All real-world problems require numerical solutions.
10sin(5/7) is fine, if you're teaching pure mathematics.
When you're interested in the student's ability to form a numerical solution, track precision and significant figures throughout the calculations and then achieve a numerical result that is accurate, even after rounding and truncation, you don't want 10sin(5/7) + 20cos(1/5) as their final answer.
Engineering is all about that, as are most of the physical sciences. It's not as simple as you'd like to make it seem.
If they can't handle the switch from an expensive calculator to some simpler one, are they fit to even be studying university-level physics in the first place?
It's not handling the switch that is the issue.
I use a TI graphing calculator. I'm very proficient with it. It's been so long since I used my programmable Sharp calculator that I can't drive it quickly anymore - even though 10 years ago I could work it as quickly as I can drive the TI now.
There are some things that just work by rote - and where the buttons on your calculator keypad and whether you need to use the second function key to get at them is one of them. It is painful trying to solve a complex problem in a stressful situation without the added stress of trying to figure out a new tool which is substantially the same but painfully different to the old one.
That said, I've yet to see a decent scientific calculator with 3G support. I tried using a few "calculator" apps on my touch screen phones (iphone and N900) and they just weren't up to the task of rapid number entry, and calculation.
In real scientific exams you'd find no problem banning phones and laptops from the room. Just make sure to make the students well aware that they can't use their phones and that they'll need an approved calculator. That worked back in the day when I went through and phones were just becoming mainstream. I don't see there's a lot more you can do apart from ensuring that there are a team of staff handy to walk the room and enforce the no phones rule.
No test should ever need a calculator if setup properly.
I disagree. I studied Electrical Engineering and even the most basic of calculations outside of first year involved sin/cosine/logarithm at some point. Sure, you can make the effort to contrive the test such that the students are only ever dealing with "common" angles (0, 45, 90, 180, etc) and such but in Engineering that often opens up a simplified special case solution that doesn't test if the student can deal with real world calculations at all.
The instructor _could_ provide cosine and logarithm tables to the students but it's just easier to allow them the use of a basic scientific calculator.
Your suggestion is flawed - electricity has to come from somewhere. Currently the preferred way is to burn fossil fuel. If coal becomes a limited supply they can always burn oil. They certainly burn natural gas for electricity production at many plants. Natural gas is a by-product of extracting o
Electric cars shift the location of the burning away from the vehicle. They also make it more efficient, since burning fuel in car engine is notoriously inefficient. Electric cars currently do not remove the requirement to burn oil.
but with the advancement in tools to help us navigate more effectivily, who really wants to take an old school map with them
Um, people who are not completely clueless goits. I don't know about you but my GPS runs on batteries and they're only good for so long. My old fashioned map runs on light, and it seems that's naturally for between 6-18 hours of the day, 365 days of the year depending on location/season. For that other 18-6 hours of the day fire is a capable provider of light, even if it's barely enough to read my old school map.
Also, my old school map doesn't tend to cost as much as my GPS so if I can carry two or three different copies if I'm paranoid, and if I drop my bag in the river while crossing it I don't completely fuck the old fashioned map.
Printed maps are infinitely useful and GPS can never replace them except for the very casual hiker/camper.
My concern is that Apple are making a product which, on the outset, looks shiny and garners consumer interest. They don't know about the walled garden. They just see something which (while over priced) looks like awesome value because it's so shiny with all these neat (read: gimmick) "features".
Then Apple has the consumers by the balls. Does the iPhone support decent Bluetooth transfers yet, or anything other than a headset for that matter.
Can it run Flash? I don't give a fuck what Apple says. It's my device and if I want to run something on it then I'd damn well better be able to if that something can easily exist. Flash existed for iPhone. Apple said fuck off. While in principle I agree with Apple in that decision because Flash is overpriced garbage that should have been killed off shortly after it was born, I disagree with them forcing their decision on everyone.
In fact, does it support open standards at all?
Is it not a fragile P.O.S?
