Nazi leaders, for example, escalated the war and in the end committed suicide; they had no interest in compromise or deescalation because they wouldn't benefit from it.
When they were escalating, up to something like 1942, they thought they could win the war. After that, they were just in for the ride. And even among the Nazi leadership there were very few suicides: Hitler famously did, but then he could hardly expect to live a normal boring life afterwards. There are two or three others, but the same applied to them. In fact one of them committed suicide the day before he was to be hanged.
Those people that prefer boring normal lives don't try to kill US presidents.
I'm sorry, but you've lost me here. I am not aware of any Islamic terrorist groups that have carried out assassination attempts on US presidents. US military or citizens in general? Yes. Specifically presidents? No. However, if you're implying that only insane people would do such a thing: any Iraqi fighting the occupying US forces might consider it rational to kill the enemy commander-in-chief.
The militants, however, do not benefit from deescalation and peace, and those are the people that pick assassination targets. Hence, it's more rational for them to kill the dove than the hawk.
That depends entirely on the goals of these militants. If the goal is to remove the occupying US forces from Iraq, it is probably the wrong choice, depending on the `dovishness' of the dove. If the goal is to just foster instability, it might be the right choice, if they think the US forces are destabilizing Iraq. If the goal is to let Iraqis fight the US forces for their own benefit (whatever that is), this might be the best choice. However, they have to assume that both the Iraqis and the hawk are stupid enough to do their bidding.
Do you seriously think that people whose primary occupation has been to make IEDs and gun people down in the street are going to fit back into a civilian economy?
Why not? That's how it worked in other countries with a resistance movement: in the USA, in european countries after WWII, in Vietnam, South Africa, Iran, etc.
Of course this works best if the hostilities have a clear winner with a sane head, because otherwise things will stay messy for a long time, as in Afghanistan or Zimbabwe.
That doesn't mean that the average Iraqi wil have any great love for the USA, or that there won't be idiots who want to continue the fight once Iraq has been liberated, but like everywhere else, people tend to prefer living a boring normal live.
And yes, the above is a gross simplification: there is also a multiparty civil war going on where the US troops are merely another pawn in the game. Let's just hope a clear and sane winner emerges from that. It is not at all clear that at this point the US could do anything meaningful to influence the results of that war, even with the sanest of commanders.
Oh, and there are also a couple of hot-headed idiots who consider the mere presence of the USA in their holy country, and by extent in the entire islamic world, an invasion. Although they have been able to do a few well-publicized terrorist attacks, it is highly unlikely they could do real damage to their enemies. Apart from shocking their enemies into a stupid reaction, that is. They simply won't be able to recruit enough hotheads to make a significant impact: as long as you don't destroy their boring normal live, people prefer to live that boring normal live.
No matter how many licenses you have, modifying and reselling the OS is sure to land you in court.
In a sense you are right: a company in a situation like Apple might well feel itself compelled to go to court on something like this. However, it is not at all clear that they will actually win.
What exactly have Psystar done wrong? They buy a copy of Mac OS for you, they install it for you on a computer, and add to and overwrite some of the installed software for you. Then they ship you the computer and Mac OS DVD. For the next customer they buy a new copy of Mac OS, etc.
Apart, possibly, from the EULA stipulation that started all this discussion, It is not at all obvious that they violated any laws. Copyright laws? No, they act as your agent. DRM protections? How? Any other law? I don't see which one.
Therefore, I think that it is perfectly reasonable to say that the entire lawsuit would hinge on that one EULA stipulation.
You can dissmiss the people who won't vote for Obama as biggots if you want to be biggoted about it yourself but lots of people just see him for what he is. Obama is nothing but a clueless flim-flam man who has not idea what he is doing now or will be getting into down the road. He is only where he is because the bankers (namely those involved with the FED) think they can control him. They are willing to buy his electorate with a few token issues and distractions like oil prices.
As a european, this is what I always love about discussions of american politics: the rational positions solidly supported by well-chosen arguments, the politeness, the ability to see the good in everyone, and the common sense of all these posts. Based on this kind of discussion, I'm sure the man or woman to wield all that power of the USA will be chosen carefully.
[/sarcasm]
(To the OP: sorry to single you out, but you do make my point for me.)
OOXML, on the other hand, went through the fast track process normally reserved for formats that are already in use and mature but not yet official standards.
