has left a huge
impact on portable devices everywhere. As for the former, the project probably forgot that
"Charity begins at Home". Refusing to sell full-price to americans wanting them shows a complete
lack of understanding of how economies of scale & price segmentation would've worked out.
I'm not going to mourn the failure of Negroponte, but I'll just give the technical folks at
OLPC a big thumbs-up.
I think it is unfair to declare this project a great failure, even in the social area. The project hasn't ended yet, and considering the highly ambitious goal they have set themselves, it is no wonder it takes them time to reach it. But I agree that the technology spin-offs of the project are remarkable too, although I think you should give Negroponte some credit for that part too.
I'm not so sure mass-selling the original OLPC on other markets would have been a good idea. The support organization to do that properly would have been costly, and a distraction from the real goals of the project. Perhaps they could have created or partnered with a commercial enterprise that would license the design to sell to consumers, but getting the legalities of such a deal right would have been tricky. And the first OLPC design was really just a beta anyway, if that.
Seems like a terribly bad idea to me. (1) It corrupts the US election process, because that's not how it was supposed to work. (2) It legitimizes non-democratic measures to counter this. (3) It increases the odds that Sara Palin becomes President. On the plus side, it does show a rather touching confidence in the common sense of the US voter (that, sadly, I cannot share).
As a european my most direct concern is (3), because having an airhead as the leader of a large and powerful nation is bad for the whole world, but (1) and (2) are painful to watch too. To use a car analogy: of course my neighbor is free to use a sledgehammer on his own car, but it's still painful to watch.
Very similar arguments have been leveled against corporate-rationed health care. Making health care a free-market jungle doesn't sound like the best possible system to me either.
So if you slap on the 'parody' label everything is allowed? Someone copies Ubuntu, calls it Cowbuntu, prints a box with Linus Torvalds and Mark Shuttleworth as cows on it, and sells it for a low, low, 699$. And of course no sources. "It was just a parody, your honor. Not providing the sources is part of that. It mocks the crypto-socialist tendencies of the open-source community."
How does anyone know they're authentic? Why isn't the US government simply stating that none of them are real?
There are simply too many of them to be easily faked in a convincing way. Even the ones that have been made public. And of course the US government cannot reasonably claim at the same time that they are fake and that they are endangering US interests. (Not that governments are always reasonable in matters like this.)
Lastly, why does the government not simply send a lot of bogus traffic around, as sort of a reverse "I am Spartacus!" maneuver, in which there are whole messages which are essentially nulls, burying the real messages in a sea of BS?
I'm not entirely sure what you propose, but I don't see how this could work. The leaked set of messages is fixed, so adding nonsense to the set won't work.
The Pakistani secret service has planted negative stories about India in Pakistani newspapers supposedly based on leaked cables. That was quickly debunked, though, again because the supposed quotes were not found in the real leaked messages. I don't see how anyone else could be more effective with such a tactic.
Airing a politician's dirty laundry is one thing, but releasing documents that may have names of people that may be endangered unawares should be handled with some discretion.
Can you give any example of someone who has been endangered by this? As far as I can tell most of the leaks have been pretty tame, and only confirm what everyone more-or-less knew anyway. I'm not saying it is not possible, but thus far I haven't heard of any example that comes even close.
And it's not a "theory", it's fact - Economists have studied exactly these effects for decades.
Hah! As if all economists agree on their theories. For any economist an equal and opposite economist can be found. The only facts economists produce are statistics, and you know what they say about statistics. Anything economists produce beyond that is theory, and hard to verify theory at that.
We were hoping for a Theodore Roosevelt. We got a Bush with a brain and a tan.
Excuse me for mingling in this all-american and highly traditional pie fight, but I think you were hoping for someone with a magic bullet or even better a magic wand. Americans always do, and then they get disappointed, and when the mid-terms are there, they try to see if the other side has the magic wand. (Hint: nope.)
The truth is that the US is a large country with a complicated demographic, a complicated economy, voters that vote with their underbelly rather than their brains, (and hence voters that listen to the loudmouths rather than the nuanced politicians), with a rather bad case of corruption (or 'lobbying', as you call the most prevalent case), and a degenerated media system.
In these circumstances even the best president ever would have a hard time making an impact.
Curing all this takes time, a lot of time: you have to start at the local level, breed sanity there, convince people that it works, try to get an entire state converted, try to get a few more states converted. Then, and only then, you could even try to think of steering the national politics in a saner direction.
