I know you want to pat Apple on the back but let's be fair, Apple set lots of expectations. The first expectation is that Apple said at launch the white one would be available soon after the black one, and it's not. On one hand you have to make sure it's right, on the other hand you, you have the Duke Nukem Forever syndrome. You have to ship or cancel at some point. The second expectation that the iPhone 5, whatever that is, will be announced 3 months after the iPhone 4 white is now due out. April is the month when iPhone sales started to trickle down as more people put off waiting for #4. Exactly who's going to get all excited about a white iPhone at that point?
Apple should have had this sorted out by the holiday season or just axed it. Spring of next year is too late. I would have more respect if they just came out and said "sorry we goofed, no white iPhone 4 because it will take too long to fix the problems we had at fabrication."
I'm happy they are identifying real problems and not shipping with this defect but I'm not exactly thrilled about their handling of it either.
According to the movie, Mark was characterized as a comp sci guy who saw beyond what the Winklevoss twins had in mind. And just so it's understood, the Winklevoss's idea was no revolutionary idea nor was it original. The movie even mentioned Friendster and Myspace and someone (I forget who and how) basically asks how would this be better than those two. The Eric Parker character goes on to elaborate how Facebook "is cool." I think that's what the movie is trying to portray.
I'm not agreeing with these portrayals in reality, simply stating how the movie told the story.
That's the great thing about this movie as a work of art. The characters were complex and no one was a perfect hero or perfect villain. They were real people, real people with real personality issues and real quirks and real greed. I think that's the key thing here.
Mark Zuckerberg - dick, computer geek, had some vision to make something cool Eric Parker - dick, computer geek, thinks he's awesome but when confronted he scampers like a scared mouse and then uses paranoid delusions to explain what went wrong without owning up to his own mistakes. Winklevoss twins and that other guy - all dicks, guys with money who think they deserve a hoard of cash because they are good looking, come from money and have high GPAs. And yet their vision was limited basically to a Facebook limited to Harvard and had no real vision for the features to add to it. Eduardo - not really much of a dick, nice guy, wanted to help, wanted to help run the business, and in the end got screwed despite being the original funder, but compared to everyone else had no real vision, he was just trying to do as he was taught. Nice guy but if he had had his way, Facebook would probably not be nearly as big as it is.
I loved the characters as characters, but the only character I actually liked as a person was Mark's ex-gf. Everyone else was foolish or a dick. And that's what happened here, a bunch of dicks met at one point, soap opera ensues, and because this was such an explosively good idea everyone thinks they deserve a chunk of money. If you think that any of these characters other than the ex-gf is portrayed as a 100% hero or villain, you have a seriously warped and false sense of black and white and you don't belong in the discourse of this movie.
And the example of how it affects the electorate shows again that tweeting is a tool used by politicians to both read and influence the people.
The article makes twitter up as the cause or driving force of change. That's never the truth. Radio, TV, the internet, and all the tools on the internet are just that, tools. Statements like "The revolution will be Televised/Tweeted/Facebooked/beamed directly into our brains" is true, because whenever the revolution comes it will be broadcast on as many mediums as possible.
... Is the person who is on the other side of the accident, obeying traffic rules and minding their own business when some idiot blows a red light because they were too busy texting and then is killed. Traffic accidents are incredibly traumatic, physically, mentally, and emotionally. I know a friend who had an accident that wasn't her fault, but is still making payments on her newly purchased car because the insurance company paid her for the value of the car, not the value of the loan. And death is forever, so punishment after the fact is little solace to the teenager last month who plowed into a family SUV last month in my home town and killed the passenger all because he was too impatient to wait behind a car driving in front of him around a curve on a backroad.
Your same logic could be applied to people who speed or run redlights. Sure don't ticket them until they have an accident after running a redlight. The problem with your idea is that people already think they are fantastic drivers and could not possibly get into accidents. Then they get into an accident and the damage is done. Sure don't ticket that guy driving drunk until he kills a nice happy family of four or something that looks equally gruesome and heartwrenching on the 11:00 PM news.
To me, the obvious answer to car accidents is public transportation, and I'm sure that these rules are not helping very much because it's very hard to enforce before an accident anyway. However, if we continue to insist on cars as the way we get around in the US, then we all have a vested interest in making them safe by insisting on enforcement of rules that protect every driver as best we can. I'm not saying the anti-texting laws are effective, I'm just saying punish only on results is not as effective as you think.
Okay I know Steve lives in his own world of facts and figures, but in the cited article, Steve says he's paid "$1 billion to developers." Now, semantically speaking, it means exactly that, that they paid $1 billion. That means that users would have paid Apple $1.43 billion or so. Then take 70%, and you have $1 billion paid to developers. If you think Steve is doing stat manipulation, and he's been known to do that, then please site your source. Don't try fighting this argument with math and semantics because you will lose.
And you lost big time when you site apple took "$300,000". Yes I'm sure you meant $3 million. Apple takes 30%, not 3%, and there's that thing called the "millions" before billions. If you are going to try this, please get that number right so it makes it seem like you know what you are talking about.
I bought a pipe to the internet, I should be able to do what I want with it. If it's limited to 2 GB of data or whatever, then so be it, but that's different than saying "If you connect a phone it's $25, but if you connect a laptop, it's $15 more for the same exact data." It's price gouging people who use laptops just for the convenience of using a full size keyboard and monitor.
It's also the way the big providers are trying to cash in on demand at the same time limiting demand for their own broke ass networks. If you really want it, you have to pay thru the nose, and we'll price it high enough that we won't get overloaded since we don't upgrade our networks fast enough.
