How the people formed such a masochistic relationship with the big corporations -- one so strong that they'll stand in the street and protest against their own interests -- is beyond me.
politicians are in the pockets of corporations. they can't be paid directly, but politicians leave office at some point. many of them magically wind up on the boards of these corporations with dubious titles and high paychecks. corporations also help to get them elected by paying for ads, etc. a few TV ads can make all the difference. e
elections are bought and paid for. politicians are fully owned corporate entities in the US. social issues are just a smoke screen.
politicians align themselves (publicly) on divisive social issues like abortion, and quietly push the laws that suit corporations. sometimes, they even blend them together. the real blockage to a next gen healthcare in the US is insurance corporations who want to keep raping the US public. but somehow, it's been turned into a polarizing social issue with the anti-tax, less government folks fighting against it.
people almost blindly support politicians and the corporations behind them because they "represent" the social values they believe in. meanwhile, the social issues never get resolved. they are just a never-ending battle used to blind us from the real issues.
what can be worse than having no health insurance and having to wait until you are in imminent threat of death before getting treatment? one of my wife's relatives went to an emergency room with a bursting appendix and sat there for 8+ hours in agony before being treated. welcome to the USA.
that's the reality for many americans. the people you hear from here are most likely employed in high tech and bought into a group insurance plan, as am i at the moment. it's great as long as you have a job.
the WHO rates the US #37 in the world, behind countries like the domincan republic and costa rica. still think our system is the way to go? like a lot of other things in the US, everything is peachy as long as you are well-off. if you have a run of bad luck or pull a bad lot in life, too bad.
okay, but they do have a placebo effect, so why not fund them? if people are taking them, they are getting some relief. many people that are relying on homeopathic remedies will just resort to using the much more expensive prescription options. will this really save them money?
i have tried many homeopathic remedies and have never got any effect from them. i attribute this to the fact that i'm generally a glass 1/2 empty person so i expect medecine not to work. no placebo effect for me. that being said, i understand that the placebo effect improves people's lives so i'd never knock them for pursuing homeopathic remedies.
because the average person doesn't know or care that flash is resource intensive. they just want a way to access all of those videos and silly games. they know their phone can already play videos and games. why can't it play flash videos and games?
fingerprints grow back if you remove the epidermis. if you go deeper than that, you'll just create a new fingerprint with a new unique signature.
i guess you could keep cutting them every few weeks. the result of that would be you couldn't clock in to work most of the time. pretty much the same result as not taking the job in the first place... and a lot more painful.
haven't had a job before eh? seriously, welcome to the work force. employers can require you to do all sorts of things. it's perfectly legal because you are not required to work for them. there are some restrictions to that of course but fingerprinting, drug tests, background checks, etc are all well within the limits.
so yeah, mcdonalds is hiring, and they don't require fingerprinting. there is almost certainly a local branch in your town. that, or suck it up and enjoy your federally funded student do-nothing-and-get-paid job.
have you looked at the provider price for a new, unlocked cell phone lately?
yes i just bought one.
most are as much as, if not more than, a new desktop/laptop computer!
i am not an expert on the manufacturing process of cell phones or the cost of the components that go into them, but this is what i know: building something smaller cost more, and cell phones have to pay both hardware and software license fees to make use of things like 3G, google apps, etc in their phones.
Providers should give me a new laptop/phone/whatever if I drop it in water because that's what the fucking warranty they provided me says they'd do: I pay the monthly added fee for the damage warranty, and if my device is damaged, they will replace or repair it. There is no mention of a little pink sticker.
if they wouldn't cover your phone when moisture sensor was tripped, then no, you weren't paying for that. did you read what you signed?
almost all warranties are not worth it. you are better off taking you chances in the long run even if you eat it now and then on some devices. apple's applecare is the one exception to that (not my opinion, google on it and you'll see it written over and over).
