I don't know where this myth comes from, but the 3G ones DO have a true GPS. Perhaps people think that 'assisted GPS' means 'fake GPS'. Wrong. It just means that the real GPS gets some help from the cellular network to quickly get a first position fix. After that it functions like any other GPS, and without that help it just takes a little longer to get the fix.
I bought it as an e-reader. With its large screen it can very nicely handle PDF scientific papers and books, although I admit the supply of scientific e-books is a bit thin at the moment.
There is a Kindle with the same screen size, but it is almost as expensive, and the iPad has a much faster screen. Plus I know and like the iPod touch, the Kindle is hard to buy here in the Netherlands, and I refuse to use the Kindle book store because their ebooks are just as expensive as the paper ones. Then again, the Apple bookstore in the Netherlands has exactly zero modern titles...
Laptops are useless as e-reader because you cannot use them with the screen in portrait position.
Everything else is icing on the cake, although it is a pretty thick layer. Email, simple gaming, and web browsing are all very nice. One day I may use it as a moving map (I have one with a GPS), and there are a couple of other neat special-purpose apps I use now and then. The paint and draw apps I've bought are still a bit cumbersome, but they are getting better and better. Oh, and I use it as a photo viewer. I think I've watched one or two of videos on it, but that's it.
As I understand it, interpreters are allowed if the code is wholly contained in the app and it doesn't download code from elsewhere. This also allows game engines such as Unreal and Unity.
Correct. That's why Frotz for the iPhone at a certain moment removed the download option, but instead came with a raft-load of adventures pre-installed.
As far as I know, the new rules that were introduced a few weeks ago would allow the download option again.
The expertise clearly exists to do it properly, the only explanation I can see is intentional sabotage of the voting process.
How about plain old money? You need a lot of voting machines to handle the entire voting population, and purpose-designed machines are expensive, even if they are modified PCs (as some of them seem to be). Not that all vendors are saints...
Considering the costs, I can see the great attraction of internet voting for the organizers: you only need central servers (that you may even hire from Amazon or something), all other hardware is owned by the voter, and you don't even need personnel. I therefore have some sympathy for government people that tried anyway despite the opposition of experts, and their questions to the experts were also understandable, but I hope they have learned their lesson now.
Or like radio, yeah, remember how TV killed radio? Or the VCR, remember how that killed the cinema?
Meh. Sure, the market for paper books might shrink back from its peak, but it's not disappearing, and certainly not overnight.
In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, What a maroon!
Then again, analog cameras are almost extinct, and so are typewriters. Digital cameras and word processors have been mocked just
as much in their early days, and were rejected just as much for sentimental reasons. Predictions are difficult, especially about the future.
Lots of things that are smart investments if you're building a home from scratch are not so great if you're talking about replacing a working system. Almost nobody will pay more for a house just because it has better efficiency that will save $1000/year on utility bills, so the payback horizon is often much longer than people intend to own the house for.
So, you're saying that Obama shouldn't have had these panels installed because he will have moved out before they have paid themselves back, and it doesn't increase the sales price of the White House? It makes a weird kind of sense, actually.
Well, this goes to show how much of electronics recycling is a gimmick and publicity stunt.
Actually, it shows that current electronics recycling is not a gimmick, at least in Japan.
The entire infrastructure apparently is already in place, is functioning, and is economical enough to survive.
There is more to recycling than just rare metals.
Dems run around throwing money at Wind (meh) and Solar PV (a waste of money).
This is what I always admire about the political climate in the US. There is always someone willing to come up with a
well-considered, polite, nuanced, and rational treatise of the pro's and con's of a problem, even for a complicated problem such as alternative energy.
No wonder that the US is universally considered the best-functioning democracy in the world.
Of course it does, or flightradar24. Congratulations, you're the first one to think this clearly, and you're only number one-hundred-something to respond.
Not everything that is illegal is criminal. Speeding or running a red light, for example. And trespassing on US territory.