A traditional laptop basically requires you to unfold the setup, and sometimes plug in peripherals depending on if you like trackpoints or trackpads or neither (I personally hate both, traditional mice for me). An iPad requires you to hit the screen power button and viola, it's on and everything is there you need. I'm directly interacting with the electronic book page or web page. The motions feel nature and are easy to learn.
Also an iPad is more about getting information and content out, not putting information in. Touch screens work fine for writing short specific messages. Keyboards will be better input devices until touchscreens become as accurate and fast as keyboards, and some people even buy keyboards for their iPad. And even if you did have a physical keyboard, you could just whip out the iPad and check the scores or read the news without it so many times it's optional.
With an iPad you are getting an extra level of physical convenience that is quite real. If that's not for you that's fine, it's not meant for everyone. Tablets are suddenly the en vogue because when the iPad was first released, all the other tech companies said "me too!" Now these same companies are saying "shit we are losing laptop sales, we better get our asses moving." I can't speak to say if other tablets will offer a total package that is useful and competitive with the iPad. Right now we can only say what the iPad does vs everything else.
Apple is the king of media events, and is also the king of making a big deal out of something small. To me, Google voice in Gmail was far more significant world wide than Google instant, so where was the major media event for that? All these great tools and then you go make a big deal about Google instant? It never added up for me. It seemed like they were trying to take a page from the Steve Job's book of marketing, but to what end?
And of course article has to hit me with the giant "duh" hammer. Google is trying to figure out a balance between annoying users and getting as many ads out there as possible. So you type in "New York" on the way to "New York metropolitian opera" and you get ads served up about new york. Then New York Metro, then New York Metropolitian. Each time, there's a small chance something might catch your eye. Targeted ads, quietly slipped in, hoping you'll notice as you search and maybe click on them. Millions of people world wide use Google. Most of them will not click on ads, but some will, and that's all Google needs is for some people to click the ads.
The media event was more a practice event to notify investors and ad buyers, not the public at large. Get the word out to people who buy and sell and have money. And practice doing this like Steve-o does, in order to compete with his RDF. Steve has been pushing iAds lately and explaining how iAd can reach millions of iOS devices. Gotta start getting the word out on Googleriffic features that make money.
I read the whole article, and the author's main complaint seems to be that the game itself doesn't have an in game "left hand/right hand option." He didn't actually attempt to play the game, he just poked around in different menus trying to configure it. Maybe it was symmetrical enough that no option was needed? I don't have a DSi and I'm right handed, but if someone wants to convince me that a game is unplayable left handed, wouldn't you have to at least attempt to play it? Clarification would be nice.
I'm on XP and using Firefox. I use it for security, stability and extensibility. It's been doing remarkably well on all three fronts.
It's interesting how the browser wars are reverting back to the age old "I'm faster than you are" argument which was all but forgotten in general circles. People used to say which was faster, intel or PCC, Mac or Windows, and now it doesn't matter any more finally because you can't tell the difference when sending an email or working on a word document, and if you can tell, usually it doesn't make a difference. Sure, high end graphics and math work need to know which is faster, but exactly how many of us are doing that?
My perception is that the biggest thing MS is pushing on IE9 is the speed, and not pushing hard enough on security and stability. What good is a Corvette that can go 200+ when it's brakes are so bad they might kill you?
Require carriers to sell unlocked phones with no crapware.
OR
Split sales of phones away from carriers. Require carriers to figure out what kind of universal technology they can use, like SIM cards or whatever, and then simply have the carriers provide plans and have customers simply pick the phone and carrier separately.
I understand that people think that bundling service and the phone some how gives them a discount, but the problem is that we've gone down this road for so long and we aren't getting a real improvement of quality of service. In fact, it's decreasing in terms of quality of the phone call. Before it was a way to sell new lines, now it's a way to lock users into a contract so that you can't move away if quality of service is not what you need. The carriers are competing by providing the snazziest phones, not by providing phones that make clear phone calls and can reliably connect in as many places as possible. Let's refocus the companies on competing on what they are supposed to compete on and maybe the cost of the handsets will go down and carriers will have more freedom to invest the subsidy money in infrastructure.
And I know nothing about Zynga, I just saw this pattern on similar "farming" games on the iPhone.
This is just the natural growth from Mafia wars and Farmville. These games are simplistic games based on a simple mathematical progression formula, and they are designed to make you want to get into the game as often as you can until you can't stand it any more and move on. Then you end up moving onto another game which is similar but then ends up being the exact same game.
When the iPhone came out, two major companies basically had a formula where they created mafia wars clones, then they decided to clone their own games! They made games based on ninjas, racing, spacefaring, transformers ripoffs, westerns, superheroes, etc, but the game was EXACTLY the same, just different names for the weapons, properties and missions. The business model was simple, offer the games for free, get as many people onto the games, offer them free "points" if they spent money on the game, then have them use those points to make themselves ultra powerful faster than us mere mortals who simply wanted to progress with the game normally. Eventually, script kiddies and low level hackers basically tried to get those points for free, because there was a high incentive to do so and the code was relatively simplistic to hack, and you get major hackers running around in the game killing every honest person and making their life hell so all those people move onto a new game... which was just a version of the old game in a new wrapper. Eventually the rich kiddies would come to dominate that game because they had the money, and the script kiddies would come to "0wn" that game too and ruin it and make everyone move on again.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
These types of games are stupid, and are designed to get large payouts from a few stupid rich people who wipe their asses with $100. The games are not meant to be complex, and are meant to be easily copied by the creators, so it's easy for someone else to copy them as well. So it becomes a mad dash for the next shiny means of distracting people and saying "hey if you want to be L337 maybe you should give me $500 for some power pills!" And in order to keep ahead of script kiddies you have to basically perform a refresh of the business model by releasing a new game every now and then that's exactly like the old game but just looks different. So all of this is entirely unsurprising. No one is trying to inject any quality here or distinguish themselves. Doing so would cost more money and this isn't about investment, it's about quick very short term profits. The spammers have branched out and are happy that placed like Facebook and the iPhone have made it so easy to develop and distribute stupid simple games.
