I've seen plenty of stories where Joe hacked this, or John hacked that or Larry came up with this ingenious hack. But since when is slashdot concerned with the details of said hack?
If your news story is "If you hack your Mac OS X system files and then upgrade, you'll get a blue screen," then that's not news on slashdot. Anyone crowd who is "linux-heavy" should know this and go "duh!", and anyone who is not in that crowd has no idea what that means anyway.
The news here is not that exists but the details of what a proper OS X hacker might do to avoid getting the blue screen. That type of information properly belongs on a hacker website properly formatted and dedicated to handle this type of information. Slashdot's never handled that kind of hacker detail and I don't believe they intend to, nor should they.
First let me say that my country, the ol' U.S. of A. is far from perfect. Second, let me say as an anonymous coward, you fail to let us know your own country. The UK and Canada, two countries I admire, currently have their own issues they are dealing with. You could be posting from some third world country that believes that anything the US stands for is something you refuse to stand for and therefore you are anti-constitution. I don't know. But don't throw stones at our huge glass houses. And don't shit pan the US constitution without a discussion of what failed and what didn't.
What the constitution is: 1) A document of precise, but not perfect, rules by which to found and run a government with very specific checks and balances so that no one branch of government is more powerful than others, so that not only there would be cooperation in order to pass important laws, but there would also be some competition. 2) A document with an addendum to preserve specific human rights the founders thought were important so that no state could pass laws to take away those rights. 3) A document that is changeable over time, albeit with a little difficulty, so that the change isn't whimsical.
What the constitution is not: 1) A suicide pact 2) A written in stone monolithic set of commandments 3) Psychic paper which compels the reader to always obey it's rules 4) A document that can pick up a gun and enforce itself
What happened to the constitution was that it was ignored. It was ignored because over a very long time, the public was pushed in a specific direction believing that the direction we were going was the proper one. This involved countless economic and social reasons. And it just got worse. Most people didn't see it that way, because it didn't impact them personally, and the average wage was not keeping up with inflation, the rich were getting richer and poor getting poorer, more people being impacted by NSL letters, more soldiers were dying in Iraq for what we knew to be a lie, a terribly managed natural disaster, and then finally an economic collapse followed by the most inept management seen in living memory. Eventually the public would demand a shift to a different direction.
What happened on first Tuesday of November in 2006 was the first step in what shows us the first thing that is good about the constitution. As things get worse, as more and more people are fed up with bad decisions, people begin to exercise the single most important constitutional power they have... a vote. The 2006 election was the first inkling that the US was fed up with it's president. So we voted another party into power. This didn't fix the problem, this didn't even stop the bleeding, but it did apply a tourniquet. Since then, the political will was slowly shifting away from Bush. This allowed all these things to properly come to light. Then in 2008 we used that constitutional power again, and we soundly rejected anything and everything that man stood for.
And while we flexed the constitutional rights there, other groups were going out and using the constitution for what it was for, defending these rights that Bush and cronies tried to take away. Such processes take time, and they are bearing fruit now. You may want these things to happen immediately, and am right there with you, but they don't. If we did things like this whimsically, then everything we'd do would be on a whim, and we'd be in worse shape as more bad decisions snuck into a system that didn't properly vett them, as the US system is designed to try to do.
One of the reasons why it took so long to fix this is because the will of the people, partially driven by stupidity, partially driven by fear, partially driven by group think, and partially driven by a very corrupt and very bad set of politicians, was against changing the status quo. But when it got really bad, the constitution succeeded by giving us an opportunity to return from the edge, and I think we have. A court decision like this is proof of
Jobs is a marketer. What happens is a programmer gets a cool idea, writes a prototype, and sends it up to the execs for review along with a dozen other ideas. Then jobs gets baked, reads through proposals, sees the cool one and goes "OMG I can so sell that to millions of n00bs! A brilliant marketing plan for this just popped into my head! I will 0wnz j00r w0rldz with my reality distortion field muahahahahahahaha!!" Developers get paid, Jobs is triumphant, and the result is not perfect but pretty good, incredibly stylish, and everyone except the most die hard slashdotters and luddites will want one.
I know you are making a joke, but let's be serious for a second.
Is it possible to be a food addict?
Aren't we all food addicts?
Isn't this something we all need to ensure our survival until we spread our genes?
And yet we know what food addiction is, it's called gluttony, and it's pretty common in the US these days.