regardless of what you expect, it doesn't change the fact that the iphone is made from cheap consumer grade electronics that have no special protection against heat, cold or moisture. this is no different than any other phone, laptop or any other so-called "portable" device... unless they specifically advertise as such (and then you pay 2x+).
i have no doubt i could take my laptop, my TV, my game console out in freezing temperatures and they'd work fine... would it increase their chance of failure over time? probably.
you did not consider the consequences of being "locked in" to any contract. if you move and get no reception in your new area, too bad, you signed a contract. if your financial situation changes, too bad, pay up.
and best of all, now that you are locked in, providers have little or no interest in keeping you happy as a customer. they can provide whatever crappy service they want and it doesn't matter because the majority of their customers are locked in.
in the US, providers don't compete on service. they compete on what shiny new phones they have. pretty inexpensive for the providers. the cost of giving you a discount on the shiny phone is insignificant compared to their savings from serving you with poor reception, technical support, and customer service over the course of your 2 year contract.
3)I don't think anyone will argue with me that the nominal purpose of a cell phone, is as a communication device that a person CAN CARRY AROUND WITH THEM.
you have pockets right? stick in an inside pocket and it won't get below freezing.
try to look at it from their perspective. a lot of devices are damaged by water. should they have to *prove* that the device was damaged by water? i guess they'd need to hire an independent investigator to give it any credence too. oops, i guess they might as well just replace any device that has the LCI tripped... it's going to cost too much to prove the water damage.
now, when i want a new iphone, i just expose it to moisture until it fails... then let it dry out. that's the problem. if you dry out a device that failed because moisture damage, you really can't easily tell. in fact, people that live in cold climates just get new iphones every couple of months by using them outside now and then.
oh by the way, that $600 iphone now costs $1000 to cover all the people that are repeatedly wrecking their phones with moisture damage.
personally, i'd rather pay a fair price for my devices and take care of them. i don't want to pay for dummies that don't take care of their stuff.
no consumer-grade electronic device is rated for those conditions. would you put your TV outside at night? your computer? same thing. just because it's a phone doesn't mean it's any more resistant to harsh conditions than any other electronics device.
i don't see why a manufacturer should give me a new laptop / phone / etc if i drop it in water. they cover defects not misuse. if they did cover things like that, the price goes up for everyone. i take care of my stuff and i'd rather not overpay up front so dummies can get a new laptop by dropping it in the tub.
Editing, typesetting, formatting, proofing, marketing, artwork, etc all still needs to be done.
many many books are just words and the "typesetting" is just fitting the words onto a page and is done by simple inexpensive software that can run on a PC. these same books have no artwork.
an e-marketplace (a bunch of servers, software and bandwidth (not free))
not free, but much cheaper than physically stocking the book onto shelves or warehouses and physically transporting the book to stores / consumers.
the cost difference is not the huge amount that people seem to think it is
yes, but is it more than, say, $0? publishers seem to want to charge us the same, if not more, for digital books.
most people grab a book, read it, then get another book. despite what/.'s will tell us about their insatiable reading habits, that's what most people do. needing to carry around tens or hundreds of books is a niche. i have no doubt that e-book owners have tens or hundreds of books on their device and regularly flaunt this to e-book non-believers, but they just aren't accessing all of those books on a daily basis.
there are some people that like tech for the sake of it, and involving tech in some aspect of their lives tends to pique their interest. i am not immune to this by any means. i remember how my handheld GPS renewed my interest in hiking for a while. i didn't like hiking as much as i liked watching my path being plotted and knowing how much elevation i had gained. i think this is the main draw of e-books at this point in their evolution. one more shiny device to tote around for people with $300 burning a hole in their pocket.
for the rest of us, that like reading for the sake of reading, a regular books is lighter, easier to read, open formatted, more durable, can be purchased used at a discount, and cheaper than an ebook and moreover it's ownership is transferrable. not to mention that publishers have drastically reduced their costs and passed on none of it to the consumer. i guess that's not a direct knock against e-readers, but if the books costed significantly less that sure would be a draw.
to be fair i think there are some uses that fall outside of traditional book reading that may work for ebooks. if you consume many periodicals... students with a ton of back breaking textbooks... for example.
as for their popularity among the masses, i live in a million+ person city and i can count the number of times i've seen someone reading an e-book on my hands. maybe people keep them at home.
when you go to xfinity.com and click "buy", you are right back at the old comcast site with all the same comcast services and prices. they really outdid themselves on this one.