Far be it from me to stop these evil people from stealing from the rich, but for the rest of us, to paraphrase WOPR, the only way to win these games is by not playing.
Reduce the copyright limits back to more reasonable levels. What I mean by reasonable levels are levels where the user makes money within a shorter period of time and then it's allowed to go into the public domain where anyone can copy it. Something like a period of 20 years or so, with an option for a single extension.
Media and content should benefit the public at large. The copyright laws as they are set up now to perpetually give money to publishers for publishing and holding onto books and then simply raking in royalties for over a century, even after the author dies. The current system rewards big time names and big time publishers to sit on their laurels and not produce new content but simply milk their huge libraries is the only reason for technology like this. A library could serve a great purpose as a repository for books, a place to access the web for free, and a place to serve up free digital books if only we would remove these artificial restrictions that copyright has put on us.
Remember, if you're criticizing the ones in power (whites, Christians, Jews/Judaism, conservatives, men, heterosexuals) it's OK, but if you're criticizing the ones being oppressed (African-Americans, Muslims/Islam, homosexuals, polyamorists) it's a "hate crime".
There fixed it for you.
Dude, whites aren't even a majority world wide. Christians and Muslims world wide are about equal worldwide and even if Christians are ahead, calling Muslims a minority is not even close. Jews aren't even a majority so I do not have any idea what you are smoking (and my apologies to any Jews for any unintended "Powerful Jewish Cabal" insinuations, I was merely trying to make a point about how totally inaccurate the parent's comment was). Conservatives are also not in the majority by any nonpartisan independent poll that has been taken in the US, it's roughly 50/50 and statistically speaking, and 50.1% does not constitute a statistical majority unless you have been obviously drinking from the font of wisdom that is Fox News.
It should have been clear you are a troll but since you got modded up I'll have to respond.
Each philosophy (including all religions) thinks it is the right one.
Just like science, we have a bunch of competing hypotheses which fight for evidence and dominance until one comes out on top. Yup that sounds about right and within that statement I see no problem.
Two or more cannot coexist in the same space.
Sliding into bigot territory, but you were ambiguous enough to warrant a more broad response. I coexist with people different than me with different views constantly. Philosophies themselves change, grow, die off, etc, but coexisting philosophies have nothing to do with coexisting people. I forget the number but there are about 100 people or so in Iraq who still practice zoroastrianism. If their way of life dies off, that would be sad for them, but if one of them commits a crime and blows up my house, I don't immediately blame zoroastrians. Your weasel words are a way of trying to say that it's impossible for two religious to try to coexist so let's burn everything. That's entirely untrue and in the modern era we've proved that it is possible, you just have to wrap your mind around the idea that your neighbors personal religious beliefs are something that does not affect your ability to offer them a cup of tea and discuss things in a calm and rational manner.
People have the right to be intolerant... because without intolerance, they allow themselves to be assimilated.
The spanish inquisitors were intolerant, do you think we should bring them back? People have the right to their opinion, but not all opinions are equally valid, and that doesn't give you the right to hurt, maim or kill someone just because they have a different viewpoint. Religions constantly change and evolve. If they remained exactly the same, they'd die out. If the Catholic church still tortured people to confess witchcraft, Catholicism would shrink really fast in the modern age.
RackSpace made a stupid error by getting involved in a political issue. Now people will expect more webhosts to do this, and they will waste many more hours trying to figure out what is and is not "hate speech."
Actually Rackspace was probably defending itself against a lawsuit, this was not political on their part. Other webhosts will do it for the same reason, money.
Time spent discussing hate speech will not be lost because this is an important topic. A mean, narrow, bigoted preacher in Florida wanted to grab some attention by basically spreading true hate speech. He got his attention, but by talking about this and calling it what it really is and hopefully growing better for it, we won't have wasted any time.
That's EXACTLY what that blurb is stating, no beating around the bush. Economically speaking, company seeks labor at the cheapest rates possible. Offshoring is the cheapest in many situations.
And the article isn't justifying anything, just explaining a truth in the market place. If you had two white people living on the same block in Anytown, USA who had the same skillset and one asked for $30,000 and one asked for $35,000, you'd hire the cheaper one. If you want your elected official to do something about it, that's a completely different discussion.
If you aren't smarter than some tech in India, or can't justify why your job should stay right were it is, your job isn't safe. It doesn't suggest remedies, but if you read between the lines that if you don't take the political route, one good way to keep your job is to keep getting smarter. It's just the truth.
This is a Wiki on Philosophy. Wikipedia is Wiki meant to be an encyclopedia of everything possible. How does one show that this is what Wikipedia would look like if run by academics if it's not serving the exact same purpose? So would that mean Wookiepedia.com is what Wikipedia would look like if run by Star Wars fans? It's like handing a book on philosophy to someone and saying "This is what Encyclopedia Britanica would look like if Philosophers wrote it."