Not all people are sex addicts. Having sex every day is just a healthy sex life. Having sex to the point that you neglect your health, take unnecessary risks, put yourself or others in harms way, or otherwise damage your life or the lives of those around you. You can truly be clinically addicted to almost anything if this is the case. If you game 12 hours a day, sleep 2 and work and eat the rest of the time and you can interact well enough to live your own life and not bother anyone else, you aren't addicted. We call it addiction because we believe the person is connected to the inanimate object in front of them. It's usually not true, it's just that people feel more comfortable using it as the tool that it is, for entertainment and communication.
It's a machine, Ronald. It doesn't get pissed off, it doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it doesn't laugh at your jokes... IT JUST RUNS PROGRAMS!
Ronald's premise makes two key assumptions which are deeply flawed:
1) It's entirely the human soldier's fault that he's unethical. 2) The person directly in charge of putting the robot to work is entirely ethical.
I pose that the soldiers in Iraq haven't been trained to deal with a situation like this properly. The fact that 17 percent of US soldiers in Iraq think all people should be treated as insurgents is more reflective of poor education on the US military's part. The US military prides itself on having it's soldiers think as one unit, and 17 is a very high discrepancy that they have failed to take care of, mostly because there are plenty in the leadership who think that way themselves. Treating everyone they come across as an insurgent and not treating them in the proper manner is a great way to "lose the war" by not having the trust of the people you are trying to protect.
It's that same leadership who'd program a robot like this to patrol our borders and think it's perfectly ethical to shoot any human on sight crossing the border illegally, or treat every citizen as an insurgent, all in the name of "security."
Besides, a robot is completely incompassionate. A properly trained human has the ability to appear compassionate and yet treat the situation skeptically until they know for sure the target is or is not a threat.
This is not a problem that can be solved with technology. The concept is a great project and hopefully will be a wonderful step forward in AI development, but at no point will it solve any "ethical" problem in terms of making war "more ethical."
Remember, the people who designed the Internet (incorrectly) assumed that all computers on the network would be trustworthy, so the rules are pretty loose.
C'mon, Macworld is better than this. Okay, the article is critically reviewing the anti-phishing feature, but the writer seems to have a bone to pick and in order to post an emotionally charged article, takes things one step too far.
The internet was intentionally designed, itself, not to have a centralized authorizing body for each and every PC and server on the planet. It's decentralized on purpose. When a so called journalist writes something like this, I have a problem, because to me it's just pandering to the security freaks. It's a bit off topic, but I also have a problem reading the rest of the article because it makes it hard to trust what the guy has to say. There's probably good facts in the article, and if there's a problem Apple should be criticized, but I can't possibly continue reading when I see something stupid like this.
Hell the first thing I thought of wasn't sports, but safety. Is this something you can make work clothes out of so that if you work on a boat or pier, if you fall in, can it be made so your clothes don't absorb water and make it harder for you to swim to safety. If the water doesn't get absorbed, you could put a layer of insulation underneath it to help stay warm in cold water to help defend you from hypothermia.
But obviously the money is in selling a swimmer a $10,000 swimsuit so they can shave.02 seconds off their swim time in the hopes of beating Michael Phelps in the next olympics.
In the case of Vista, enterprises have stayed away in droves.
Which is a point I've been making for months to pro Vista people who don't understand why this is such a disaster and keep claiming "Vista isn't that bad." What they don't understand is that for the business market, Vista is extraordinarily bad!! That's extraordinarily bad for Microsoft, and which is their main source of income. Business are still buying XP licenses for new machines, but they aren't upgrading current machines to Vista because it's an admin nightmare and companies have lost complete trust in Vista.
Microsoft has then been trying to fix the problem by putting out odd consumer ads? The problem isn't primarily with consumers, which is why their ad campaign is broken, too.
Personally, I hated megablocks, because the bricks are not made with the same quality as Legos. Legos have a very exacting standard they make for each brick, to guarentee they fit together and stay together when you want to, and come apart when you need them to. Megablocks I found are looser, and don't stay together as often. I'm anal. I played with Legos when I was young, but when I grew up, my son and I put together some megablocks sets he got from someone else. The comparative quality was very poor.
However, in terms of business, a competition between Megablocks and Legos is a good thing. Legos wants (I hope) to be a higher quality toy, while Megablocks is for those who are less anal and more frugal. They have carved out their own niches and provide choice for the consumer. Additional players in the market should help.