I certainly don't want to make light of Microsoft's blatant manipulation of the processes, but in some sense the Microsoft Office formats are `already in use and mature'. Anyone on a standards committee who is only a simple Windows/Office user because s/he is an expert in an entirely different field, may well be astonished that people would be against fast-tracking Microsoft's standards. After all, it's the only document standard they use daily.
And of course all protests against the standardization are troublesome meddling by ivory-tower activists.
However, the little respect I had for this point of view was rapidly gone when they so obviously were bending the rules of their own decision process. What good is a standards organization that doesn't even follow its own rules?
By that logic Slashdot shouldn't have any down moderation at all. It's censorship, after all. A saner interpretation is to consider all Slashdot moderation as just an opinion on the posting. That you are too lazy to read all low-modded postings is your problem...
Since this topic drift seems to be inevitable anyway, let me go with the flow...
I don't doubt that Blender is a helpful and powerful tool if you use it daily, but the user interface has a learning curve like the cliffs of Dover. As a veteran user of PovRay and a raft of other 3D tools I am more than happy with the array of tools Blender offers to create, bend, sculpt, distort, warp, arrange, and otherwise mangle 3D objects, so at an abstract level it is quite clear what to do to create 3D objects. In that sense I am even willing to grant that Blender is `intuitive'.
However, HOWEVER, the Blender user interface is totally unhelpful in explaining how to use these tools. Blender throws at the user a collection of panels and buttons and windows that is different from what anyone else is doing, and requires you learn a vast number of keystrokes, slang terms, magical pixels to click or drag, and all that with little or no handholding. Where are the tooltips, popup menus, help windows, or even just nods to standard user interfaces? And can you please make some of these magical areas to click or drag a little more obvious and a little larger, please? Optionally then?
You could argue that editors like vi and Emacs do exactly the same: they require you to learn magical keystrokes with little or no handholding. However, there you can get by with a limited set of magic that let you do your thing, although perhaps not in the most efficient way. Precisely because 3D editing is so difficult, that is not possible in Blender. You have to learn quite a lot of the Blender magic to do anything meaningful.
I've tried to learn Blender at least three times, and one time I even bought a book to learn it. Every time I gave up in disgust because I just didn't have the time to learn all that magic and got disgusted by the unhelpful Blender UI that clearly has no time at all for newcomers. Every time I decided that I was better off spending my time writing PovRay code. (And $DEITY knows PovRay has its own interesting collection of quirks, weird limitations, and cranky developers.)
In short: yes, in one sense Blender is intuitive. However, at another level it is just a impenetrable jumble of buttons and dials that is more complicated to use than an airplane.
I get so sick of people acting as though the iPhone is the first smartphone ever and "background processes" and their implications are uncharted territory. Of course it isn't the first one. That doesn't mean it is a trivial issue. The point remains that an small device like a smartphone, a PDA, a GPS, or whatever, is a programming platform that must be treated with far more respect for resource issues than a normal desktop. If Apple tries to offer an SDK that anyone willing to pay 100$/year can use, they can't give much support for individual applications, and they have to have a number of strict limitations. Moreover the entire SDK thing is pretty much an experiment at the moment. Isn't that reason enough to have that restriction there?
And I suspect that if a big company or a large Open-Source project came to Apple with a competently implemented application and a sound cooperation proposal, that restriction could be lifted.
Smartphones have been around for years and I really haven't heard of many applications on Palm/Windows Mobile/Blackberry that have incurred massive data charges or have dramatically shortened battery life. If those applications did, they'd either be fixed or people would just stop using them! Instead of using market forces, Apple seems to prefer not to have such an application in its store in the first place. I, for one, can't blame them.
I understand the need for some sort of approval process for code, though I personally disagree with it's effectiveness. But what argument do you have against letting consumers choose to download apps with background processes? There are two solid arguments that trump any conspiracy theories:
User experience. Background processes eat unpredictable numbers of processor cycles, making the rest of the software slower and therefore less user-friendly. Apple doesn't want their software look bad because of third-party software.
Transparency. Background processes may incur communication costs that the user doesn't know about. If the user has to activate the program before it can do something costly, there is at least some obvious relation between the huge phone bill at the end of the month and the activity on the phone.
Bonus argument: viruses are more effective as background processes.