We had a customer recently who we sold credit card software to. We sell this software to many varying businesses. They are a legitimate business, they just happen to distribute adult DVDs. However, they lied on their form on their merchant bank, and the bank found out and cut them off, and they were unable process cards. After this dramatic happenstance, they then turn around and shopped around for a new merchant bank, but could not, because of the very reason they lied in the first place... because they were worried that if they told the truth no one would take them on.
Now it wasn't right to lie, but they didn't lie in order to launder money, they lied because they would not be taken as a serious business otherwise, and I don't know about you but I think they have that right to be taken seriously. They were let go because banks are adverse to taking a risk on any type of business like this simply in name only. Sure, there are plenty of criminal organizations dealing in porn, but there are plenty of legitimate ones too. Human beings, especially Americans, overreact to porn and sex and try to marginalize it as something demonic. When you marginalize it, you get a group of people who are willing to work with it with varying levels of morals outside of the normal. Mostly you get two kinds of people, those who think porn is perfectly acceptable, and those who think anything including criminal activity is acceptable as long as it makes money. Then less than moral companies sprout up to help the immoral and moral alike deal with this kind of business, you get moral groups popping up saying "See! porn is bad! look at all the criminal activity it breeds!" and you continue the vicious cycle.
So because banks are scared of the adult industry in general because we marginalize it, and by marginalizing it we make it prone to criminal behavior and banks don't want to take the chance, legitimate or not, so we end up with bullshit like this, businesses that are guilty by association and nothing else.
The article makes an interesting hypothesis, but then completely fails to back them up logically. This is an empassioned article full of "cruft" and no substance.
First let me say that Cruft is defined by Wikipedia as "computing jargon for code, data, or software of poor quality". Great, you could make a case for this, but the article completely fails to do so. The author defines cruft by the number of features... errrnnttt WRONG. You use that word... I do not think it means what you think it means. If cruft were defined by number of features, then every major piece of software that runs the internet would be full to the gills of real and true cruft. The only example of a real problem the author gives is that iTunes is in fact lacking a feature, specifically Facebook integration. I can understand that's a concern but you can't say that a piece of software is crufty for having too many features and then give an example of this as a lack of features.
Now, if you want to make a case for cruft, you have to start pointing out things like crashes, bugs, design flaws, etc. Show me the poor quality code. By what I consider the definition of cruft, I'm sure someone can make an argument that iTunes is crufty. But the arguments of the article don't line up with the premise. Now personally I like iTunes, and haven't had a crash on it in like 5 years. There are some interface oddities I'd like to change, and iTunes 10 didn't introduce a whole lot and I think the new icon as well as the color changes within the GUI are ugly but not a major problem. I do think the media list is easier to navigate now, and syncing reports more information on the progress of the sync which I like. It's only 2 days so the jury is out on Ping, but personally I've not run into huge problems in iTunes resulting from crufty code in my history working with iTunes. i know that's anecdotal, but so are all the anti-iTunes rants here.
The moral of the story... Adding new features does not necessarily add cruft. Adding poor quality code adds to the cruft. And if you think this is poor quality code, please, go forth and make that argument now.
It is likely that most of the social networking stuff with apple will be tied to me.com or iTunes. Both of these are fee based services
iTunes is not fee based. Everything, including Ping is free until you download something, like a song or a game. Facebook has something to be worried about. Facebook's revenue stream is eyeballs on ads and if people spend more time in Ping, Facebook is losing.
Since Ping is free, the rest of your discussion doesn't make any sense. What Apple is doing is basically creating a social network, for free, to encourage sales of music through the iTunes store. Apple's vision for the longest time has been to continue to come up with more tools that encourage you to buy content. We used to think of the iTunes music store as a vehicle to drive hardware sales. It once was, but it's so big now in terms of volume I don't believe that any more. They are trying to get people to buy content so that they make money, pure and simple.
It used to be there were very respectable sources that were clearly identifiable and reported responsibly. These sources did not exist through the entire history of the united states but they did exist (Cronkite is one important example, The Washington post and LA times of the 60s and 70s were others).
Now the mainstream news is consolidated more and more into corporate interests who basically tilt the news ever so slightly and work within a system that is affected more and more by money and less by responsible journalism. Those responsible sources on a mainstream level are going away and being replaced by a sea of bloggers. Some good, many not, but judgement of who is doing journalism and who is whining in their blog and putting a stamp on it is not the domain of you, me, or the government.
What sucks about this is this guy has got a point, but that's lost because his actions are plain nuts and will drown out most mainstream discussion. But the point is that we are at a point where we are deeply concerned with climate change and resources on this planet, and people think that it's not at all irresponsible to have 19 children, and then the media encourages it!
China may be run by dictatorial fuckwads, but they have a point with their laws on having children. The entire society can't sustain it's population now, so adding another billion hungry mouths over 20 years is just going to fuck things up even more. With the scientific information I've been seeing as of late with global warming, potable water, oil, etc, I can actually envision near future where first world countries start considering birth limits. I understand the personal liberties some people feel they have a right to, but there comes a time when your insistence on having more children affects me and my family. If just you, me, and your spouse left on the planet, and there is only enough food to feed 3 people, and you and your spouse go and have a child without asking me, someone is going to have to give up food. You just impinged on me and my ability to stay alive by having a child. This is not a matter of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, this is good old fashioned primitive instinct of I want to live.
This guy might be an insane fuckwad, but he has a point. We should not be glorifying having 19 children when every new child strains our resources. Sure, we need to have babies to keep the species alive, but without resources to sustain them, there will be a huge population crash.