Has the call signal quality improved? iPhone 4 has a pretty bad antenna design flaw which makes it essentially useless as a phone because you have to continually be mindful of how you hold it. My 3GS (which I sent back and demanded a refund) was so useless it couldn't get signal where a $20 Nokia worked just fine. Is it stable? Again, my 3GS used to crash randomly all the time. It'd even crash silently - sit there with the shiny GUI responding and all of the phone functions dead and disconnected from the network.
I'm a bit perplexed at this comment, I thought that McDonalds had a fairly large gluten free menu though I'm not a celiac myself.
Sure it does. If you want a salad or a soda! Almost everything on the Maccas menu has wheat in it, from the burgers to the nuggets. It's all bread or flour based, at least around here. It might be different in other localities.
There is a big difference between having a gun pointed at you from a random person on the street, and from a police officer. With the exception of a few bad apples (Oakland, London), a police officer's gun is a shield that keeps them safe during their daily job. It's just a fact of life.
What's the difference? Gun accidents happen. If someone is pointing a firearm at you it's a safe assumption you'll be shot, regardless of their intentions. Why do you think we never point guns at people, even if we're "sure" they're not loaded?
Perhaps. But they often have exclusive contracts with ticketmaster and offer NO WAY of buying tickets at the venue. I think this should be illegal. I come into the theater - tickets are on sale and available - but they tell me to go to the third party website (and pay lots of "convenience" fees).
Perhaps where you are. At least here the ticketing agencies I know of all have a physical presence (booths) around the place. Many have a presence in the larger venues they represent, as well as larger shopping malls. I've never had a problem walking into the store and talking to a person about buying a ticket. You still pay the "booking fee", but at least you made them actually do something now because a person's salary was involved.
My problem with this is that these scummy brokers make it hard to get seats when they open. They use automated scripts and any number of credit card numbers and ensure they hammer the vendor's servers as hard as possible. They do this because the Internet makes it so easy to do. While they're doing this of course I have to put up with timeouts, dropped connections and a general inability to get tickets.
The Internet has already removed the thrill of waiting in line to get tickets. Perhaps if these ticketing companies simply opened up for physical sales at the ticket booth (say) a day before they opened online sales they'd do far more damage to the professional scalpers. Waiting in line to buy a maximum of 4 tickets is a time consuming and expensive process when you're trying to rapidly buy up the largest number possible.
Die-hard fans will queue up to get tickets if they go online. Other fans will rush to the ticket office to get them at some point very early on in the sale process if that's the only way to get them.
Fuck the scalpers, start selling tickets via face to face transaction again and the problem is reduced.
I care; I really care. If I buy tickets for a show well in the future and plans change I want to be able to give the ticket to friends or sell it.
Conversely, I don't want to have to pay some ruthless ticketing company some percentage of the sale if I buy a ticket off someone who can no longer go to the show. The original purchaser paid what the promoter deemed the fair price, I'll pay roughly that. Why should they get more than they were prepared to accept initially when they aren't giving any more in return? I guarantee that getting some cut of the secondary sales won't make them put on a better show - it'll just put more money in some ticketing company's bank account.
And a much much larger amount of C, which we find in much much smaller quantities in the air. But hey let's not let facts get in the way of a good story about turning air into oil.
because the 50 mpg car is better than all of them. that is the one you buy; that is the one that matters.
Miles per gallon is a good unit for the average consumer. The average consumer is an idiot and will buy the thing with the biggest numbers. This applies to everything. Obviously bigger is better. Why do you think AMD use that pathetic 2600+ rating on their CPUs even though they're clocked a lot slower than that. 200Hz TVs that are then fed with a 60Hz FTA signal or a 24Hz Blu-Ray cinematic title. PMPO ratings for "audio" gear that stagger the mind. The list goes on.
MPG is a good unit because in the case of MPG bigger is actually better, no doubts about it.
What they will be doing is cutting off service to people who they are told, by a third party firm, are sharing copyrighted music
Which is their right - the ISP has the right as a company to decide who they do and don't provide service to, so long as that is on a non-discriminatory (race, religion, age, gender, etc) basis.