And the `give the user the choice' argument is a bit bogus, IMHO. People will whine and whine, even if they have been warned about these effects.
That is nothing but a transparent block toward the network specific apps, like IM and VOIP, that Apple either does not want to exist, or wants to monopolize for itself. Remember how much trouble Microsoft got in when they gave their programs special treatment over competitors? Let's first see how things work out in practice before we build conspiracy theories, ok? The SDK and its current restrictions were designed to enable third-party software without incurring too much problems for Apple, but it is still an experiment. I can well understand that for now they play it safe. If in practice there is a well-founded demand for more freedom I suspect the rules will change.
Data stored in DRAM produces physical changes in the cells that can be detected long after power is removed. For systems used to handle extremely sensitive data, physical destruction of the RAM isn't unreasonable.
Sorry, but I'm extremely sceptical, because it goes against all physical properties of DRAM. What physical changes? How long after power is removed? How can these changes be used to reconstruct the data?
Even if we keep getting exponential growth of transistors per dollar in the coming years, the question is what to do with them. Arranging them in useful circuits is increasingly difficult because at a certain point adding cache and execution units to a processor just isn't very helpful (hence multi-core). Adding more cores is also not going to help at some point. Moreover, power dissipation can't keep growing proportionally, which means that with increasing transistor counts each transistor will have to dissipate less, which means lowering the average number of switching events per transistor, and how are we going to arrange for that?
And I seriously don't understand why so many people in this thread just don't get it. Surely a laptop is not a serious alternative to a book reader: it is far heavier, has a worse display for text reading, and is inevitably in landscape mode. Similar for all the people holding up the Nokia N800, iPod touch, PDAs and even mobile phones. Are you seriously claiming you can read an entire novel on one of these things? Comfortably?
Yes, the dead-tree version has its advantages, but try carrying around a 1000 of them, or search for text in them, or enlarge their font.
With regard to DRM: that doesn't sound like such a good deal, but there is lots of reading material out there that doesn't have these restrictions, and both the Kindle and the Sony can handle a couple of popular unrestricted formats (although I think they should support more.)
Then there are the people with the silly objections: It doesn't have backlight! Yeah, well, ditto for a dead-tree book. It doesn't fit in my pocket! Yeah, that's kind-of hard if you want a comfortable screen. They are so expensive! Yes, that's how it goes with bleeding-edge technology.
Mind you, I still think the vendors could develop more compelling products. They are dreaming their dreams of avarice, and often forget that they have to make a compelling product first to be the iPod of books, but nevertheless both the Kindle and the Sony are fairly interesting devices.
The conclusion I draw from the article is that this would be a great christmas present for a lot of children everywhere. (And that's a hint to the makers.)
I don't doubt for a moment that this thread will be filled with the usual/. grousing about the usefulness of the entire project, but let's give credit where credit is due: it looks like they have made a product that appeals to children. Perhaps they know what they are doing?
If this is a truly an international disgrace and a great launch to science why don't ESA or the Russians launch it?
Although I am not at all familiar with this particular launch, the usual answer is that it would be too expensive to adapt the payload to another launch vehicle. That doesn't mean the other launch vehicles are inferior; it just means conversion isn't practical.
Note that resupply or crew rotation missions are much less problematic, because they consist of a set of smaller payloads, and the exact set can easily be adjusted to the available vehicle. Not so for one big payload.
Strikes me as an indictment of human behavior. Do you praise apple for all of the previous times that they ported java, or condemn them for the one time that they don't?
Apparently, you're not in possession of all the facts. Apple has provided a beta of Java 6 that is now more than a year old. They dropped heavy hints that Leopard would include a release version of Java 6. Despite these promises, Apple has until now not delivered. Is this reason to be angry with Apple? That's a bit strong, but I am disappointed, and I'm certainly not the only one. If Apple don't intend to release a new version after all, it would be nice if they would just say so. If they did, Sun just might jump in and release their own version, who knows.
Obviously, I am happy that some people were enterprising enough not to wait for Apple, and release their own version. Unfortunately, they can't take advantage of all the work Apple has put in their Java release to integrate it better in Mac OS X. And again a little help from Apple would be welcome: if Apple doesn't want to release new versions on their own, it would help if they would at least open up some of their code to help these kinds of third-party implementations.