If a Java bytecode file requires conversion at all to run on the Dalvik VM, then the Dalvik VM doesn't run Java bytecode.
sigh. in my first post, i said android can run third party JARs, not dalvik can run JavaVM bytecode. i should have said "use" not "run", sorry. no you can't just copy the JAR onto the phone and run it obviously. from a developer's perspective, it doesn't matter. you import a JAR into your android app project and it works.
i agreed with what you said in your last post if you care to read it. you made a silly assumption about being able to port swing to android. i am sorry about that, but you said it.
i don't know whether there is no equiv dex for the swing bytecode, or maybe there is an equiv, it can be converted, but the dalvik VM can't run it. regardless, you can't get swing on android. swing is just an example of one part the JDK that you can't run on android. there are others.
they aren't getting burned. the vast, vast majority of people don't have abusive ex-husbands, and don't have people stalking them and in general have nothing they want or need to hide from anyone. that's the average gmail user.
social networks work when they have critical mass... and that would have been achieved with buzz only a long time from now or maybe even never if they had defaulted to having it off. google made a decision that the average user would be served better by having it on by default.
if you are one of the very few people that has chosen to build a life where you need to hide from people, that might upset you... but it works fine for almost everyone else.
nope. google doesn't associate your name with mined data.
could they? sure. and if they did, eventually one of their 20k employees spread all over the world would blab, and google would be no more. they are a very rich company. if people lose trust in them and find out they are doing what you say, their core business goes down the tube. there's not motivation for them to do it.
maybe they should form a committee to discuss the forming of a committee to discuss how to go about deciding whether to use gmail? that seems to be the way these things work.
The problem is choice (users can already forward mail to Gmail; it doesn't make sense to force that option and not have a backup or opt-out mail server)."
the difference is that they won't have to manage / maintain campus mail servers. they won't have to field support calls related to email problems.
The VM, whether JVM or Dalvik VM, doesn't know how to execute Swing libraries, or any other libraries. That's the point of libraries: they're just code for some machine (virtual or otherwise) to execute. So if the Swing GUI library is statically linked into the same JAR as the application, the J/VM has all the bytecode to execute.
in the library uses an "instruction set" that the VM doesn't understand, it won't run obviously. it dalvik doesn't implement the instructions related to the swing GUI, it can't execute those. swing isn't like an implementation of a list. the VM hasn't to bridge to the native OS to be able to do things like draw widgets into a graphics window.
I can't see anyone else saying that the Dalvik VM can run Java bytecode. Only that it runs.dex binaries [wikipedia.org], which are not Java bytecode. Lots of people are saying [google.com] that it doesn't run Java bytecode.
let me quote from the wikipedia page on the dalvik VM,
"A tool called dx is used to convert Java.class files into the.dex format. Multiple classes are included in a single.dex file. Duplicate strings and other constants used in multiple class files are included only once in the.dex output to conserve space. Java bytecode is also converted into an alternate instruction set used by the Dalvik VM. An uncompressed.dex file is typically a few percent smaller in size than a compressed.jar (Java Archive) derived from the same.class files."
in other words, while dalvik doesn't run java bytecode directly, it is a 1-1 conversion process from java bytecode to dalvik dex and the SDK does that conversion process for you. you can import and.jar file into an eclipse android project and use it in your android app.