Where they'll fall down is if they cut off contracted customers then insist that said customer continues to pay the contracted rate. They will fall down because the recording industry has been repeatedly shown to use unreliable evidence, and even to fabricate evidence when they are losing. It has also been shown that these "infringement notices" do not constitute actual proof that the user did anything wrong, since they're often generated by a machine which scans for filenames and signatures on data that is shared publicly (FTP, HTTP, torrents, etc). Just because I call a file "2012.avi" and the first kilobyte has the same signature as a copy they know is on a torrent server doesn't mean that the whole file is that trite movie. It may just be conveniently the next number in some sequence.
If the user then litigates against the ISP for down time/costs they will (probably) win, since the ISP will have no actual evidence that the user violated any copyrights and hence ISP policy. The only way the ISP could come out of this winning is to insist that the "copyright holder" bring the user to court three times and prove to a court's satisfaction that the user was, in fact, infringing their rights.
Further to this, I could simply generate a script the repeatedly sends infringement notices to the ISP for every IP address in their allocated netblocks. No evidence necessary. Let's see how long it takes them to realise that their three strikes policy is useless.
>The code OP wrote on his own is on his copyright and he can distribute under the GPL
Unless his contract of employment states otherwise, as many do.
I'd say at a guess (IANAL) that the software has been "distributed" to the OP as a requirement of performing his work. The GPL allows him to then fork and continue to use that code for non-work related purposes - even releasing it off his own back under the terms of the GPL. Presuming that the compiled binary links in any form of GPL'd code this is all perfectly fine in my view. The only thing that would be not permitted is stealing the copyright and re-licensing the parts of it that he doesn't own the rights to. But given time he could re-implement those parts so he did hold the copyright to them.
Of course, I am not a lawyer and the courts still do not fully grok the terms of software licensing and source code (black magic as far as they're concerned) so doing that could end badly even if the intent of the GPL is met.
I know this is the sort of thing that goes on at black hat conferences, but could this guy potentially get in some sort of legal trouble for demonstrating what he has found?
What pisses me off is that he is publishing this. Others probably know about it and are silently exploiting it. The banks don't care. They want to present an illusion of security because fixing security would cost them more money than it currently saves. They'll only do something about it when it becomes really widespread and starts actually costing serious green.
So comments like yours and from the article are really only from YOUR opinions. Now brace yourself for another shock, people have different opinions!
Here's another opinion. As someone who _had_ an iPhone and went back to a $50 Nokia I'll tell you the iPhone is junk. It's shiny, polished junk.
* The battery life was woeful when you're actually using it as intended. I was lucky to get a day out of the thing and I used it as an ereader for about an hour during my daily commute and a phone casually. * It's not compatible (enough) with earlier iPod connectors/interfaces so my iPod capable car stereo won't work with it. A lot of other iPod capable stuff either failed or whinged at me. The phone quite often whinged too. Here's news Apple - if you use a "standard" connector on the thing then support it; don't change the damn internals and then tell the phone to whinge the thing on the other end is too old. * It's locked down - you can only buy applications that Apple approve. If you jail break it you lose warranty, and on 3GS models the ability to reboot the fucking thing. * There is no pr0n (well there is, but Jobs is in denial that Safari can be used to access pr0n). * It crashed and froze up more often than not. * I couldn't save anything in it that Apple doesn't want me to. That includes the videos/photos of my son that came attached to a series of MMS. They were forever trapped in the phone and I had to ask the sender to email me instead. * I can't send files via email/MMS that Apple doesn't want me to. I can't send that hillarious video that I just received to anyone else because it _might_ fuck over some record company somewhere. * I was stuck using iTunes to sync the address book and calendar. What kind of shit is that? Some people actually don't want to use iTunes. Apple won't expose those things in a standard way so I can't just use SyncML or something similar. * The app store is full up with absolute garbage, low quality apps. There's an app for everything where "app" is defined as half-arsed P.O.S and "everything" is defined as {lim x->0 (1/x)}. Finding good quality software was difficult. A lot of the apps blatantly lie about their capability and you don't find out until you've paid for them. * Apple is reportedly known to stiff app developers. * Glass screen is uber-fragile; I know of several people who have managed to break them even when being mostly careful. It's such a common occurrence that a lot of insurance policies won't cover it anymore. * Bluetooth is a joke. Can't even transfer files with it. Apple's answer... use email or MMS. What if I'm sitting right next to the person and want to save some data charges? Nope. Use email or MMS. * Apple seem to pander to the big telcos about ripping out features. For example it wouldn't let me download large (>5M) files over my data plan, even though I paid for a certain amount of data and wanted to use it as _I_ saw fit, not Apple. What if I need a 15M file right now this very instant and I'm nowhere near a WiFi connection? Nope, I'm S.O.L just because Apple says so. * No VoIP... what's with that? It's my phone, and if I want to use VoIP over my carrier's IP network then so be it. Don't tell me I can't. To top it all off, my carrier was a Skype partner and I could use Skype quite happily on their network (they encouraged it). Nope. Can't do that on an iPhone because Apple said so, even though my particular carrier is ok with it. * Did I mention the battery life sucks? * Apple doesn't seem interested in fixing any of the shortcomings that practically no other phone has, because they are all shortcomings that force you to reach out into data and call charges land even when you really don't need to.