At the same time, I hope someone tackles with the idea that lego sets are too specialized now. There are so many specialty pieces that it limits the amount you can create with a single set, and limits the replay value. Back in the 80s, there were tons of new pieces that weren't all just bricks, but those pieces could still be creatively used to build new models from your imagination. The odd shaped clear plastic panel that curls around the model just so and only has one real use is annoying.
A long time ago someone posted here something similar along these lines, stating emphatically that iTunes was a crappy MP3 player because it wasn't skinnable. Why the average computer user would need or want a skinnable MP3 player was beyond me. However I remember the early days of Winamp and Macamp. Those were the days out on the edge when people ripped MP3s and they were just starting to get popular, and file sharing was harder because not everyone had a CD burner and connection speeds were a lot slower and only file sharers had MP3s.
As a badge of honor these file sharers would play their songs on their PCs or Macs, and would have the most gaudy obnoxious skins they could create for their own players. However, at the time, I found the players didn't make sense to me, and had very few other features, and basically did not make it fun to play MP3 files... but OMG I could skin the hell out of it!
So for someone who liked simplicity and ease of use, I said F*** this I'll stick with CDs.
Later, iTunes came on the scene and I decided to try it. After a few minutes of fiddling, it made sense! And half that time was basically ridding myself of the expectations I had set for myself thanks to Winamp and Macamp.
Love them or hate them, Apple makes good software, and iTunes is designed with a more mainstream user in mind. This MP3 player is designed with those file sharing MP3 ripping technoheads who like to show off their leet skillz by skinning their MP3 software to show how badass they are. iTunes is designed to work well and manage content for everyone else.
The only duty google has is to please it's shareholders, if you were to 'redistribute' the wealth of large companies that annoy you like you say, well that isn't exactly encouraging for people to try to form successful companies is it, what with them putting in the work and collectively everyone else getting the profit.
Just to clarify something, Google has a duty to it's consumers as well. The two consumer groups it has are:
1) Searchers. This is the obvious one, but what's less obvious is that they aren't paying money direct to google, so they aren't directly a source of revenue. However, we do "pay" with our eyeballs as we see Google ads on their search engine. It's their duty to make sure as many eyeballs are on those ads, but at the same time don't piss us off so much that we go somewhere else for search content because ads are choking the results. Their duty is to keep us searching as much as possible because that helps with their primary source of revenue.
2) Ad buyers. Less obvious to the average joe, but of course their primary source of revenue. Would yahoo be a good thing for these ad buyers, or would the decrease in competition increase prices and reduce choice? It's their duty to ad buyers as consumers to provide a good product, and a duty to the market place to not act like a monopoly or stifle real competition.
The shareholders don't care about these things, they are just about getting more money. However, as one of those "obama liberals" who wants to "spread the wealth," I want to do so by maintaining and encouraging competition, and reminding everyone that we should be looking out for the consumer, not share holders.
Companies that put shareholders first and consumers second should not be tolerated. Companies that put consumers first often find that the shareholders are taken care of in the bargain.
There is no question that the election of a half-Arab, half-Black child of a broken home to the Presidency of the United States *says* something to the world and to history about us as a country, as an ideal, that can never, ever, be taken away.
I think idiotic statements like are what defined what the rest of the world thought of the US before this election, don't keep it up. You almost made a good point until you detracted from your entire statement with this nonsense.
Obama's mother is from Wichita, Kansas, and is quite caucasian. His biological father is from Kenya, and was ethnically called a Luo, a subsaharan African ethnic group. His adopted father, while in fact a muslim, was ethnically indonesian. Not all muslims are arabs.
Arab is an ethnic term, and there is no evidence that Obama is in any way Arab (just like there's no evidence he's muslim). I can't fathom why you said this, other than the fact that you might be thinking arab=muslim. If that was the case, then that's just plain idiotic, and is yet another reason why the world hates us, because if we can't get that right, we can't get foreign policy right.
Because a lawyer's job is to make the strongest argument. The stronger argument is that the person who "owned" the computer called the police. The question then becomes did the owner give the police proper permission. If they did, then that's the strongest argument. If they did not, then they went with this argument because it's all they had.
And if someone screwed up, that person needs to be slapped around for not following proper procedure.