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I know you want to pat Apple on the back but let's be fair, Apple set lots of expectations. The first expectation is that Apple said at launch the white one would be available soon after the black one, and it's not. On one hand you have to make sure it's right, on the other hand you, you have the Duke Nukem Forever syndrome. You have to ship or cancel at some point. The second expectation that the iPhone 5, whatever that is, will be announced 3 months after the iPhone 4 white is now due out. April is the month when iPhone sales started to trickle down as more people put off waiting for #4. Exactly who's going to get all excited about a white iPhone at that point?
Apple should have had this sorted out by the holiday season or just axed it. Spring of next year is too late. I would have more respect if they just came out and said "sorry we goofed, no white iPhone 4 because it will take too long to fix the problems we had at fabrication."
I'm happy they are identifying real problems and not shipping with this defect but I'm not exactly thrilled about their handling of it either.
It is endangerment if you blow it into the child's eyes and get soap in the child's eyes and ignore the child's cries of pain.
According to the movie, Mark was characterized as a comp sci guy who saw beyond what the Winklevoss twins had in mind. And just so it's understood, the Winklevoss's idea was no revolutionary idea nor was it original. The movie even mentioned Friendster and Myspace and someone (I forget who and how) basically asks how would this be better than those two. The Eric Parker character goes on to elaborate how Facebook "is cool." I think that's what the movie is trying to portray.
I'm not agreeing with these portrayals in reality, simply stating how the movie told the story.
That's the great thing about this movie as a work of art. The characters were complex and no one was a perfect hero or perfect villain. They were real people, real people with real personality issues and real quirks and real greed. I think that's the key thing here.
Mark Zuckerberg - dick, computer geek, had some vision to make something cool
Eric Parker - dick, computer geek, thinks he's awesome but when confronted he scampers like a scared mouse and then uses paranoid delusions to explain what went wrong without owning up to his own mistakes.
Winklevoss twins and that other guy - all dicks, guys with money who think they deserve a hoard of cash because they are good looking, come from money and have high GPAs. And yet their vision was limited basically to a Facebook limited to Harvard and had no real vision for the features to add to it.
Eduardo - not really much of a dick, nice guy, wanted to help, wanted to help run the business, and in the end got screwed despite being the original funder, but compared to everyone else had no real vision, he was just trying to do as he was taught. Nice guy but if he had had his way, Facebook would probably not be nearly as big as it is.
I loved the characters as characters, but the only character I actually liked as a person was Mark's ex-gf. Everyone else was foolish or a dick. And that's what happened here, a bunch of dicks met at one point, soap opera ensues, and because this was such an explosively good idea everyone thinks they deserve a chunk of money. If you think that any of these characters other than the ex-gf is portrayed as a 100% hero or villain, you have a seriously warped and false sense of black and white and you don't belong in the discourse of this movie.
And the example of how it affects the electorate shows again that tweeting is a tool used by politicians to both read and influence the people.
The article makes twitter up as the cause or driving force of change. That's never the truth. Radio, TV, the internet, and all the tools on the internet are just that, tools. Statements like "The revolution will be Televised/Tweeted/Facebooked/beamed directly into our brains" is true, because whenever the revolution comes it will be broadcast on as many mediums as possible.
... Is the person who is on the other side of the accident, obeying traffic rules and minding their own business when some idiot blows a red light because they were too busy texting and then is killed. Traffic accidents are incredibly traumatic, physically, mentally, and emotionally. I know a friend who had an accident that wasn't her fault, but is still making payments on her newly purchased car because the insurance company paid her for the value of the car, not the value of the loan. And death is forever, so punishment after the fact is little solace to the teenager last month who plowed into a family SUV last month in my home town and killed the passenger all because he was too impatient to wait behind a car driving in front of him around a curve on a backroad.
Your same logic could be applied to people who speed or run redlights. Sure don't ticket them until they have an accident after running a redlight. The problem with your idea is that people already think they are fantastic drivers and could not possibly get into accidents. Then they get into an accident and the damage is done. Sure don't ticket that guy driving drunk until he kills a nice happy family of four or something that looks equally gruesome and heartwrenching on the 11:00 PM news.
To me, the obvious answer to car accidents is public transportation, and I'm sure that these rules are not helping very much because it's very hard to enforce before an accident anyway. However, if we continue to insist on cars as the way we get around in the US, then we all have a vested interest in making them safe by insisting on enforcement of rules that protect every driver as best we can. I'm not saying the anti-texting laws are effective, I'm just saying punish only on results is not as effective as you think.
Okay I know Steve lives in his own world of facts and figures, but in the cited article, Steve says he's paid "$1 billion to developers." Now, semantically speaking, it means exactly that, that they paid $1 billion. That means that users would have paid Apple $1.43 billion or so. Then take 70%, and you have $1 billion paid to developers. If you think Steve is doing stat manipulation, and he's been known to do that, then please site your source. Don't try fighting this argument with math and semantics because you will lose.
And you lost big time when you site apple took "$300,000". Yes I'm sure you meant $3 million. Apple takes 30%, not 3%, and there's that thing called the "millions" before billions. If you are going to try this, please get that number right so it makes it seem like you know what you are talking about.
I bought a pipe to the internet, I should be able to do what I want with it. If it's limited to 2 GB of data or whatever, then so be it, but that's different than saying "If you connect a phone it's $25, but if you connect a laptop, it's $15 more for the same exact data." It's price gouging people who use laptops just for the convenience of using a full size keyboard and monitor.
It's also the way the big providers are trying to cash in on demand at the same time limiting demand for their own broke ass networks. If you really want it, you have to pay thru the nose, and we'll price it high enough that we won't get overloaded since we don't upgrade our networks fast enough.