The three things I don't like about my $50 Nokia are the lack of a QWERTY keyboard (a standard addition to many smart phones now), small screen size (again, fixed on modern more expensive phones) and the fact it's slow and limited in memory (also fixed by every other smart phone). Other than that, one of the cheapest non-smart models of phone kicks the shit out of an iPhone any day as far as I'm concerned.
The article makes it sound like the chems found their way there after the housing development. How much of this is the army's fault...
A lot of it is. I would hazard a guess that in their paranoid state they dumped the stuff and made sure that the records were highly classified and hard to find. After all, if it were public knowledge what's to stop your average $ENEMY coming along and digging it up and using it against you?
It is the government's fault for not cleaning it up after the war or making it clearly known that the land was contaminated.
Slashdot Mirror
All real-world problems require numerical solutions.
10sin(5/7) is fine, if you're teaching pure mathematics.
When you're interested in the student's ability to form a numerical solution, track precision and significant figures throughout the calculations and then achieve a numerical result that is accurate, even after rounding and truncation, you don't want 10sin(5/7) + 20cos(1/5) as their final answer.
Engineering is all about that, as are most of the physical sciences. It's not as simple as you'd like to make it seem.
If they can't handle the switch from an expensive calculator to some simpler one, are they fit to even be studying university-level physics in the first place?
It's not handling the switch that is the issue.
I use a TI graphing calculator. I'm very proficient with it. It's been so long since I used my programmable Sharp calculator that I can't drive it quickly anymore - even though 10 years ago I could work it as quickly as I can drive the TI now.
There are some things that just work by rote - and where the buttons on your calculator keypad and whether you need to use the second function key to get at them is one of them. It is painful trying to solve a complex problem in a stressful situation without the added stress of trying to figure out a new tool which is substantially the same but painfully different to the old one.
That said, I've yet to see a decent scientific calculator with 3G support. I tried using a few "calculator" apps on my touch screen phones (iphone and N900) and they just weren't up to the task of rapid number entry, and calculation.
In real scientific exams you'd find no problem banning phones and laptops from the room. Just make sure to make the students well aware that they can't use their phones and that they'll need an approved calculator. That worked back in the day when I went through and phones were just becoming mainstream. I don't see there's a lot more you can do apart from ensuring that there are a team of staff handy to walk the room and enforce the no phones rule.
No test should ever need a calculator if setup properly.
I disagree. I studied Electrical Engineering and even the most basic of calculations outside of first year involved sin/cosine/logarithm at some point. Sure, you can make the effort to contrive the test such that the students are only ever dealing with "common" angles (0, 45, 90, 180, etc) and such but in Engineering that often opens up a simplified special case solution that doesn't test if the student can deal with real world calculations at all.
The instructor _could_ provide cosine and logarithm tables to the students but it's just easier to allow them the use of a basic scientific calculator.
Your suggestion is flawed - electricity has to come from somewhere. Currently the preferred way is to burn fossil fuel. If coal becomes a limited supply they can always burn oil. They certainly burn natural gas for electricity production at many plants. Natural gas is a by-product of extracting o
Electric cars shift the location of the burning away from the vehicle. They also make it more efficient, since burning fuel in car engine is notoriously inefficient. Electric cars currently do not remove the requirement to burn oil.