(Cue the 'Actually, in my state/these circumstances...')
Sure, but that doesn't answer the original question: how well can it handle the unexpected? I also have to wonder why there are such long pauses between the moves. I suspect it is to do motion planning, but in any case these pauses are not there because the programmers wanted to have them. At least not for this long.
Nevertheless, this is just demo software on an experimental platform, and this looks like a very impressive one. This robot is no longer laughably clumsy; it's just clumsy, and in the next one or two iterations it may even reach the stage where it could be used in production work. Since robotics is hard, that's very impressive.
So you are saying that the chief executive officer, constitutionally, the top law enforcement officer of the land, going into a court of law and not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, doesn't somehow abuse the public trust or interests?
Since these questions were about about a sexual affair that was not any business to anyone but the three people involved, I would say that yes, this isn't a very serious abuse of public trust or interests.
Sure, Bill Clinton lied under oath, but surely you can't argue that this comes even close in seriousness to the Watergate or Plame scandals, or the lies that led to the second Iraq war?
That has nothing to do with political affiliation, and everything to do with the circumstances. A manufactured scandal and
a lawsuit that is intended to damage is not the same as blatant abuse of power for murky personal gain.
I don't understand that reasoning either. If someone claims Fox is doing immoral reporting, they are only making that particular claim. They do not make any claims, positive or negative, about any other news sources, or anything else at all.
Too many people spending too much time watching the Fox Propaganda Network
As opposed to the MSNBC lefty spin vortex?
I never understand this kind of reasoning. Apparently Fox News makes propaganda for the US Republican Party while claiming to be neutral. That seems to be established fact, because I have yet to see anyone deny it. Everyone also agrees that propaganda is bad, especially for a news channel. Then how does it make things any better that some major competitors are supposedly leaning to the left?
And yet, you have the freedom to say what I just quoted without being thrown in some secret prison.
No police state is ever absolute. Even in the former DDR (in my limited knowledge the freakiest control freaks yet) you were able to get away with some things.
The fact remains that for six years someone was threatened with prison (secret or not) for simply telling someone that he'd been asked questions by the FBI. Surely that is cause for worry? It makes it far too easy to abuse the system, and the US three-letter agencies do not exactly have a spotless record with respect to abuse of the system.
Of course you also have to wonder how many similar cases there are that are still under a gag order, and whether there are even worse ones.
It WAS and IS unjustified media fear mongering. They had everyone expecting another Spanish flu at least or perhaps a great plague level event.
Except that responsible media (including even/.) always indicated that the predictions had a wide margin of error. Of course if someone is looking for their daily dose of fear, there are always media that are happy to oblige.
In other words.....YAWN!
That's easy to say in hindsight, Mr Armchair Epidemiologist. Last year there was good reason to assume things could be far more serious.
There's also the awful "overrated" and "underrated" mods, which I don't think should exist.
I think they serve a purpose. I use `overrated' when a post is factually incorrect or boring (for example repeats a joke for the millionth time). I use `underrated' when a post has received unwarranted negative moderations but doesn't fit any of the other positive moderations very well.
Apple tries to ensure a little bit of quality mainly by charging developers to put their app in the app store. The review process screens out some, but mostly for other purposes. $100 a year discourages an immense amount of crap - just like spam would be reduced if there was some significant cost to send an e-mail.
The Android market requires a one-time $25 registration fee, so the difference isn't really that big.
Average people have never wanted to write their own programs for any other "computer they depend on." Why would a phone be different?
Disagree. Microsoft Access, Word, and Excel all offer programmability for the average people. And there sure are people using that programmability, and even depending on the resulting software. (Yeah, they all are bad for large programs, but this is not about large programs.) As long as the sandbox is solid enough, I don't see a reason to discourage people from writing their own programs for their phone. Why shouldn't Joe Average write a little program for his phone that counts who's ahead in beer rounds, or keeps track of the score for his local tennis tournament?