A traditional laptop basically requires you to unfold the setup, and sometimes plug in peripherals depending on if you like trackpoints or trackpads or neither (I personally hate both, traditional mice for me). An iPad requires you to hit the screen power button and viola, it's on and everything is there you need. I'm directly interacting with the electronic book page or web page. The motions feel nature and are easy to learn.
Also an iPad is more about getting information and content out, not putting information in. Touch screens work fine for writing short specific messages. Keyboards will be better input devices until touchscreens become as accurate and fast as keyboards, and some people even buy keyboards for their iPad. And even if you did have a physical keyboard, you could just whip out the iPad and check the scores or read the news without it so many times it's optional.
With an iPad you are getting an extra level of physical convenience that is quite real. If that's not for you that's fine, it's not meant for everyone. Tablets are suddenly the en vogue because when the iPad was first released, all the other tech companies said "me too!" Now these same companies are saying "shit we are losing laptop sales, we better get our asses moving." I can't speak to say if other tablets will offer a total package that is useful and competitive with the iPad. Right now we can only say what the iPad does vs everything else.
...so it is recommended that you refrain from social media altogether.
There, fixed it for you.
Apple is the king of media events, and is also the king of making a big deal out of something small. To me, Google voice in Gmail was far more significant world wide than Google instant, so where was the major media event for that? All these great tools and then you go make a big deal about Google instant? It never added up for me. It seemed like they were trying to take a page from the Steve Job's book of marketing, but to what end?
And of course article has to hit me with the giant "duh" hammer. Google is trying to figure out a balance between annoying users and getting as many ads out there as possible. So you type in "New York" on the way to "New York metropolitian opera" and you get ads served up about new york. Then New York Metro, then New York Metropolitian. Each time, there's a small chance something might catch your eye. Targeted ads, quietly slipped in, hoping you'll notice as you search and maybe click on them. Millions of people world wide use Google. Most of them will not click on ads, but some will, and that's all Google needs is for some people to click the ads.
The media event was more a practice event to notify investors and ad buyers, not the public at large. Get the word out to people who buy and sell and have money. And practice doing this like Steve-o does, in order to compete with his RDF. Steve has been pushing iAds lately and explaining how iAd can reach millions of iOS devices. Gotta start getting the word out on Googleriffic features that make money.
I read the whole article, and the author's main complaint seems to be that the game itself doesn't have an in game "left hand/right hand option." He didn't actually attempt to play the game, he just poked around in different menus trying to configure it. Maybe it was symmetrical enough that no option was needed? I don't have a DSi and I'm right handed, but if someone wants to convince me that a game is unplayable left handed, wouldn't you have to at least attempt to play it? Clarification would be nice.
I'm on XP and using Firefox. I use it for security, stability and extensibility. It's been doing remarkably well on all three fronts.
It's interesting how the browser wars are reverting back to the age old "I'm faster than you are" argument which was all but forgotten in general circles. People used to say which was faster, intel or PCC, Mac or Windows, and now it doesn't matter any more finally because you can't tell the difference when sending an email or working on a word document, and if you can tell, usually it doesn't make a difference. Sure, high end graphics and math work need to know which is faster, but exactly how many of us are doing that?
My perception is that the biggest thing MS is pushing on IE9 is the speed, and not pushing hard enough on security and stability. What good is a Corvette that can go 200+ when it's brakes are so bad they might kill you?
Require carriers to sell unlocked phones with no crapware.
OR
Split sales of phones away from carriers. Require carriers to figure out what kind of universal technology they can use, like SIM cards or whatever, and then simply have the carriers provide plans and have customers simply pick the phone and carrier separately.
I understand that people think that bundling service and the phone some how gives them a discount, but the problem is that we've gone down this road for so long and we aren't getting a real improvement of quality of service. In fact, it's decreasing in terms of quality of the phone call. Before it was a way to sell new lines, now it's a way to lock users into a contract so that you can't move away if quality of service is not what you need. The carriers are competing by providing the snazziest phones, not by providing phones that make clear phone calls and can reliably connect in as many places as possible. Let's refocus the companies on competing on what they are supposed to compete on and maybe the cost of the handsets will go down and carriers will have more freedom to invest the subsidy money in infrastructure.
Or maybe we are going to hell in a hand basket, and Linus is just to lazy to move? It took him this long just to sign up for citizenship.
"Oh look, the four horsemen are outside my window, maybe it's time to go back to Finland."
And I know nothing about Zynga, I just saw this pattern on similar "farming" games on the iPhone.
This is just the natural growth from Mafia wars and Farmville. These games are simplistic games based on a simple mathematical progression formula, and they are designed to make you want to get into the game as often as you can until you can't stand it any more and move on. Then you end up moving onto another game which is similar but then ends up being the exact same game.
When the iPhone came out, two major companies basically had a formula where they created mafia wars clones, then they decided to clone their own games! They made games based on ninjas, racing, spacefaring, transformers ripoffs, westerns, superheroes, etc, but the game was EXACTLY the same, just different names for the weapons, properties and missions. The business model was simple, offer the games for free, get as many people onto the games, offer them free "points" if they spent money on the game, then have them use those points to make themselves ultra powerful faster than us mere mortals who simply wanted to progress with the game normally. Eventually, script kiddies and low level hackers basically tried to get those points for free, because there was a high incentive to do so and the code was relatively simplistic to hack, and you get major hackers running around in the game killing every honest person and making their life hell so all those people move onto a new game... which was just a version of the old game in a new wrapper. Eventually the rich kiddies would come to dominate that game because they had the money, and the script kiddies would come to "0wn" that game too and ruin it and make everyone move on again.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
These types of games are stupid, and are designed to get large payouts from a few stupid rich people who wipe their asses with $100. The games are not meant to be complex, and are meant to be easily copied by the creators, so it's easy for someone else to copy them as well. So it becomes a mad dash for the next shiny means of distracting people and saying "hey if you want to be L337 maybe you should give me $500 for some power pills!" And in order to keep ahead of script kiddies you have to basically perform a refresh of the business model by releasing a new game every now and then that's exactly like the old game but just looks different. So all of this is entirely unsurprising. No one is trying to inject any quality here or distinguish themselves. Doing so would cost more money and this isn't about investment, it's about quick very short term profits. The spammers have branched out and are happy that placed like Facebook and the iPhone have made it so easy to develop and distribute stupid simple games.