Actually, this used to be the case in Netherland in the '70s. You could only use phones from the national phone company (the PTT). Later, you could use any phone, as long as it was approved by the PTT. Nowadays, everybody is free to choose whatever phone they like.
The same used to be true in the USA, with AT&T being the monopolist. That was the reason the original poster used those phones as a sarcastic example.
Separate devices for each and every app are a waste of money and space.
Not to mention very inflexible. One of the reasons computers are so useful is that you can create your own workflow by running different applications.
Nevertheless, the trend is towards flatter, lighter, and cheaper screens. One of these days Apple is going to strech an iPod touch to a 15" screen, and people will have an ultra-flat PC, or a PDA, or a tablet, or an intelligent screen, or a book reader, or a smart TV, or whatever they want to call it.
Sorry, but you're not doing a good job defending this policy. I'm sure this has been discussed to death on Wikipedia, but that isn't reflected in this defense.
Trivia is bad because in essence it's about unimportant information. Wikipedia is first and foremost an encyclopedia, not a bunch of unimportant facts. If the information is important, then it's not trivia.
But aren't 99% of the entries in any encyclopedia unimportant to a particular reader of that encyclopedia? Conversely, if someone bothered to make a Wikipedia entry for it, there is at least one person in the world who considered this information important. In your defense you only give a circular definition of unimportant (= trivial = unimportant).
If the information is not important to the subject, then it shouldn't be included.
That sounds like shifting the goal posts to me. Yes, the entry of a particular topic should be on topic, but as long as an entry is on topic to a particular subject, even if the topic is the color of the bricks of the local school, why should it be deleted? Or do you mean that Wikipedia as a whole has a subject? If so, what is it?
If the topic is about something trivial, then it shouldn't be on Wikipedia - go put it somewhere else.
Again, why, and what exactly is `trivial'?
We routinely remove information. Our policies mandate it. For instance, you may not include original research.
(Ignoring the rather cryptic example.)
Of course there are reasons to remove information, but why is `it is trivial' one of these reasons?
China, Iran, we already know what kind of cultures these countries have.
Really? If with 'we' you mean the collective mind of Slashdot, I have to disagree. The collective mind of Slashdot only knows the cliches about every country except the USA and perhaps Great Brittain. I'm glad I'm not assimilated yet.
Italy is a country that rich media bosses can rule with much scandal, as they please.
That is about as accurate as
The USA is a country that rich oil bosses can rule with much scandal, as they please.
That is, there is some truth in it, but reality if far more subtle than that.
Personally, I don't see the attraction of this kind of device. The core functionality seems to be webbrowsing while you're traveling. That may be nice, but is it really so important that you make a dedicated device for it? Aparently Nokia seems to think so (and Apple too, in a way), but I just don't see it. Can anyone lusting for this device tell me what the attraction is?
Also, how do these things compare to the devices on the Japanese market? During my recent trip to Japan I saw a similar device on display all over Japan. Sorry, I don't know a brand name, but clearly vendors also want to fill this niche in the Japanese market.
Well, the Soviets tried that several decades ago, and, well... Yeah.
Their Marx worship was just as much a religion as christianity, islam, mormonism, hinduism, etc. are. If it quacks like a duck and all that. Of course their propaganda denied that, but that was just their way of saying that there is only One True religion.
Your argument does nothing to disprove the original premise.
Why does the EU always seem to come down on US-based companies that control a large portion of specific markets?
Because
US media, including/., rarely report on cartels involving no US-based companies: for example, for some reason people
in the US don't seem to be well-informed about the beer,
paper, banana,
gas switchgear, and rubber cartels (from just the first two Google pages on 'european commission cartel').
US-based companies sell lots of stuff in Europe, and therefore have plenty of opportunity to do illegal or suspect things: there is a reason North-Korean companies are rarely sued.
Slashdot Mirror
Nazi leaders, for example, escalated the war and in the end committed suicide; they had no interest in compromise or deescalation because they wouldn't benefit from it.
When they were escalating, up to something like 1942, they thought they could win the war. After that, they were just in for the ride. And even among the Nazi leadership there were very few suicides: Hitler famously did, but then he could hardly expect to live a normal boring life afterwards. There are two or three others, but the same applied to them. In fact one of them committed suicide the day before he was to be hanged.
Those people that prefer boring normal lives don't try to kill US presidents.