And personally I would be very curious to see what schoolgirls would come up with if writing their own software would ever become popular in those circles. I suspect it will be eye-searing pink, but probably also refreshingly different.
This is exactly the kind of content-free critique I was trying satirize, but it seems you're much better at it. In particular the 'Apple favors form over function' is classical, classical.
I'm not complaining about slashdot reporting stories... I'm saying that any Apple story - whether it be positive or negative - turns into people screaming their hatred for the company like it were a picture of Emmanuel Goldstein. In the ten years I've been visiting the site, I've seen this only happen to two companies: Microsoft and SCO.
And that's not even the worst:
The painful torture of logic reasoning: Apple are evil because they are arrogant because they don't admit there is a serious problem which is serious because at least ten bloggers have said there is a problem. Curating is evil because it takes away our freedom to download shoddy and dangerous apps but they should have blocked all those fart applications. Oh, and curating doesn't work because it doesn't block each and every app that Joe Blogger thinks shouldn't be in the store.
The armchair expertise: Gigahertz antenna design is a black art, but obviously Apple designers are far less competent than Joe Blogger. Apple could easily have foreseen each and every abuse of the store because, ehm, well, they just could. (Because Steve Jobs is god, perhaps?). Oh, and if they sell millions a week of something, and there is a shortage, that shortage is obviously artificial, because they should have known that they would sell millions. It is obviously only part of the hype they are creating.
The demand for a fix NOW, NOW, NOW: If Apple doesn't respond for a week, they obviously don't want to admit there is a problem, and they don't care, and they are incompetent, and they have really gone downhill and they only sell to sheeple in the first place. Oh and have I said already that I want a fix for this problem NOW, NOW, NOW?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know where this myth comes from, but the 3G ones DO have a true GPS. Perhaps people think that 'assisted GPS' means 'fake GPS'. Wrong. It just means that the real GPS gets some help from the cellular network to quickly get a first position fix. After that it functions like any other GPS, and without that help it just takes a little longer to get the fix.
I bought it as an e-reader. With its large screen it can very nicely handle PDF scientific papers and books, although I admit the supply of scientific e-books is a bit thin at the moment.
There is a Kindle with the same screen size, but it is almost as expensive, and the iPad has a much faster screen. Plus I know and like the iPod touch, the Kindle is hard to buy here in the Netherlands, and I refuse to use the Kindle book store because their ebooks are just as expensive as the paper ones. Then again, the Apple bookstore in the Netherlands has exactly zero modern titles... Laptops are useless as e-reader because you cannot use them with the screen in portrait position.
Everything else is icing on the cake, although it is a pretty thick layer. Email, simple gaming, and web browsing are all very nice. One day I may use it as a moving map (I have one with a GPS), and there are a couple of other neat special-purpose apps I use now and then. The paint and draw apps I've bought are still a bit cumbersome, but they are getting better and better. Oh, and I use it as a photo viewer. I think I've watched one or two of videos on it, but that's it.
As I understand it, interpreters are allowed if the code is wholly contained in the app and it doesn't download code from elsewhere. This also allows game engines such as Unreal and Unity.
Correct. That's why Frotz for the iPhone at a certain moment removed the download option, but instead came with a raft-load of adventures pre-installed.
As far as I know, the new rules that were introduced a few weeks ago would allow the download option again.
Or whistle their text into a modem.
The expertise clearly exists to do it properly, the only explanation I can see is intentional sabotage of the voting process.
How about plain old money? You need a lot of voting machines to handle the entire voting population, and purpose-designed machines are expensive, even if they are modified PCs (as some of them seem to be). Not that all vendors are saints...
Considering the costs, I can see the great attraction of internet voting for the organizers: you only need central servers (that you may even hire from Amazon or something), all other hardware is owned by the voter, and you don't even need personnel. I therefore have some sympathy for government people that tried anyway despite the opposition of experts, and their questions to the experts were also understandable, but I hope they have learned their lesson now.