Actually, I guess plenty of crazy people use actual crack too...
And most of those actual crack users are still smarter than the average religious nutter!
s/that's naturally for/that's naturally available for/
Fixed that. Oops.
but with the advancement in tools to help us navigate more effectivily, who really wants to take an old school map with them
Um, people who are not completely clueless goits. I don't know about you but my GPS runs on batteries and they're only good for so long. My old fashioned map runs on light, and it seems that's naturally for between 6-18 hours of the day, 365 days of the year depending on location/season. For that other 18-6 hours of the day fire is a capable provider of light, even if it's barely enough to read my old school map.
Also, my old school map doesn't tend to cost as much as my GPS so if I can carry two or three different copies if I'm paranoid, and if I drop my bag in the river while crossing it I don't completely fuck the old fashioned map.
Printed maps are infinitely useful and GPS can never replace them except for the very casual hiker/camper.
If you don't like it, don't buy it
My concern is that Apple are making a product which, on the outset, looks shiny and garners consumer interest. They don't know about the walled garden. They just see something which (while over priced) looks like awesome value because it's so shiny with all these neat (read: gimmick) "features".
Then Apple has the consumers by the balls. Does the iPhone support decent Bluetooth transfers yet, or anything other than a headset for that matter.
Can it run Flash? I don't give a fuck what Apple says. It's my device and if I want to run something on it then I'd damn well better be able to if that something can easily exist. Flash existed for iPhone. Apple said fuck off. While in principle I agree with Apple in that decision because Flash is overpriced garbage that should have been killed off shortly after it was born, I disagree with them forcing their decision on everyone.
In fact, does it support open standards at all?
Is it not a fragile P.O.S?
Has the call signal quality improved? iPhone 4 has a pretty bad antenna design flaw which makes it essentially useless as a phone because you have to continually be mindful of how you hold it. My 3GS (which I sent back and demanded a refund) was so useless it couldn't get signal where a $20 Nokia worked just fine. Is it stable? Again, my 3GS used to crash randomly all the time. It'd even crash silently - sit there with the shiny GUI responding and all of the phone functions dead and disconnected from the network.
Oh the fun days. I miss my Amiga. It died.
I'm a bit perplexed at this comment, I thought that McDonalds had a fairly large gluten free menu though I'm not a celiac myself.
Sure it does. If you want a salad or a soda! Almost everything on the Maccas menu has wheat in it, from the burgers to the nuggets. It's all bread or flour based, at least around here. It might be different in other localities.
There is a big difference between having a gun pointed at you from a random person on the street, and from a police officer. With the exception of a few bad apples (Oakland, London), a police officer's gun is a shield that keeps them safe during their daily job. It's just a fact of life.
What's the difference? Gun accidents happen. If someone is pointing a firearm at you it's a safe assumption you'll be shot, regardless of their intentions. Why do you think we never point guns at people, even if we're "sure" they're not loaded?
Perhaps. But they often have exclusive contracts with ticketmaster and offer NO WAY of buying tickets at the venue. I think this should be illegal. I come into the theater - tickets are on sale and available - but they tell me to go to the third party website (and pay lots of "convenience" fees).
Perhaps where you are. At least here the ticketing agencies I know of all have a physical presence (booths) around the place. Many have a presence in the larger venues they represent, as well as larger shopping malls. I've never had a problem walking into the store and talking to a person about buying a ticket. You still pay the "booking fee", but at least you made them actually do something now because a person's salary was involved.
My problem with this is that these scummy brokers make it hard to get seats when they open. They use automated scripts and any number of credit card numbers and ensure they hammer the vendor's servers as hard as possible. They do this because the Internet makes it so easy to do. While they're doing this of course I have to put up with timeouts, dropped connections and a general inability to get tickets.
The Internet has already removed the thrill of waiting in line to get tickets. Perhaps if these ticketing companies simply opened up for physical sales at the ticket booth (say) a day before they opened online sales they'd do far more damage to the professional scalpers. Waiting in line to buy a maximum of 4 tickets is a time consuming and expensive process when you're trying to rapidly buy up the largest number possible.