I'm sorry, but you've lost me here. I am not aware of any Islamic terrorist groups that have carried out assassination attempts on US presidents. US military or citizens in general? Yes. Specifically presidents? No. However, if you're implying that only insane people would do such a thing: any Iraqi fighting the occupying US forces might consider it rational to kill the enemy commander-in-chief.
The militants, however, do not benefit from deescalation and peace, and those are the people that pick assassination targets. Hence, it's more rational for them to kill the dove than the hawk.
That depends entirely on the goals of these militants. If the goal is to remove the occupying US forces from Iraq, it is probably the wrong choice, depending on the `dovishness' of the dove. If the goal is to just foster instability, it might be the right choice, if they think the US forces are destabilizing Iraq. If the goal is to let Iraqis fight the US forces for their own benefit (whatever that is), this might be the best choice. However, they have to assume that both the Iraqis and the hawk are stupid enough to do their bidding.
Do you seriously think that people whose primary occupation has been to make IEDs and gun people down in the street are going to fit back into a civilian economy?
Why not? That's how it worked in other countries with a resistance movement: in the USA, in european countries after WWII, in Vietnam, South Africa, Iran, etc. Of course this works best if the hostilities have a clear winner with a sane head, because otherwise things will stay messy for a long time, as in Afghanistan or Zimbabwe. That doesn't mean that the average Iraqi wil have any great love for the USA, or that there won't be idiots who want to continue the fight once Iraq has been liberated, but like everywhere else, people tend to prefer living a boring normal live.
And yes, the above is a gross simplification: there is also a multiparty civil war going on where the US troops are merely another pawn in the game. Let's just hope a clear and sane winner emerges from that. It is not at all clear that at this point the US could do anything meaningful to influence the results of that war, even with the sanest of commanders.
Oh, and there are also a couple of hot-headed idiots who consider the mere presence of the USA in their holy country, and by extent in the entire islamic world, an invasion. Although they have been able to do a few well-publicized terrorist attacks, it is highly unlikely they could do real damage to their enemies. Apart from shocking their enemies into a stupid reaction, that is. They simply won't be able to recruit enough hotheads to make a significant impact: as long as you don't destroy their boring normal live, people prefer to live that boring normal live.
No matter how many licenses you have, modifying and reselling the OS is sure to land you in court.
In a sense you are right: a company in a situation like Apple might well feel itself compelled to go to court on something like this. However, it is not at all clear that they will actually win.
What exactly have Psystar done wrong? They buy a copy of Mac OS for you, they install it for you on a computer, and add to and overwrite some of the installed software for you. Then they ship you the computer and Mac OS DVD. For the next customer they buy a new copy of Mac OS, etc.
Apart, possibly, from the EULA stipulation that started all this discussion, It is not at all obvious that they violated any laws. Copyright laws? No, they act as your agent. DRM protections? How? Any other law? I don't see which one.
Therefore, I think that it is perfectly reasonable to say that the entire lawsuit would hinge on that one EULA stipulation.
African or European?
DISCLAIMER: this is purely speculation, although I consider it in character for the current US administration.
As a european, this is what I always love about discussions of american politics: the rational positions solidly supported by well-chosen arguments, the politeness, the ability to see the good in everyone, and the common sense of all these posts. Based on this kind of discussion, I'm sure the man or woman to wield all that power of the USA will be chosen carefully.
[/sarcasm]
(To the OP: sorry to single you out, but you do make my point for me.)
I certainly don't want to make light of Microsoft's blatant manipulation of the processes, but in some sense the Microsoft Office formats are `already in use and mature'. Anyone on a standards committee who is only a simple Windows/Office user because s/he is an expert in an entirely different field, may well be astonished that people would be against fast-tracking Microsoft's standards. After all, it's the only document standard they use daily. And of course all protests against the standardization are troublesome meddling by ivory-tower activists.
However, the little respect I had for this point of view was rapidly gone when they so obviously were bending the rules of their own decision process. What good is a standards organization that doesn't even follow its own rules?
By that logic Slashdot shouldn't have any down moderation at all. It's censorship, after all. A saner interpretation is to consider all Slashdot moderation as just an opinion on the posting. That you are too lazy to read all low-modded postings is your problem...