Or like radio, yeah, remember how TV killed radio? Or the VCR, remember how that killed the cinema?
Meh. Sure, the market for paper books might shrink back from its peak, but it's not disappearing, and certainly not overnight.
In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, What a maroon!
Then again, analog cameras are almost extinct, and so are typewriters. Digital cameras and word processors have been mocked just as much in their early days, and were rejected just as much for sentimental reasons. Predictions are difficult, especially about the future.
Well, when you want short domain names you have to go to rather loony countries for them to not be taken yet.
I'm not sure if I'm arguing for or against your point here, but the .us domain is rather empty.
Lots of things that are smart investments if you're building a home from scratch are not so great if you're talking about replacing a working system. Almost nobody will pay more for a house just because it has better efficiency that will save $1000/year on utility bills, so the payback horizon is often much longer than people intend to own the house for.
So, you're saying that Obama shouldn't have had these panels installed because he will have moved out before they have paid themselves back, and it doesn't increase the sales price of the White House? It makes a weird kind of sense, actually.
Yeah, it does fit rather well, doesn't it? Except, who's Lin Tai Yu here?
You're right. Sorry for the mental agony that must have caused.
Well, this goes to show how much of electronics recycling is a gimmick and publicity stunt.
Actually, it shows that current electronics recycling is not a gimmick, at least in Japan. The entire infrastructure apparently is already in place, is functioning, and is economical enough to survive. There is more to recycling than just rare metals.
Dems run around throwing money at Wind (meh) and Solar PV (a waste of money).
This is what I always admire about the political climate in the US. There is always someone willing to come up with a well-considered, polite, nuanced, and rational treatise of the pro's and con's of a problem, even for a complicated problem such as alternative energy. No wonder that the US is universally considered the best-functioning democracy in the world.
Of course it does, or flightradar24. Congratulations, you're the first one to think this clearly, and you're only number one-hundred-something to respond.
Not everything that is illegal is criminal. Speeding or running a red light, for example. And trespassing on US territory. (Cue the 'Actually, in my state/these circumstances ...')
Sure, but that doesn't answer the original question: how well can it handle the unexpected? I also have to wonder why there are such long pauses between the moves. I suspect it is to do motion planning, but in any case these pauses are not there because the programmers wanted to have them. At least not for this long.
Nevertheless, this is just demo software on an experimental platform, and this looks like a very impressive one. This robot is no longer laughably clumsy; it's just clumsy, and in the next one or two iterations it may even reach the stage where it could be used in production work. Since robotics is hard, that's very impressive.
So you are saying that the chief executive officer, constitutionally, the top law enforcement officer of the land, going into a court of law and not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, doesn't somehow abuse the public trust or interests?
Since these questions were about about a sexual affair that was not any business to anyone but the three people involved, I would say that yes, this isn't a very serious abuse of public trust or interests. Sure, Bill Clinton lied under oath, but surely you can't argue that this comes even close in seriousness to the Watergate or Plame scandals, or the lies that led to the second Iraq war? That has nothing to do with political affiliation, and everything to do with the circumstances. A manufactured scandal and a lawsuit that is intended to damage is not the same as blatant abuse of power for murky personal gain.
I don't understand that reasoning either. If someone claims Fox is doing immoral reporting, they are only making that particular claim. They do not make any claims, positive or negative, about any other news sources, or anything else at all.
What offense are they committing?
Too many people spending too much time watching the Fox Propaganda Network As opposed to the MSNBC lefty spin vortex?
I never understand this kind of reasoning. Apparently Fox News makes propaganda for the US Republican Party while claiming to be neutral. That seems to be established fact, because I have yet to see anyone deny it. Everyone also agrees that propaganda is bad, especially for a news channel. Then how does it make things any better that some major competitors are supposedly leaning to the left?