Die-hard fans will queue up to get tickets if they go online. Other fans will rush to the ticket office to get them at some point very early on in the sale process if that's the only way to get them.
Fuck the scalpers, start selling tickets via face to face transaction again and the problem is reduced.
I care; I really care. If I buy tickets for a show well in the future and plans change I want to be able to give the ticket to friends or sell it.
Conversely, I don't want to have to pay some ruthless ticketing company some percentage of the sale if I buy a ticket off someone who can no longer go to the show. The original purchaser paid what the promoter deemed the fair price, I'll pay roughly that. Why should they get more than they were prepared to accept initially when they aren't giving any more in return? I guarantee that getting some cut of the secondary sales won't make them put on a better show - it'll just put more money in some ticketing company's bank account.
Oil is also made of H and O
And a much much larger amount of C, which we find in much much smaller quantities in the air. But hey let's not let facts get in the way of a good story about turning air into oil.
because the 50 mpg car is better than all of them. that is the one you buy; that is the one that matters.
Miles per gallon is a good unit for the average consumer. The average consumer is an idiot and will buy the thing with the biggest numbers. This applies to everything. Obviously bigger is better. Why do you think AMD use that pathetic 2600+ rating on their CPUs even though they're clocked a lot slower than that. 200Hz TVs that are then fed with a 60Hz FTA signal or a 24Hz Blu-Ray cinematic title. PMPO ratings for "audio" gear that stagger the mind. The list goes on.
MPG is a good unit because in the case of MPG bigger is actually better, no doubts about it.
But can it predict the future with only a 5% margin for error simply be extrapolating the most likely outcome of all known variables?
What they will be doing is cutting off service to people who they are told, by a third party firm, are sharing copyrighted music
Which is their right - the ISP has the right as a company to decide who they do and don't provide service to, so long as that is on a non-discriminatory (race, religion, age, gender, etc) basis.
Where they'll fall down is if they cut off contracted customers then insist that said customer continues to pay the contracted rate. They will fall down because the recording industry has been repeatedly shown to use unreliable evidence, and even to fabricate evidence when they are losing. It has also been shown that these "infringement notices" do not constitute actual proof that the user did anything wrong, since they're often generated by a machine which scans for filenames and signatures on data that is shared publicly (FTP, HTTP, torrents, etc). Just because I call a file "2012.avi" and the first kilobyte has the same signature as a copy they know is on a torrent server doesn't mean that the whole file is that trite movie. It may just be conveniently the next number in some sequence.
If the user then litigates against the ISP for down time/costs they will (probably) win, since the ISP will have no actual evidence that the user violated any copyrights and hence ISP policy. The only way the ISP could come out of this winning is to insist that the "copyright holder" bring the user to court three times and prove to a court's satisfaction that the user was, in fact, infringing their rights.
Further to this, I could simply generate a script the repeatedly sends infringement notices to the ISP for every IP address in their allocated netblocks. No evidence necessary. Let's see how long it takes them to realise that their three strikes policy is useless.
Why not just ask Zaphod if you can borrow his glasses?
>The code OP wrote on his own is on his copyright and he can distribute under the GPL
Unless his contract of employment states otherwise, as many do.
I'd say at a guess (IANAL) that the software has been "distributed" to the OP as a requirement of performing his work. The GPL allows him to then fork and continue to use that code for non-work related purposes - even releasing it off his own back under the terms of the GPL. Presuming that the compiled binary links in any form of GPL'd code this is all perfectly fine in my view. The only thing that would be not permitted is stealing the copyright and re-licensing the parts of it that he doesn't own the rights to. But given time he could re-implement those parts so he did hold the copyright to them.
Of course, I am not a lawyer and the courts still do not fully grok the terms of software licensing and source code (black magic as far as they're concerned) so doing that could end badly even if the intent of the GPL is met.
I know this is the sort of thing that goes on at black hat conferences, but could this guy potentially get in some sort of legal trouble for demonstrating what he has found?
What pisses me off is that he is publishing this. Others probably know about it and are silently exploiting it. The banks don't care. They want to present an illusion of security because fixing security would cost them more money than it currently saves. They'll only do something about it when it becomes really widespread and starts actually costing serious green.