Good luck. I hope you make it, but you'll definitely need all the luck you can get.
Can someone please explain to me why it will take Adobe two weeks to get a patch out?
They need to come up with a reliable way to fix this, make absolutely sure it actually fixes the problem, and then make sure the patch doesn't cause crashes on any of the OS variants out there. Otherwise the chaos would be worse. Plus, you don't give a optimistic estimate right at the start.
(Look how Chile handled that for the mining disaster. They started with a safe estimate, and got praised for beating their own deadline. Imagine the reactions if they had been too optimistic in their original estimate.)
[tinfoilhat]
The REAL reason Apple removed this from the App Store? You can use it to install Windows 3.1 or even... Windows95!
Who needs Windows 7 Phone when you can rock Windows 3.1 on your iPhone?!
[/tinfoilhat]
I know that, unlike lots of other people here with daft theories, you're joking, but the real reason may be a big disappointment for Apple bashers.
I read on one of the Apple rumor websites that the version in the app store came with some abandonware. In particular: Ms Packman. If that is true, it is no wonder that Apple pulled this faster than you can say 'lawsuit'. It may also mean that the App will reappear in somewhat reduced form.
Brilliant!! And to think that nobody who ever was thirsty and living near the sea thought of that! Let's hope the rest of the world reads Slashdot, because there sure are some world-changing insights on it now and then.
Seriously: do the math. How many pans do you need to generate a liter per day? How much time does it take per pan to remove the salt, harvest the water, and insert new water? How much area does all this need?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but with modern US politics in the state it is in, I really can't tell if you're serious or not. If this is satire it is rather poor quality. If this is a representative opinion of part of the US electorate I think it is time to do a really thorough check of the drinking water. There seems to be a lot of lead in it.
Exactly which type of device or devices do you propose to use for your test, and assuming they are safe, how do you know the other gazilion devices out there are safe as well?
Exactly which type of plane or planes do you propose to use for your test, and assuming they are safe, how do you know the other types planes out there are safe as well?
1. Personal electronics are safe, this is just BS. 2. Personal electronics are not safe, thus if a terrorist wants to crash a plane, all they need to do is use an iPad.
How about
3. The safety is unknown, and is utterly impractical to determine for all combinations of airplanes and electronic gadgets.
And your point 2 is of course nonsense: even if some electronic gadget would be known to interfere with the functioning of an airplane, it wouldn't mean that switching on the gadget in the plane would make that plane unavoidably fall out of the sky.
He was on record as saying he thought he could bankrupt the US by dragging us into a war in the Middle East. So no, he wasn't smart, not even a little bit.
Well, the price tag of the Afghan and Iraq war is pretty staggering, and the US is in dire need of money, so he got close, didn't he?
Yeah, I know, it's a question you just don't ask. I'll have to hand in my geek card. But still, I can't help but think of it. Could it be? I mean, is it possible? Could it be that Apple was right, and Flash is just too heavy for a handheld device?
There's no "rational" reason to consider prostitution wrong; isn't it by two consenting adults?
In most western societies prostitution is strongly associated with organized crime and most prostitutes are not really consenting, but are forced into prostitution by poverty or other external reasons. Also, since sexuality is so strongly tied with emotions, I strongly suspect that the chances of mental problems are high. I'm not aware of hard evidence of this, though.
You're trying to apply modern logic and beliefs on a biblical stance (homosexuality) that's been around for thousands of years. It's your call if you choose to believe in God and the Bible but to make a subjective declaration in rebellion to what's been written for 2000 years is a bit foolhardy.
What do you mean, 'trying'? I am applying logic.
If you chose to base your opinion on a religious text rather than rational thought that's your call, but that doesn't change the conclusion of the logical reasoning. And no, using words like 'subjective', 'foolhardy', or 'rebellion' doesn't change that either.
The "I can't help it" excuse is no more valid for homosexuality than for alcoholism. There are plenty of people for both issues who admit problems and consciously struggle against it.
But there is no rational reason to consider homosexuality as a problem, whereas there are plenty of good reasons to consider alcoholism, violence, and some forms of pedophilia as a problem. Homosexuality doesn't harm anybody, while the others actively harm the person itself and/or other people. For the same reason bigotry is also a problem, but unfortunately very few people admit the problem and consciously struggle against it.