Far be it from me to stop these evil people from stealing from the rich, but for the rest of us, to paraphrase WOPR, the only way to win these games is by not playing.
Reduce the copyright limits back to more reasonable levels. What I mean by reasonable levels are levels where the user makes money within a shorter period of time and then it's allowed to go into the public domain where anyone can copy it. Something like a period of 20 years or so, with an option for a single extension.
Media and content should benefit the public at large. The copyright laws as they are set up now to perpetually give money to publishers for publishing and holding onto books and then simply raking in royalties for over a century, even after the author dies. The current system rewards big time names and big time publishers to sit on their laurels and not produce new content but simply milk their huge libraries is the only reason for technology like this. A library could serve a great purpose as a repository for books, a place to access the web for free, and a place to serve up free digital books if only we would remove these artificial restrictions that copyright has put on us.
Remember, if you're criticizing the ones in power (whites, Christians, Jews/Judaism, conservatives, men, heterosexuals) it's OK, but if you're criticizing the ones being oppressed (African-Americans, Muslims/Islam, homosexuals, polyamorists) it's a "hate crime".
There fixed it for you.
Dude, whites aren't even a majority world wide. Christians and Muslims world wide are about equal worldwide and even if Christians are ahead, calling Muslims a minority is not even close. Jews aren't even a majority so I do not have any idea what you are smoking (and my apologies to any Jews for any unintended "Powerful Jewish Cabal" insinuations, I was merely trying to make a point about how totally inaccurate the parent's comment was). Conservatives are also not in the majority by any nonpartisan independent poll that has been taken in the US, it's roughly 50/50 and statistically speaking, and 50.1% does not constitute a statistical majority unless you have been obviously drinking from the font of wisdom that is Fox News.
It should have been clear you are a troll but since you got modded up I'll have to respond.
Each philosophy (including all religions) thinks it is the right one.
Just like science, we have a bunch of competing hypotheses which fight for evidence and dominance until one comes out on top. Yup that sounds about right and within that statement I see no problem.
Two or more cannot coexist in the same space.
Sliding into bigot territory, but you were ambiguous enough to warrant a more broad response. I coexist with people different than me with different views constantly. Philosophies themselves change, grow, die off, etc, but coexisting philosophies have nothing to do with coexisting people. I forget the number but there are about 100 people or so in Iraq who still practice zoroastrianism. If their way of life dies off, that would be sad for them, but if one of them commits a crime and blows up my house, I don't immediately blame zoroastrians. Your weasel words are a way of trying to say that it's impossible for two religious to try to coexist so let's burn everything. That's entirely untrue and in the modern era we've proved that it is possible, you just have to wrap your mind around the idea that your neighbors personal religious beliefs are something that does not affect your ability to offer them a cup of tea and discuss things in a calm and rational manner.
People have the right to be intolerant... because without intolerance, they allow themselves to be assimilated.
The spanish inquisitors were intolerant, do you think we should bring them back? People have the right to their opinion, but not all opinions are equally valid, and that doesn't give you the right to hurt, maim or kill someone just because they have a different viewpoint. Religions constantly change and evolve. If they remained exactly the same, they'd die out. If the Catholic church still tortured people to confess witchcraft, Catholicism would shrink really fast in the modern age.
RackSpace made a stupid error by getting involved in a political issue. Now people will expect more webhosts to do this, and they will waste many more hours trying to figure out what is and is not "hate speech."
Actually Rackspace was probably defending itself against a lawsuit, this was not political on their part. Other webhosts will do it for the same reason, money.
Time spent discussing hate speech will not be lost because this is an important topic. A mean, narrow, bigoted preacher in Florida wanted to grab some attention by basically spreading true hate speech. He got his attention, but by talking about this and calling it what it really is and hopefully growing better for it, we won't have wasted any time.
That's EXACTLY what that blurb is stating, no beating around the bush. Economically speaking, company seeks labor at the cheapest rates possible. Offshoring is the cheapest in many situations.
And the article isn't justifying anything, just explaining a truth in the market place. If you had two white people living on the same block in Anytown, USA who had the same skillset and one asked for $30,000 and one asked for $35,000, you'd hire the cheaper one. If you want your elected official to do something about it, that's a completely different discussion.
If you aren't smarter than some tech in India, or can't justify why your job should stay right were it is, your job isn't safe. It doesn't suggest remedies, but if you read between the lines that if you don't take the political route, one good way to keep your job is to keep getting smarter. It's just the truth.
This is a Wiki on Philosophy. Wikipedia is Wiki meant to be an encyclopedia of everything possible. How does one show that this is what Wikipedia would look like if run by academics if it's not serving the exact same purpose? So would that mean Wookiepedia.com is what Wikipedia would look like if run by Star Wars fans? It's like handing a book on philosophy to someone and saying "This is what Encyclopedia Britanica would look like if Philosophers wrote it."