"Without a doubt, people will compare the G1 to the iPhone and out of the box you honestly have to say the G1 wins over the original iPhone with wireless syncing capability, cut/copy/paste, games, a wireless music store, application store and 3rd party application support, integrated GPS, multiple client IM clients, and multi-tasking capability."
That's in the conclusion on the last page. I can't find mention of the iPhone 3G. And making such a statement is silly. It's like touting all the advantages a 2008 Ford F150 has over a 1957 chevy. It's not useful information to a critical observer, and is a poor choice in a review. At the very least it's an ignorant error of omission not realizing that a useful review compares current tech to current tech. Perhaps the reviewer didn't have access to an iPhone 3G, but I can't see where they claim that. But it detracts from the review to make that comparison. It does mislead less critical readers, either by accident or on purpose.
You also have no impirical evidence that the G1 will catch up. There's a good educated guess that the G1, and personally I believe that it will, and we all base this on the history of Google. However, that doesn't mean the iPhone won't continue to move forward. It also doesn't mean T-mobile won't stiffle something in updates. And until Google does release an update, it's vaporware. A responsible review fairly compares to current competing products.
So what you have is a review handicapping the iPhone and giving excuses to Android so it seems like its further along that it is. We have to give both phones the same diligent level of critique.
Instead of investing in the top of the company infusing it with cash, how about we let the company fail and spend money on training the workers to find new jobs? It takes care of the jobs problem and gets rid of a company that's big and bulky and clumsy, and it gives absolutely no benefits to the CEO who, even though the company had mediocre performance, was still making millions of dollars.
If Tesla goes under, the same philosophy should apply, but someone could buy Tesla's technology and try to be profitable with it.
"Because he's comparing the first generation of this phone to the first generation of that phone. That's not unreasonable, given that Android will see major upgrades quickly, just as the iPhone OS did."
Timing is everything, and everything moves quickly in the tech industry. The original iPhone without 3G is over a year old. That's old news. By the time Google has updated it's phone, Apple will have more updates too. Comparing what you can get now to a piece of technology that's a year old is dishonest and smacks of the old tactic where PC consumer mags that would always compare the latest PCs to older Macs and declaring that PCs won in head to head tests.
This is not properly comparing apples to apples (or as the case may be Apples to Androids). Compare what you can get now from Apple/AT&T with what you can get now from Google/T-mobile. I have no desire here to smack down google or be an Apple fanboi, I'm just saying for a smart review, you need proper comparisons.
See the problem with answering questions honestly is that americans don't want to hear the truth. Carter proved that out when he asked the americans to tighten their belts and live within their means. They called his speech a "malaise" because Americans didn't want to hear it or accept it. So Reagan was voted in when he said "Carter is wrong, you can have anything you want!"
Bush Sr. said no new taxes. But a tax hike was required at an important time, so he helped raise taxes. He was then voted out.
A significant portion of Americans believe that the US government is required to preserve their specific way of life, no matter what that is. What's why we require so much foreign oil. That's why we have such large cars. That's why so many people have such large credit card debt. We want our politicians to tell us we can have everything, and they want them to ensure that we can get it. Few Americans are willing to accept that maybe we personally all have to accept responsibility and start buying less and tighten our belts and accept higher taxes. We have to start thinking about quality of life, and not "quantity" of life.
This is a silly question. Windows of course has nothing to do with the problem. People are putting off software investments because they can't afford it. Credit has dried up and businesses can't get capital to spend on expansions. Smart businesses see software as an investment to grow, but if there's no business to grow into, or they can't get the money, then they don't invest and grow slowly, along with the rest of the economy. Now instead of floating loans they have to save money.
Automobile repair shops are doing very well, because more people are repairing cars rather than buying new ones. Same goes for software. Why buy new software and hardware when you can maintain the old.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen plenty of stories where Joe hacked this, or John hacked that or Larry came up with this ingenious hack. But since when is slashdot concerned with the details of said hack?
If your news story is "If you hack your Mac OS X system files and then upgrade, you'll get a blue screen," then that's not news on slashdot. Anyone crowd who is "linux-heavy" should know this and go "duh!", and anyone who is not in that crowd has no idea what that means anyway.
The news here is not that exists but the details of what a proper OS X hacker might do to avoid getting the blue screen. That type of information properly belongs on a hacker website properly formatted and dedicated to handle this type of information. Slashdot's never handled that kind of hacker detail and I don't believe they intend to, nor should they.