The fact that the protection doesn't stop 100% of malicious apps doesn't mean it is not effective.
They require a card, but the card that can be an iTunes gift card, which you can get for cash at a number of locations.
Eh? How can you say something like this? Apple hasn't even announced anything, all we know is that Apple wants to hire engineers with experience in NFC. They may not even want to use it for payment, but for something else entirely. And even if this is about payment, why would it have to be coupled with Apple's payment account?
Or perhaps Apple is only hiring these people to catch up with other phones in the Japanese market. NFC phones are so popular in Japan that vendors of current iPhones sometimes put a sticker with a dumb NFC chip on it to close the gap at least a little. For the real thing see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaifu-Keitai. The article lists about 40 different of applications for NFC (specifically: Sony's FeliCa system): loyalty cards, event and airplane tickets, public transport tickets, and yes, electronic money.
Also, electronic money is not necessarily coupled with a credit card or a bank account. I've used the (dumb, stand-alone) Suica card in Tokyo, and it's just a card with some money on it. You charge it at one of the many vending machines in the Tokyo metro (I used cash money), and then you pay your trips with the card. You can also use it to buy drinks and snacks from vending machines or shops in the metro stations, but it's not a nation-wide payment card.
Bears don't believe drawing a picture of them is picking a fight.
Which only proves that Muslims aren't bears. No more, no less.
Hey, we all have our hot buttons. I even know a rather famous tribe somewhere on this globe that has members that consider it a provocation when people burn a piece of cloth. But only if the cloth is painted in a particular pattern with red stripes and a blue decorated rectangle. Most other patterns are fine. Just as with the Muslims, only a few hotheads in this tribe get really angry, but it's still a remarkable phenomena.
As always, there are other people of this tribe that consider that anger silly and stupid, but hey, there are always some hotheads. It also doesn't help when someone stokes the fires by describing the so-called provocation in the most exaggerated possible terms. Despicable, I know, but I'm afraid these people exist, both in Muslim countries and with that famous tribe.
If they were armed they would have shot the person before he killed anyone so no one in the crowd exercised their right to carry a PDW, including the security people. Arizona laws allowing people to carry weapons did not achieve their objective but the solution is simple - make it mandatory for everyone in Arizona to carry firearms!
If I had mod points I would mod this as 'Funny'. Still, I really think you should clearly label this as sarcasm. Some poor soul might think you are serious.
Socially speaking, the project has been a great failure. But technologically, it has left a huge impact on portable devices everywhere. As for the former, the project probably forgot that "Charity begins at Home". Refusing to sell full-price to americans wanting them shows a complete lack of understanding of how economies of scale & price segmentation would've worked out. I'm not going to mourn the failure of Negroponte, but I'll just give the technical folks at OLPC a big thumbs-up.
I think it is unfair to declare this project a great failure, even in the social area. The project hasn't ended yet, and considering the highly ambitious goal they have set themselves, it is no wonder it takes them time to reach it. But I agree that the technology spin-offs of the project are remarkable too, although I think you should give Negroponte some credit for that part too.
I'm not so sure mass-selling the original OLPC on other markets would have been a good idea. The support organization to do that properly would have been costly, and a distraction from the real goals of the project. Perhaps they could have created or partnered with a commercial enterprise that would license the design to sell to consumers, but getting the legalities of such a deal right would have been tricky. And the first OLPC design was really just a beta anyway, if that.
Seems like a terribly bad idea to me. (1) It corrupts the US election process, because that's not how it was supposed to work. (2) It legitimizes non-democratic measures to counter this. (3) It increases the odds that Sara Palin becomes President. On the plus side, it does show a rather touching confidence in the common sense of the US voter (that, sadly, I cannot share).
As a european my most direct concern is (3), because having an airhead as the leader of a large and powerful nation is bad for the whole world, but (1) and (2) are painful to watch too. To use a car analogy: of course my neighbor is free to use a sledgehammer on his own car, but it's still painful to watch.
Very similar arguments have been leveled against corporate-rationed health care. Making health care a free-market jungle doesn't sound like the best possible system to me either.
So you claim that doll is a clever parody? Really?
So if you slap on the 'parody' label everything is allowed? Someone copies Ubuntu, calls it Cowbuntu, prints a box with Linus Torvalds and Mark Shuttleworth as cows on it, and sells it for a low, low, 699$. And of course no sources. "It was just a parody, your honor. Not providing the sources is part of that. It mocks the crypto-socialist tendencies of the open-source community."