I don't doubt that Blender is a helpful and powerful tool if you use it daily, but the user interface has a learning curve like the cliffs of Dover. As a veteran user of PovRay and a raft of other 3D tools I am more than happy with the array of tools Blender offers to create, bend, sculpt, distort, warp, arrange, and otherwise mangle 3D objects, so at an abstract level it is quite clear what to do to create 3D objects. In that sense I am even willing to grant that Blender is `intuitive'.
However, HOWEVER, the Blender user interface is totally unhelpful in explaining how to use these tools. Blender throws at the user a collection of panels and buttons and windows that is different from what anyone else is doing, and requires you learn a vast number of keystrokes, slang terms, magical pixels to click or drag, and all that with little or no handholding. Where are the tooltips, popup menus, help windows, or even just nods to standard user interfaces? And can you please make some of these magical areas to click or drag a little more obvious and a little larger, please? Optionally then?
You could argue that editors like vi and Emacs do exactly the same: they require you to learn magical keystrokes with little or no handholding. However, there you can get by with a limited set of magic that let you do your thing, although perhaps not in the most efficient way. Precisely because 3D editing is so difficult, that is not possible in Blender. You have to learn quite a lot of the Blender magic to do anything meaningful.
I've tried to learn Blender at least three times, and one time I even bought a book to learn it. Every time I gave up in disgust because I just didn't have the time to learn all that magic and got disgusted by the unhelpful Blender UI that clearly has no time at all for newcomers. Every time I decided that I was better off spending my time writing PovRay code. (And $DEITY knows PovRay has its own interesting collection of quirks, weird limitations, and cranky developers.)
In short: yes, in one sense Blender is intuitive. However, at another level it is just a impenetrable jumble of buttons and dials that is more complicated to use than an airplane.
At least it's better than binliner.
And I suspect that if a big company or a large Open-Source project came to Apple with a competently implemented application and a sound cooperation proposal, that restriction could be lifted.
Smartphones have been around for years and I really haven't heard of many applications on Palm/Windows Mobile/Blackberry that have incurred massive data charges or have dramatically shortened battery life. If those applications did, they'd either be fixed or people would just stop using them! Instead of using market forces, Apple seems to prefer not to have such an application in its store in the first place. I, for one, can't blame them.- User experience. Background processes eat unpredictable numbers of processor cycles, making the rest of the software slower and therefore less user-friendly. Apple doesn't want their software look bad because of third-party software.
- Transparency. Background processes may incur communication costs that the user doesn't know about. If the user has to activate the program before it can do something costly, there is at least some obvious relation between the huge phone bill at the end of the month and the activity on the phone.
- Bonus argument: viruses are more effective as background processes.
And the `give the user the choice' argument is a bit bogus, IMHO. People will whine and whine, even if they have been warned about these effects. That is nothing but a transparent block toward the network specific apps, like IM and VOIP, that Apple either does not want to exist, or wants to monopolize for itself. Remember how much trouble Microsoft got in when they gave their programs special treatment over competitors? Let's first see how things work out in practice before we build conspiracy theories, ok? The SDK and its current restrictions were designed to enable third-party software without incurring too much problems for Apple, but it is still an experiment. I can well understand that for now they play it safe. If in practice there is a well-founded demand for more freedom I suspect the rules will change.Sorry, but I'm extremely sceptical, because it goes against all physical properties of DRAM. What physical changes? How long after power is removed? How can these changes be used to reconstruct the data?
Even if we keep getting exponential growth of transistors per dollar in the coming years, the question is what to do with them. Arranging them in useful circuits is increasingly difficult because at a certain point adding cache and execution units to a processor just isn't very helpful (hence multi-core). Adding more cores is also not going to help at some point. Moreover, power dissipation can't keep growing proportionally, which means that with increasing transistor counts each transistor will have to dissipate less, which means lowering the average number of switching events per transistor, and how are we going to arrange for that?
And I seriously don't understand why so many people in this thread just don't get it. Surely a laptop is not a serious alternative to a book reader: it is far heavier, has a worse display for text reading, and is inevitably in landscape mode. Similar for all the people holding up the Nokia N800, iPod touch, PDAs and even mobile phones. Are you seriously claiming you can read an entire novel on one of these things? Comfortably?
Yes, the dead-tree version has its advantages, but try carrying around a 1000 of them, or search for text in them, or enlarge their font.