First let me say that my country, the ol' U.S. of A. is far from perfect. Second, let me say as an anonymous coward, you fail to let us know your own country. The UK and Canada, two countries I admire, currently have their own issues they are dealing with. You could be posting from some third world country that believes that anything the US stands for is something you refuse to stand for and therefore you are anti-constitution. I don't know. But don't throw stones at our huge glass houses. And don't shit pan the US constitution without a discussion of what failed and what didn't.
What the constitution is:
1) A document of precise, but not perfect, rules by which to found and run a government with very specific checks and balances so that no one branch of government is more powerful than others, so that not only there would be cooperation in order to pass important laws, but there would also be some competition.
2) A document with an addendum to preserve specific human rights the founders thought were important so that no state could pass laws to take away those rights.
3) A document that is changeable over time, albeit with a little difficulty, so that the change isn't whimsical.
What the constitution is not:
1) A suicide pact
2) A written in stone monolithic set of commandments
3) Psychic paper which compels the reader to always obey it's rules
4) A document that can pick up a gun and enforce itself
What happened to the constitution was that it was ignored. It was ignored because over a very long time, the public was pushed in a specific direction believing that the direction we were going was the proper one. This involved countless economic and social reasons. And it just got worse. Most people didn't see it that way, because it didn't impact them personally, and the average wage was not keeping up with inflation, the rich were getting richer and poor getting poorer, more people being impacted by NSL letters, more soldiers were dying in Iraq for what we knew to be a lie, a terribly managed natural disaster, and then finally an economic collapse followed by the most inept management seen in living memory. Eventually the public would demand a shift to a different direction.
What happened on first Tuesday of November in 2006 was the first step in what shows us the first thing that is good about the constitution. As things get worse, as more and more people are fed up with bad decisions, people begin to exercise the single most important constitutional power they have... a vote. The 2006 election was the first inkling that the US was fed up with it's president. So we voted another party into power. This didn't fix the problem, this didn't even stop the bleeding, but it did apply a tourniquet. Since then, the political will was slowly shifting away from Bush. This allowed all these things to properly come to light. Then in 2008 we used that constitutional power again, and we soundly rejected anything and everything that man stood for.
And while we flexed the constitutional rights there, other groups were going out and using the constitution for what it was for, defending these rights that Bush and cronies tried to take away. Such processes take time, and they are bearing fruit now. You may want these things to happen immediately, and am right there with you, but they don't. If we did things like this whimsically, then everything we'd do would be on a whim, and we'd be in worse shape as more bad decisions snuck into a system that didn't properly vett them, as the US system is designed to try to do.
One of the reasons why it took so long to fix this is because the will of the people, partially driven by stupidity, partially driven by fear, partially driven by group think, and partially driven by a very corrupt and very bad set of politicians, was against changing the status quo. But when it got really bad, the constitution succeeded by giving us an opportunity to return from the edge, and I think we have. A court decision like this is proof of
Please! Sarcasm is the highest form of humor. It requires a good deal of intelligence to understand well crafted sarcasm.
Note the list of people who have trouble detecting sarcasm:
Dementia sufferers .NET programmers
Aspergers syndrome sufferers
Autism sufferers
Rednecks
Republicans
Fundamentalists
And it's quite obvious that all these people are suffering from mental disorders so it makes sense why they can't detect sarcasm.
Jobs is a marketer. What happens is a programmer gets a cool idea, writes a prototype, and sends it up to the execs for review along with a dozen other ideas. Then jobs gets baked, reads through proposals, sees the cool one and goes "OMG I can so sell that to millions of n00bs! A brilliant marketing plan for this just popped into my head! I will 0wnz j00r w0rldz with my reality distortion field muahahahahahahaha!!" Developers get paid, Jobs is triumphant, and the result is not perfect but pretty good, incredibly stylish, and everyone except the most die hard slashdotters and luddites will want one.
I know you are making a joke, but let's be serious for a second.
Is it possible to be a food addict?
Aren't we all food addicts?
Isn't this something we all need to ensure our survival until we spread our genes?
And yet we know what food addiction is, it's called gluttony, and it's pretty common in the US these days.