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How the people formed such a masochistic relationship with the big corporations -- one so strong that they'll stand in the street and protest against their own interests -- is beyond me.
politicians are in the pockets of corporations. they can't be paid directly, but politicians leave office at some point. many of them magically wind up on the boards of these corporations with dubious titles and high paychecks. corporations also help to get them elected by paying for ads, etc. a few TV ads can make all the difference. e
elections are bought and paid for. politicians are fully owned corporate entities in the US. social issues are just a smoke screen.
politicians align themselves (publicly) on divisive social issues like abortion, and quietly push the laws that suit corporations. sometimes, they even blend them together. the real blockage to a next gen healthcare in the US is insurance corporations who want to keep raping the US public. but somehow, it's been turned into a polarizing social issue with the anti-tax, less government folks fighting against it.
people almost blindly support politicians and the corporations behind them because they "represent" the social values they believe in. meanwhile, the social issues never get resolved. they are just a never-ending battle used to blind us from the real issues.
reading this discussion has made me sad.
what can be worse than having no health insurance and having to wait until you are in imminent threat of death before getting treatment? one of my wife's relatives went to an emergency room with a bursting appendix and sat there for 8+ hours in agony before being treated. welcome to the USA.
that's the reality for many americans. the people you hear from here are most likely employed in high tech and bought into a group insurance plan, as am i at the moment. it's great as long as you have a job.
the WHO rates the US #37 in the world, behind countries like the domincan republic and costa rica. still think our system is the way to go? like a lot of other things in the US, everything is peachy as long as you are well-off. if you have a run of bad luck or pull a bad lot in life, too bad.
okay, but they do have a placebo effect, so why not fund them? if people are taking them, they are getting some relief. many people that are relying on homeopathic remedies will just resort to using the much more expensive prescription options. will this really save them money?
i have tried many homeopathic remedies and have never got any effect from them. i attribute this to the fact that i'm generally a glass 1/2 empty person so i expect medecine not to work. no placebo effect for me. that being said, i understand that the placebo effect improves people's lives so i'd never knock them for pursuing homeopathic remedies.
because the average person doesn't know or care that flash is resource intensive. they just want a way to access all of those videos and silly games. they know their phone can already play videos and games. why can't it play flash videos and games?
fingerprints grow back if you remove the epidermis. if you go deeper than that, you'll just create a new fingerprint with a new unique signature.
i guess you could keep cutting them every few weeks. the result of that would be you couldn't clock in to work most of the time. pretty much the same result as not taking the job in the first place ... and a lot more painful.
haven't had a job before eh? seriously, welcome to the work force. employers can require you to do all sorts of things. it's perfectly legal because you are not required to work for them. there are some restrictions to that of course but fingerprinting, drug tests, background checks, etc are all well within the limits.
so yeah, mcdonalds is hiring, and they don't require fingerprinting. there is almost certainly a local branch in your town. that, or suck it up and enjoy your federally funded student do-nothing-and-get-paid job.
have you looked at the provider price for a new, unlocked cell phone lately?
yes i just bought one.
most are as much as, if not more than, a new desktop/laptop computer!
i am not an expert on the manufacturing process of cell phones or the cost of the components that go into them, but this is what i know: building something smaller cost more, and cell phones have to pay both hardware and software license fees to make use of things like 3G, google apps, etc in their phones.
Providers should give me a new laptop/phone/whatever if I drop it in water because that's what the fucking warranty they provided me says they'd do: I pay the monthly added fee for the damage warranty, and if my device is damaged, they will replace or repair it. There is no mention of a little pink sticker.
if they wouldn't cover your phone when moisture sensor was tripped, then no, you weren't paying for that. did you read what you signed?
almost all warranties are not worth it. you are better off taking you chances in the long run even if you eat it now and then on some devices. apple's applecare is the one exception to that (not my opinion, google on it and you'll see it written over and over).
regardless of what you expect, it doesn't change the fact that the iphone is made from cheap consumer grade electronics that have no special protection against heat, cold or moisture. this is no different than any other phone, laptop or any other so-called "portable" device ... unless they specifically advertise as such (and then you pay 2x+).