With regard to DRM: that doesn't sound like such a good deal, but there is lots of reading material out there that doesn't have these restrictions, and both the Kindle and the Sony can handle a couple of popular unrestricted formats (although I think they should support more.)
Then there are the people with the silly objections: It doesn't have backlight! Yeah, well, ditto for a dead-tree book. It doesn't fit in my pocket! Yeah, that's kind-of hard if you want a comfortable screen. They are so expensive! Yes, that's how it goes with bleeding-edge technology.
Mind you, I still think the vendors could develop more compelling products. They are dreaming their dreams of avarice, and often forget that they have to make a compelling product first to be the iPod of books, but nevertheless both the Kindle and the Sony are fairly interesting devices.
I don't doubt for a moment that this thread will be filled with the usual /. grousing about the usefulness of the entire project, but let's give credit where credit is due: it looks like they have made a product that appeals to children. Perhaps they know what they are doing?
Although I am not at all familiar with this particular launch, the usual answer is that it would be too expensive to adapt the payload to another launch vehicle. That doesn't mean the other launch vehicles are inferior; it just means conversion isn't practical.
Note that resupply or crew rotation missions are much less problematic, because they consist of a set of smaller payloads, and the exact set can easily be adjusted to the available vehicle. Not so for one big payload.
Apparently, you're not in possession of all the facts. Apple has provided a beta of Java 6 that is now more than a year old. They dropped heavy hints that Leopard would include a release version of Java 6. Despite these promises, Apple has until now not delivered. Is this reason to be angry with Apple? That's a bit strong, but I am disappointed, and I'm certainly not the only one. If Apple don't intend to release a new version after all, it would be nice if they would just say so. If they did, Sun just might jump in and release their own version, who knows.
Obviously, I am happy that some people were enterprising enough not to wait for Apple, and release their own version. Unfortunately, they can't take advantage of all the work Apple has put in their Java release to integrate it better in Mac OS X. And again a little help from Apple would be welcome: if Apple doesn't want to release new versions on their own, it would help if they would at least open up some of their code to help these kinds of third-party implementations.
The same used to be true in the USA, with AT&T being the monopolist. That was the reason the original poster used those phones as a sarcastic example.
Not to mention very inflexible. One of the reasons computers are so useful is that you can create your own workflow by running different applications.
Nevertheless, the trend is towards flatter, lighter, and cheaper screens. One of these days Apple is going to strech an iPod touch to a 15" screen, and people will have an ultra-flat PC, or a PDA, or a tablet, or an intelligent screen, or a book reader, or a smart TV, or whatever they want to call it.
But aren't 99% of the entries in any encyclopedia unimportant to a particular reader of that encyclopedia? Conversely, if someone bothered to make a Wikipedia entry for it, there is at least one person in the world who considered this information important. In your defense you only give a circular definition of unimportant (= trivial = unimportant).
That sounds like shifting the goal posts to me. Yes, the entry of a particular topic should be on topic, but as long as an entry is on topic to a particular subject, even if the topic is the color of the bricks of the local school, why should it be deleted? Or do you mean that Wikipedia as a whole has a subject? If so, what is it?
Again, why, and what exactly is `trivial'?
(Ignoring the rather cryptic example.) Of course there are reasons to remove information, but why is `it is trivial' one of these reasons?
Really? If with 'we' you mean the collective mind of Slashdot, I have to disagree. The collective mind of Slashdot only knows the cliches about every country except the USA and perhaps Great Brittain. I'm glad I'm not assimilated yet.
That is about as accurate as
That is, there is some truth in it, but reality if far more subtle than that.
Personally, I don't see the attraction of this kind of device. The core functionality seems to be webbrowsing while you're traveling. That may be nice, but is it really so important that you make a dedicated device for it? Aparently Nokia seems to think so (and Apple too, in a way), but I just don't see it. Can anyone lusting for this device tell me what the attraction is? Also, how do these things compare to the devices on the Japanese market? During my recent trip to Japan I saw a similar device on display all over Japan. Sorry, I don't know a brand name, but clearly vendors also want to fill this niche in the Japanese market.
Their Marx worship was just as much a religion as christianity, islam, mormonism, hinduism, etc. are. If it quacks like a duck and all that. Of course their propaganda denied that, but that was just their way of saying that there is only One True religion.
Your argument does nothing to disprove the original premise.
Because