Not all people are sex addicts. Having sex every day is just a healthy sex life. Having sex to the point that you neglect your health, take unnecessary risks, put yourself or others in harms way, or otherwise damage your life or the lives of those around you. You can truly be clinically addicted to almost anything if this is the case. If you game 12 hours a day, sleep 2 and work and eat the rest of the time and you can interact well enough to live your own life and not bother anyone else, you aren't addicted. We call it addiction because we believe the person is connected to the inanimate object in front of them. It's usually not true, it's just that people feel more comfortable using it as the tool that it is, for entertainment and communication.
To paraphrase my favorite movie of 1986:
It's a machine, Ronald. It doesn't get pissed off, it doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it doesn't laugh at your jokes... IT JUST RUNS PROGRAMS!
Ronald's premise makes two key assumptions which are deeply flawed:
1) It's entirely the human soldier's fault that he's unethical.
2) The person directly in charge of putting the robot to work is entirely ethical.
I pose that the soldiers in Iraq haven't been trained to deal with a situation like this properly. The fact that 17 percent of US soldiers in Iraq think all people should be treated as insurgents is more reflective of poor education on the US military's part. The US military prides itself on having it's soldiers think as one unit, and 17 is a very high discrepancy that they have failed to take care of, mostly because there are plenty in the leadership who think that way themselves. Treating everyone they come across as an insurgent and not treating them in the proper manner is a great way to "lose the war" by not having the trust of the people you are trying to protect.
It's that same leadership who'd program a robot like this to patrol our borders and think it's perfectly ethical to shoot any human on sight crossing the border illegally, or treat every citizen as an insurgent, all in the name of "security."
Besides, a robot is completely incompassionate. A properly trained human has the ability to appear compassionate and yet treat the situation skeptically until they know for sure the target is or is not a threat.
This is not a problem that can be solved with technology. The concept is a great project and hopefully will be a wonderful step forward in AI development, but at no point will it solve any "ethical" problem in terms of making war "more ethical."
Remember, the people who designed the Internet (incorrectly) assumed that all computers on the network would be trustworthy, so the rules are pretty loose.
C'mon, Macworld is better than this. Okay, the article is critically reviewing the anti-phishing feature, but the writer seems to have a bone to pick and in order to post an emotionally charged article, takes things one step too far.
The internet was intentionally designed, itself, not to have a centralized authorizing body for each and every PC and server on the planet. It's decentralized on purpose. When a so called journalist writes something like this, I have a problem, because to me it's just pandering to the security freaks. It's a bit off topic, but I also have a problem reading the rest of the article because it makes it hard to trust what the guy has to say. There's probably good facts in the article, and if there's a problem Apple should be criticized, but I can't possibly continue reading when I see something stupid like this.
Hell the first thing I thought of wasn't sports, but safety. Is this something you can make work clothes out of so that if you work on a boat or pier, if you fall in, can it be made so your clothes don't absorb water and make it harder for you to swim to safety. If the water doesn't get absorbed, you could put a layer of insulation underneath it to help stay warm in cold water to help defend you from hypothermia.
But obviously the money is in selling a swimmer a $10,000 swimsuit so they can shave .02 seconds off their swim time in the hopes of beating Michael Phelps in the next olympics.
I'm sorry... but Joe six-pack does not pass the turing test. There's that little detail about the machine having to display intelligence...
In the case of Vista, enterprises have stayed away in droves.
Which is a point I've been making for months to pro Vista people who don't understand why this is such a disaster and keep claiming "Vista isn't that bad." What they don't understand is that for the business market, Vista is extraordinarily bad!! That's extraordinarily bad for Microsoft, and which is their main source of income. Business are still buying XP licenses for new machines, but they aren't upgrading current machines to Vista because it's an admin nightmare and companies have lost complete trust in Vista.
Microsoft has then been trying to fix the problem by putting out odd consumer ads? The problem isn't primarily with consumers, which is why their ad campaign is broken, too.
Personally, I hated megablocks, because the bricks are not made with the same quality as Legos. Legos have a very exacting standard they make for each brick, to guarentee they fit together and stay together when you want to, and come apart when you need them to. Megablocks I found are looser, and don't stay together as often. I'm anal. I played with Legos when I was young, but when I grew up, my son and I put together some megablocks sets he got from someone else. The comparative quality was very poor.
However, in terms of business, a competition between Megablocks and Legos is a good thing. Legos wants (I hope) to be a higher quality toy, while Megablocks is for those who are less anal and more frugal. They have carved out their own niches and provide choice for the consumer. Additional players in the market should help.