And yet, you have the freedom to say what I just quoted without being thrown in some secret prison.
No police state is ever absolute. Even in the former DDR (in my limited knowledge the freakiest control freaks yet) you were able to get away with some things.
The fact remains that for six years someone was threatened with prison (secret or not) for simply telling someone that he'd been asked questions by the FBI. Surely that is cause for worry? It makes it far too easy to abuse the system, and the US three-letter agencies do not exactly have a spotless record with respect to abuse of the system.
Of course you also have to wonder how many similar cases there are that are still under a gag order, and whether there are even worse ones.
It WAS and IS unjustified media fear mongering. They had everyone expecting another Spanish flu at least or perhaps a great plague level event.
Except that responsible media (including even /.) always indicated that the predictions had a wide margin of error. Of course if someone is looking for their daily dose of fear, there are always media that are happy to oblige.
In other words.....YAWN!
That's easy to say in hindsight, Mr Armchair Epidemiologist. Last year there was good reason to assume things could be far more serious.
There's also the awful "overrated" and "underrated" mods, which I don't think should exist.
I think they serve a purpose. I use `overrated' when a post is factually incorrect or boring (for example repeats a joke for the millionth time). I use `underrated' when a post has received unwarranted negative moderations but doesn't fit any of the other positive moderations very well.
Apple tries to ensure a little bit of quality mainly by charging developers to put their app in the app store. The review process screens out some, but mostly for other purposes. $100 a year discourages an immense amount of crap - just like spam would be reduced if there was some significant cost to send an e-mail.
The Android market requires a one-time $25 registration fee, so the difference isn't really that big.
Average people have never wanted to write their own programs for any other "computer they depend on." Why would a phone be different?
Disagree. Microsoft Access, Word, and Excel all offer programmability for the average people. And there sure are people using that programmability, and even depending on the resulting software. (Yeah, they all are bad for large programs, but this is not about large programs.) As long as the sandbox is solid enough, I don't see a reason to discourage people from writing their own programs for their phone. Why shouldn't Joe Average write a little program for his phone that counts who's ahead in beer rounds, or keeps track of the score for his local tennis tournament?
And personally I would be very curious to see what schoolgirls would come up with if writing their own software would ever become popular in those circles. I suspect it will be eye-searing pink, but probably also refreshingly different.
Agreed.
This is exactly the kind of content-free critique I was trying satirize, but it seems you're much better at it. In particular the 'Apple favors form over function' is classical, classical.
I'm not complaining about slashdot reporting stories ... I'm saying that any Apple story - whether it be positive or negative - turns into people screaming their hatred for the company like it were a picture of Emmanuel Goldstein. In the ten years I've been visiting the site, I've seen this only happen to two companies: Microsoft and SCO.
And that's not even the worst:
The painful torture of logic reasoning: Apple are evil because they are arrogant because they don't admit there is a serious problem which is serious because at least ten bloggers have said there is a problem. Curating is evil because it takes away our freedom to download shoddy and dangerous apps but they should have blocked all those fart applications. Oh, and curating doesn't work because it doesn't block each and every app that Joe Blogger thinks shouldn't be in the store.
The armchair expertise: Gigahertz antenna design is a black art, but obviously Apple designers are far less competent than Joe Blogger. Apple could easily have foreseen each and every abuse of the store because, ehm, well, they just could. (Because Steve Jobs is god, perhaps?). Oh, and if they sell millions a week of something, and there is a shortage, that shortage is obviously artificial, because they should have known that they would sell millions. It is obviously only part of the hype they are creating.
The demand for a fix NOW, NOW, NOW: If Apple doesn't respond for a week, they obviously don't want to admit there is a problem, and they don't care, and they are incompetent, and they have really gone downhill and they only sell to sheeple in the first place. Oh and have I said already that I want a fix for this problem NOW, NOW, NOW?