i have no doubt i could take my laptop, my TV, my game console out in freezing temperatures and they'd work fine ... would it increase their chance of failure over time? probably.
is Apple required to do something similar, to offer an alternative to Safari?
you did not consider the consequences of being "locked in" to any contract. if you move and get no reception in your new area, too bad, you signed a contract. if your financial situation changes, too bad, pay up.
and best of all, now that you are locked in, providers have little or no interest in keeping you happy as a customer. they can provide whatever crappy service they want and it doesn't matter because the majority of their customers are locked in.
in the US, providers don't compete on service. they compete on what shiny new phones they have. pretty inexpensive for the providers. the cost of giving you a discount on the shiny phone is insignificant compared to their savings from serving you with poor reception, technical support, and customer service over the course of your 2 year contract.
3)I don't think anyone will argue with me that the nominal purpose of a cell phone, is as a communication device that a person CAN CARRY AROUND WITH THEM.
you have pockets right? stick in an inside pocket and it won't get below freezing.
try to look at it from their perspective. a lot of devices are damaged by water. should they have to *prove* that the device was damaged by water? i guess they'd need to hire an independent investigator to give it any credence too. oops, i guess they might as well just replace any device that has the LCI tripped ... it's going to cost too much to prove the water damage.
now, when i want a new iphone, i just expose it to moisture until it fails ... then let it dry out. that's the problem. if you dry out a device that failed because moisture damage, you really can't easily tell. in fact, people that live in cold climates just get new iphones every couple of months by using them outside now and then.
oh by the way, that $600 iphone now costs $1000 to cover all the people that are repeatedly wrecking their phones with moisture damage.
personally, i'd rather pay a fair price for my devices and take care of them. i don't want to pay for dummies that don't take care of their stuff.
how did your lawsuit turn out?
no consumer-grade electronic device is rated for those conditions. would you put your TV outside at night? your computer? same thing. just because it's a phone doesn't mean it's any more resistant to harsh conditions than any other electronics device.
i don't see why a manufacturer should give me a new laptop / phone / etc if i drop it in water. they cover defects not misuse. if they did cover things like that, the price goes up for everyone. i take care of my stuff and i'd rather not overpay up front so dummies can get a new laptop by dropping it in the tub.
Editing, typesetting, formatting, proofing, marketing, artwork, etc all still needs to be done.
many many books are just words and the "typesetting" is just fitting the words onto a page and is done by simple inexpensive software that can run on a PC. these same books have no artwork.
an e-marketplace (a bunch of servers, software and bandwidth (not free))
not free, but much cheaper than physically stocking the book onto shelves or warehouses and physically transporting the book to stores / consumers.
the cost difference is not the huge amount that people seem to think it is
yes, but is it more than, say, $0? publishers seem to want to charge us the same, if not more, for digital books.
most people grab a book, read it, then get another book. despite what /.'s will tell us about their insatiable reading habits, that's what most people do. needing to carry around tens or hundreds of books is a niche. i have no doubt that e-book owners have tens or hundreds of books on their device and regularly flaunt this to e-book non-believers, but they just aren't accessing all of those books on a daily basis.
there are some people that like tech for the sake of it, and involving tech in some aspect of their lives tends to pique their interest. i am not immune to this by any means. i remember how my handheld GPS renewed my interest in hiking for a while. i didn't like hiking as much as i liked watching my path being plotted and knowing how much elevation i had gained. i think this is the main draw of e-books at this point in their evolution. one more shiny device to tote around for people with $300 burning a hole in their pocket.
for the rest of us, that like reading for the sake of reading, a regular books is lighter, easier to read, open formatted, more durable, can be purchased used at a discount, and cheaper than an ebook and moreover it's ownership is transferrable. not to mention that publishers have drastically reduced their costs and passed on none of it to the consumer. i guess that's not a direct knock against e-readers, but if the books costed significantly less that sure would be a draw.
to be fair i think there are some uses that fall outside of traditional book reading that may work for ebooks. if you consume many periodicals ... students with a ton of back breaking textbooks ... for example.
as for their popularity among the masses, i live in a million+ person city and i can count the number of times i've seen someone reading an e-book on my hands. maybe people keep them at home.
when you go to xfinity.com and click "buy", you are right back at the old comcast site with all the same comcast services and prices. they really outdid themselves on this one.