At the same time, I hope someone tackles with the idea that lego sets are too specialized now. There are so many specialty pieces that it limits the amount you can create with a single set, and limits the replay value. Back in the 80s, there were tons of new pieces that weren't all just bricks, but those pieces could still be creatively used to build new models from your imagination. The odd shaped clear plastic panel that curls around the model just so and only has one real use is annoying.
... if it wasn't for the fact that one of the two employees mentioned happens to be the single majority stockholder of Microsoft.
A long time ago someone posted here something similar along these lines, stating emphatically that iTunes was a crappy MP3 player because it wasn't skinnable. Why the average computer user would need or want a skinnable MP3 player was beyond me. However I remember the early days of Winamp and Macamp. Those were the days out on the edge when people ripped MP3s and they were just starting to get popular, and file sharing was harder because not everyone had a CD burner and connection speeds were a lot slower and only file sharers had MP3s.
As a badge of honor these file sharers would play their songs on their PCs or Macs, and would have the most gaudy obnoxious skins they could create for their own players. However, at the time, I found the players didn't make sense to me, and had very few other features, and basically did not make it fun to play MP3 files... but OMG I could skin the hell out of it!
So for someone who liked simplicity and ease of use, I said F*** this I'll stick with CDs.
Later, iTunes came on the scene and I decided to try it. After a few minutes of fiddling, it made sense! And half that time was basically ridding myself of the expectations I had set for myself thanks to Winamp and Macamp.
Love them or hate them, Apple makes good software, and iTunes is designed with a more mainstream user in mind. This MP3 player is designed with those file sharing MP3 ripping technoheads who like to show off their leet skillz by skinning their MP3 software to show how badass they are. iTunes is designed to work well and manage content for everyone else.
The only duty google has is to please it's shareholders, if you were to 'redistribute' the wealth of large companies that annoy you like you say, well that isn't exactly encouraging for people to try to form successful companies is it, what with them putting in the work and collectively everyone else getting the profit.
Just to clarify something, Google has a duty to it's consumers as well. The two consumer groups it has are:
1) Searchers. This is the obvious one, but what's less obvious is that they aren't paying money direct to google, so they aren't directly a source of revenue. However, we do "pay" with our eyeballs as we see Google ads on their search engine. It's their duty to make sure as many eyeballs are on those ads, but at the same time don't piss us off so much that we go somewhere else for search content because ads are choking the results. Their duty is to keep us searching as much as possible because that helps with their primary source of revenue.
2) Ad buyers. Less obvious to the average joe, but of course their primary source of revenue. Would yahoo be a good thing for these ad buyers, or would the decrease in competition increase prices and reduce choice? It's their duty to ad buyers as consumers to provide a good product, and a duty to the market place to not act like a monopoly or stifle real competition.
The shareholders don't care about these things, they are just about getting more money. However, as one of those "obama liberals" who wants to "spread the wealth," I want to do so by maintaining and encouraging competition, and reminding everyone that we should be looking out for the consumer, not share holders.
Companies that put shareholders first and consumers second should not be tolerated. Companies that put consumers first often find that the shareholders are taken care of in the bargain.
There is no question that the election of a half-Arab, half-Black child of a broken home to the Presidency of the United States *says* something to the world and to history about us as a country, as an ideal, that can never, ever, be taken away.
I think idiotic statements like are what defined what the rest of the world thought of the US before this election, don't keep it up. You almost made a good point until you detracted from your entire statement with this nonsense.
Obama's mother is from Wichita, Kansas, and is quite caucasian. His biological father is from Kenya, and was ethnically called a Luo, a subsaharan African ethnic group. His adopted father, while in fact a muslim, was ethnically indonesian. Not all muslims are arabs.
Arab is an ethnic term, and there is no evidence that Obama is in any way Arab (just like there's no evidence he's muslim). I can't fathom why you said this, other than the fact that you might be thinking arab=muslim. If that was the case, then that's just plain idiotic, and is yet another reason why the world hates us, because if we can't get that right, we can't get foreign policy right.
Because a lawyer's job is to make the strongest argument. The stronger argument is that the person who "owned" the computer called the police. The question then becomes did the owner give the police proper permission. If they did, then that's the strongest argument. If they did not, then they went with this argument because it's all they had.
And if someone screwed up, that person needs to be slapped around for not following proper procedure.
... was it to code name a perfectly fine browser that's both fast and stable "Minefield"?????