We had a customer recently who we sold credit card software to. We sell this software to many varying businesses. They are a legitimate business, they just happen to distribute adult DVDs. However, they lied on their form on their merchant bank, and the bank found out and cut them off, and they were unable process cards. After this dramatic happenstance, they then turn around and shopped around for a new merchant bank, but could not, because of the very reason they lied in the first place... because they were worried that if they told the truth no one would take them on.
Now it wasn't right to lie, but they didn't lie in order to launder money, they lied because they would not be taken as a serious business otherwise, and I don't know about you but I think they have that right to be taken seriously. They were let go because banks are adverse to taking a risk on any type of business like this simply in name only. Sure, there are plenty of criminal organizations dealing in porn, but there are plenty of legitimate ones too. Human beings, especially Americans, overreact to porn and sex and try to marginalize it as something demonic. When you marginalize it, you get a group of people who are willing to work with it with varying levels of morals outside of the normal. Mostly you get two kinds of people, those who think porn is perfectly acceptable, and those who think anything including criminal activity is acceptable as long as it makes money. Then less than moral companies sprout up to help the immoral and moral alike deal with this kind of business, you get moral groups popping up saying "See! porn is bad! look at all the criminal activity it breeds!" and you continue the vicious cycle.
So because banks are scared of the adult industry in general because we marginalize it, and by marginalizing it we make it prone to criminal behavior and banks don't want to take the chance, legitimate or not, so we end up with bullshit like this, businesses that are guilty by association and nothing else.
Morality... meh.
The article makes an interesting hypothesis, but then completely fails to back them up logically. This is an empassioned article full of "cruft" and no substance.
First let me say that Cruft is defined by Wikipedia as "computing jargon for code, data, or software of poor quality". Great, you could make a case for this, but the article completely fails to do so. The author defines cruft by the number of features... errrnnttt WRONG. You use that word... I do not think it means what you think it means. If cruft were defined by number of features, then every major piece of software that runs the internet would be full to the gills of real and true cruft. The only example of a real problem the author gives is that iTunes is in fact lacking a feature, specifically Facebook integration. I can understand that's a concern but you can't say that a piece of software is crufty for having too many features and then give an example of this as a lack of features.
Now, if you want to make a case for cruft, you have to start pointing out things like crashes, bugs, design flaws, etc. Show me the poor quality code. By what I consider the definition of cruft, I'm sure someone can make an argument that iTunes is crufty. But the arguments of the article don't line up with the premise. Now personally I like iTunes, and haven't had a crash on it in like 5 years. There are some interface oddities I'd like to change, and iTunes 10 didn't introduce a whole lot and I think the new icon as well as the color changes within the GUI are ugly but not a major problem. I do think the media list is easier to navigate now, and syncing reports more information on the progress of the sync which I like. It's only 2 days so the jury is out on Ping, but personally I've not run into huge problems in iTunes resulting from crufty code in my history working with iTunes. i know that's anecdotal, but so are all the anti-iTunes rants here.
The moral of the story... Adding new features does not necessarily add cruft. Adding poor quality code adds to the cruft. And if you think this is poor quality code, please, go forth and make that argument now.
It is likely that most of the social networking stuff with apple will be tied to me.com or iTunes. Both of these are fee based services
iTunes is not fee based. Everything, including Ping is free until you download something, like a song or a game. Facebook has something to be worried about. Facebook's revenue stream is eyeballs on ads and if people spend more time in Ping, Facebook is losing.
Since Ping is free, the rest of your discussion doesn't make any sense. What Apple is doing is basically creating a social network, for free, to encourage sales of music through the iTunes store. Apple's vision for the longest time has been to continue to come up with more tools that encourage you to buy content. We used to think of the iTunes music store as a vehicle to drive hardware sales. It once was, but it's so big now in terms of volume I don't believe that any more. They are trying to get people to buy content so that they make money, pure and simple.
It used to be there were very respectable sources that were clearly identifiable and reported responsibly. These sources did not exist through the entire history of the united states but they did exist (Cronkite is one important example, The Washington post and LA times of the 60s and 70s were others).
Now the mainstream news is consolidated more and more into corporate interests who basically tilt the news ever so slightly and work within a system that is affected more and more by money and less by responsible journalism. Those responsible sources on a mainstream level are going away and being replaced by a sea of bloggers. Some good, many not, but judgement of who is doing journalism and who is whining in their blog and putting a stamp on it is not the domain of you, me, or the government.
What sucks about this is this guy has got a point, but that's lost because his actions are plain nuts and will drown out most mainstream discussion. But the point is that we are at a point where we are deeply concerned with climate change and resources on this planet, and people think that it's not at all irresponsible to have 19 children, and then the media encourages it!
China may be run by dictatorial fuckwads, but they have a point with their laws on having children. The entire society can't sustain it's population now, so adding another billion hungry mouths over 20 years is just going to fuck things up even more. With the scientific information I've been seeing as of late with global warming, potable water, oil, etc, I can actually envision near future where first world countries start considering birth limits. I understand the personal liberties some people feel they have a right to, but there comes a time when your insistence on having more children affects me and my family. If just you, me, and your spouse left on the planet, and there is only enough food to feed 3 people, and you and your spouse go and have a child without asking me, someone is going to have to give up food. You just impinged on me and my ability to stay alive by having a child. This is not a matter of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, this is good old fashioned primitive instinct of I want to live.
This guy might be an insane fuckwad, but he has a point. We should not be glorifying having 19 children when every new child strains our resources. Sure, we need to have babies to keep the species alive, but without resources to sustain them, there will be a huge population crash.