If a Java bytecode file requires conversion at all to run on the Dalvik VM, then the Dalvik VM doesn't run Java bytecode.
sigh. in my first post, i said android can run third party JARs, not dalvik can run JavaVM bytecode. i should have said "use" not "run", sorry. no you can't just copy the JAR onto the phone and run it obviously. from a developer's perspective, it doesn't matter. you import a JAR into your android app project and it works.
i agreed with what you said in your last post if you care to read it. you made a silly assumption about being able to port swing to android. i am sorry about that, but you said it.
i don't know whether there is no equiv dex for the swing bytecode, or maybe there is an equiv, it can be converted, but the dalvik VM can't run it. regardless, you can't get swing on android. swing is just an example of one part the JDK that you can't run on android. there are others.
i think your dog is due for another kicking.
they aren't getting burned. the vast, vast majority of people don't have abusive ex-husbands, and don't have people stalking them and in general have nothing they want or need to hide from anyone. that's the average gmail user.
social networks work when they have critical mass ... and that would have been achieved with buzz only a long time from now or maybe even never if they had defaulted to having it off. google made a decision that the average user would be served better by having it on by default.
if you are one of the very few people that has chosen to build a life where you need to hide from people, that might upset you ... but it works fine for almost everyone else.
nope. google doesn't associate your name with mined data.
could they? sure. and if they did, eventually one of their 20k employees spread all over the world would blab, and google would be no more. they are a very rich company. if people lose trust in them and find out they are doing what you say, their core business goes down the tube. there's not motivation for them to do it.
you are right. i suggest you run your own tinfoil covered mail server in your basement if you are not already. it's the only way to be sure.
maybe they should form a committee to discuss the forming of a committee to discuss how to go about deciding whether to use gmail? that seems to be the way these things work.
The problem is choice (users can already forward mail to Gmail; it doesn't make sense to force that option and not have a backup or opt-out mail server)."
the difference is that they won't have to manage / maintain campus mail servers. they won't have to field support calls related to email problems.
The VM, whether JVM or Dalvik VM, doesn't know how to execute Swing libraries, or any other libraries. That's the point of libraries: they're just code for some machine (virtual or otherwise) to execute. So if the Swing GUI library is statically linked into the same JAR as the application, the J/VM has all the bytecode to execute.
in the library uses an "instruction set" that the VM doesn't understand, it won't run obviously. it dalvik doesn't implement the instructions related to the swing GUI, it can't execute those. swing isn't like an implementation of a list. the VM hasn't to bridge to the native OS to be able to do things like draw widgets into a graphics window.
I can't see anyone else saying that the Dalvik VM can run Java bytecode. Only that it runs .dex binaries [wikipedia.org], which are not Java bytecode. Lots of people are saying [google.com] that it doesn't run Java bytecode.
let me quote from the wikipedia page on the dalvik VM,
"A tool called dx is used to convert Java .class files into the .dex format. Multiple classes are included in a single .dex file. Duplicate strings and other constants used in multiple class files are included only once in the .dex output to conserve space. Java bytecode is also converted into an alternate instruction set used by the Dalvik VM. An uncompressed .dex file is typically a few percent smaller in size than a compressed .jar (Java Archive) derived from the same .class files."
in other words, while dalvik doesn't run java bytecode directly, it is a 1-1 conversion process from java bytecode to dalvik dex and the SDK does that conversion process for you. you can import and .jar file into an eclipse android project and use it in your android app.