Considering how fast computer technology changes, no.
Not nonsense. The original article said this:
"Without a doubt, people will compare the G1 to the iPhone and out of the box you honestly have to say the G1 wins over the original iPhone with wireless syncing capability, cut/copy/paste, games, a wireless music store, application store and 3rd party application support, integrated GPS, multiple client IM clients, and multi-tasking capability."
That's in the conclusion on the last page. I can't find mention of the iPhone 3G. And making such a statement is silly. It's like touting all the advantages a 2008 Ford F150 has over a 1957 chevy. It's not useful information to a critical observer, and is a poor choice in a review. At the very least it's an ignorant error of omission not realizing that a useful review compares current tech to current tech. Perhaps the reviewer didn't have access to an iPhone 3G, but I can't see where they claim that. But it detracts from the review to make that comparison. It does mislead less critical readers, either by accident or on purpose.
You also have no impirical evidence that the G1 will catch up. There's a good educated guess that the G1, and personally I believe that it will, and we all base this on the history of Google. However, that doesn't mean the iPhone won't continue to move forward. It also doesn't mean T-mobile won't stiffle something in updates. And until Google does release an update, it's vaporware. A responsible review fairly compares to current competing products.
So what you have is a review handicapping the iPhone and giving excuses to Android so it seems like its further along that it is. We have to give both phones the same diligent level of critique.
Instead of investing in the top of the company infusing it with cash, how about we let the company fail and spend money on training the workers to find new jobs? It takes care of the jobs problem and gets rid of a company that's big and bulky and clumsy, and it gives absolutely no benefits to the CEO who, even though the company had mediocre performance, was still making millions of dollars.
If Tesla goes under, the same philosophy should apply, but someone could buy Tesla's technology and try to be profitable with it.
1) The US government signs net neutrality laws preserving the concept.
2) wireless providers continue selling and pushing their broadband wireless options
3) Investment into new wireless start up companies is some how encouraged and we get more competition in wireless access.
4) Everyone buys a network untethered wireless device that can connect to any broadband wireless service and they switch to VOIP for phone service.
It's a long shot, but it could happen. The government gave us the internet, they could work to try to preserve it as a tool for all people.
"Because he's comparing the first generation of this phone to the first generation of that phone. That's not unreasonable, given that Android will see major upgrades quickly, just as the iPhone OS did."
Timing is everything, and everything moves quickly in the tech industry. The original iPhone without 3G is over a year old. That's old news. By the time Google has updated it's phone, Apple will have more updates too. Comparing what you can get now to a piece of technology that's a year old is dishonest and smacks of the old tactic where PC consumer mags that would always compare the latest PCs to older Macs and declaring that PCs won in head to head tests.
This is not properly comparing apples to apples (or as the case may be Apples to Androids). Compare what you can get now from Apple/AT&T with what you can get now from Google/T-mobile. I have no desire here to smack down google or be an Apple fanboi, I'm just saying for a smart review, you need proper comparisons.
Oh the irony of code-naming any version of windows a dog.
See the problem with answering questions honestly is that americans don't want to hear the truth. Carter proved that out when he asked the americans to tighten their belts and live within their means. They called his speech a "malaise" because Americans didn't want to hear it or accept it. So Reagan was voted in when he said "Carter is wrong, you can have anything you want!"
Bush Sr. said no new taxes. But a tax hike was required at an important time, so he helped raise taxes. He was then voted out.
A significant portion of Americans believe that the US government is required to preserve their specific way of life, no matter what that is. What's why we require so much foreign oil. That's why we have such large cars. That's why so many people have such large credit card debt. We want our politicians to tell us we can have everything, and they want them to ensure that we can get it. Few Americans are willing to accept that maybe we personally all have to accept responsibility and start buying less and tighten our belts and accept higher taxes. We have to start thinking about quality of life, and not "quantity" of life.
This is a silly question. Windows of course has nothing to do with the problem. People are putting off software investments because they can't afford it. Credit has dried up and businesses can't get capital to spend on expansions. Smart businesses see software as an investment to grow, but if there's no business to grow into, or they can't get the money, then they don't invest and grow slowly, along with the rest of the economy. Now instead of floating loans they have to save money.
Automobile repair shops are doing very well, because more people are repairing cars rather than buying new ones. Same goes for software. Why buy new software and hardware when you can maintain the old.