So comments like yours and from the article are really only from YOUR opinions. Now brace yourself for another shock, people have different opinions!
Here's another opinion. As someone who _had_ an iPhone and went back to a $50 Nokia I'll tell you the iPhone is junk. It's shiny, polished junk.
* The battery life was woeful when you're actually using it as intended. I was lucky to get a day out of the thing and I used it as an ereader for about an hour during my daily commute and a phone casually.
* It's not compatible (enough) with earlier iPod connectors/interfaces so my iPod capable car stereo won't work with it. A lot of other iPod capable stuff either failed or whinged at me. The phone quite often whinged too. Here's news Apple - if you use a "standard" connector on the thing then support it; don't change the damn internals and then tell the phone to whinge the thing on the other end is too old.
* It's locked down - you can only buy applications that Apple approve. If you jail break it you lose warranty, and on 3GS models the ability to reboot the fucking thing.
* There is no pr0n (well there is, but Jobs is in denial that Safari can be used to access pr0n).
* It crashed and froze up more often than not.
* I couldn't save anything in it that Apple doesn't want me to. That includes the videos/photos of my son that came attached to a series of MMS. They were forever trapped in the phone and I had to ask the sender to email me instead.
* I can't send files via email/MMS that Apple doesn't want me to. I can't send that hillarious video that I just received to anyone else because it _might_ fuck over some record company somewhere.
* I was stuck using iTunes to sync the address book and calendar. What kind of shit is that? Some people actually don't want to use iTunes. Apple won't expose those things in a standard way so I can't just use SyncML or something similar.
* The app store is full up with absolute garbage, low quality apps. There's an app for everything where "app" is defined as half-arsed P.O.S and "everything" is defined as {lim x->0 (1/x)}. Finding good quality software was difficult. A lot of the apps blatantly lie about their capability and you don't find out until you've paid for them.
* Apple is reportedly known to stiff app developers.
* Glass screen is uber-fragile; I know of several people who have managed to break them even when being mostly careful. It's such a common occurrence that a lot of insurance policies won't cover it anymore.
* Bluetooth is a joke. Can't even transfer files with it. Apple's answer... use email or MMS. What if I'm sitting right next to the person and want to save some data charges? Nope. Use email or MMS.
* Apple seem to pander to the big telcos about ripping out features. For example it wouldn't let me download large (>5M) files over my data plan, even though I paid for a certain amount of data and wanted to use it as _I_ saw fit, not Apple. What if I need a 15M file right now this very instant and I'm nowhere near a WiFi connection? Nope, I'm S.O.L just because Apple says so.
* No VoIP... what's with that? It's my phone, and if I want to use VoIP over my carrier's IP network then so be it. Don't tell me I can't. To top it all off, my carrier was a Skype partner and I could use Skype quite happily on their network (they encouraged it). Nope. Can't do that on an iPhone because Apple said so, even though my particular carrier is ok with it.
* Did I mention the battery life sucks?
* Apple doesn't seem interested in fixing any of the shortcomings that practically no other phone has, because they are all shortcomings that force you to reach out into data and call charges land even when you really don't need to.
The three things I don't like about my $50 Nokia are the lack of a QWERTY keyboard (a standard addition to many smart phones now), small screen size (again, fixed on modern more expensive phones) and the fact it's slow and limited in memory (also fixed by every other smart phone). Other than that, one of the cheapest non-smart models of phone kicks the shit out of an iPhone any day as far as I'm concerned.
The article makes it sound like the chems found their way there after the housing development. How much of this is the army's fault...
A lot of it is. I would hazard a guess that in their paranoid state they dumped the stuff and made sure that the records were highly classified and hard to find. After all, if it were public knowledge what's to stop your average $ENEMY coming along and digging it up and using it against you?
It is the government's fault for not cleaning it up after the war or making it clearly known that the land was contaminated.
X86 assembler programming, isn't the weather outside just splendid today?
And last, but not least, can she be programmed not to dump you?
Most of the dumping on Linux is of cores, so as long as you're not 'core' you should be fine.