How does anyone know they're authentic? Why isn't the US government simply stating that none of them are real?
There are simply too many of them to be easily faked in a convincing way. Even the ones that have been made public. And of course the US government cannot reasonably claim at the same time that they are fake and that they are endangering US interests. (Not that governments are always reasonable in matters like this.)
Lastly, why does the government not simply send a lot of bogus traffic around, as sort of a reverse "I am Spartacus!" maneuver, in which there are whole messages which are essentially nulls, burying the real messages in a sea of BS?
I'm not entirely sure what you propose, but I don't see how this could work. The leaked set of messages is fixed, so adding nonsense to the set won't work. The Pakistani secret service has planted negative stories about India in Pakistani newspapers supposedly based on leaked cables. That was quickly debunked, though, again because the supposed quotes were not found in the real leaked messages. I don't see how anyone else could be more effective with such a tactic.
Airing a politician's dirty laundry is one thing, but releasing documents that may have names of people that may be endangered unawares should be handled with some discretion.
Can you give any example of someone who has been endangered by this? As far as I can tell most of the leaks have been pretty tame, and only confirm what everyone more-or-less knew anyway. I'm not saying it is not possible, but thus far I haven't heard of any example that comes even close.
And it's not a "theory", it's fact - Economists have studied exactly these effects for decades.
Hah! As if all economists agree on their theories. For any economist an equal and opposite economist can be found. The only facts economists produce are statistics, and you know what they say about statistics. Anything economists produce beyond that is theory, and hard to verify theory at that.
We were hoping for a Theodore Roosevelt. We got a Bush with a brain and a tan.
Excuse me for mingling in this all-american and highly traditional pie fight, but I think you were hoping for someone with a magic bullet or even better a magic wand. Americans always do, and then they get disappointed, and when the mid-terms are there, they try to see if the other side has the magic wand. (Hint: nope.)
The truth is that the US is a large country with a complicated demographic, a complicated economy, voters that vote with their underbelly rather than their brains, (and hence voters that listen to the loudmouths rather than the nuanced politicians), with a rather bad case of corruption (or 'lobbying', as you call the most prevalent case), and a degenerated media system.
In these circumstances even the best president ever would have a hard time making an impact.
Curing all this takes time, a lot of time: you have to start at the local level, breed sanity there, convince people that it works, try to get an entire state converted, try to get a few more states converted. Then, and only then, you could even try to think of steering the national politics in a saner direction.
Good luck. I hope you make it, but you'll definitely need all the luck you can get.
All of which would take less than 24 hours if they actually gave a shit. The shills will say otherwise but they're lying as usual.
How can you possibly know? Not every software bug is fixable in 24 hours. In fact, planning bug fixing is notoriously difficult.
Can someone please explain to me why it will take Adobe two weeks to get a patch out?
They need to come up with a reliable way to fix this, make absolutely sure it actually fixes the problem, and then make sure the patch doesn't cause crashes on any of the OS variants out there. Otherwise the chaos would be worse. Plus, you don't give a optimistic estimate right at the start.
(Look how Chile handled that for the mining disaster. They started with a safe estimate, and got praised for beating their own deadline. Imagine the reactions if they had been too optimistic in their original estimate.)
[tinfoilhat] The REAL reason Apple removed this from the App Store? You can use it to install Windows 3.1 or even... Windows95!
Who needs Windows 7 Phone when you can rock Windows 3.1 on your iPhone?! [/tinfoilhat]
I know that, unlike lots of other people here with daft theories, you're joking, but the real reason may be a big disappointment for Apple bashers.
I read on one of the Apple rumor websites that the version in the app store came with some abandonware. In particular: Ms Packman. If that is true, it is no wonder that Apple pulled this faster than you can say 'lawsuit'. It may also mean that the App will reappear in somewhat reduced form.
Brilliant!! And to think that nobody who ever was thirsty and living near the sea thought of that! Let's hope the rest of the world reads Slashdot, because there sure are some world-changing insights on it now and then.
Seriously: do the math. How many pans do you need to generate a liter per day? How much time does it take per pan to remove the salt, harvest the water, and insert new water? How much area does all this need?
Perhaps he was a lunatic, but the fact that his quote applies to mainstream Christianity or their god is not proof of that.