No, we definitely have those parties as well, but much like the Libertarian party, they don't get much coverage or traction. Also, stop portraying Europe as some bastion of far-left politics. It's not nearly as far to the left as you're portraying. There are certainly more far-left political parties, but they're usually not the ones leading the coalitions forming the government. Here's the political compass chart for the major candidates in the last U.S. presidential election. Here's the political compass chart for the European governments as of 2008. They're not too terribly different.
None of the listed countries are even left of center. The Scandinavian countries are some of the closest to that line, but what really separates them is the gap on the Authoritarian-Libertarian between them and the rest of the pack. If the broad range of European parties is similar to the ones for the 2007 Irish election there certainly is more choice available, but your governments as a whole tend to be quite similar to the U.S. There are also several far-left groups that get even less media coverage than the Green party. Many states still have candidates that run under the Socialist party and there are a number of different anarchist parties, some of which don't choose to participate in the system. You almost never hear about any of these on the news.
I can see how you might come away with your impression if you watched Fox news, where almost anything is lambasted for being "socialist" regardless of whether it has anything to do with socialism. The other American news networks aren't really any better about promoting third party candidates or policies, possibly due to the vicious circle that only effectively allows for a two-party system. I don't follow European politics so I have no way of knowing how much media coverage some of the smaller parties manage to garner, but I don't expect it's as much as the major parties get. The only reason the Libertarian party has been getting any coverage is because it got lumped in with the Tea Party, to which I think several Libertarians would object.
Have you considered that perhaps they know this, but are hoping that the current regime won't be in existence much longer. At that point it really doesn't matter what the powers that be would do as they will cease being the powers that, well, be. Regardless, it's their own call to provide the service and anyone else's call to take them up on the offer.
From a purely self-interested point of view, the company may believe they have more to benefit than to lose. From other views, they may believe that this is the right thing to do, even if it does cost a few extra bucks. Either way, motivations are complex.
While that's helpful, that's absolutely horrible. That's not something mom and pop are going to be able to figure out or even understand.
This almost feels like a +5 black comedy moderation. Just read through that list of 8 steps, many of which can be further broken down to more steps. Step 4 is especially endearing if taken literally, which may sadly be true. Shit like this is why people will buy the Apple product even if it's locked down or forces the purchaser to hand over his first-born child.
Who's to say that movies as we understand them now will persist as technology like this becomes better and better. Theaters only exist because once upon a time it was impractical to show films in any other way. Modern technology has made them mostly pointless, but society has its own flavor of inertia that keeps things like theaters around long after they're useful.
By the time this technology reaches maturity and directors actively use if for film projects, I don't believe that movie theaters will be necessary for the viewing experience. It's entirely likely that 3D scenes will be devised for small room, or home viewing. If you can have great looking holograms, I don't think that creative individuals will choose to limit themselves to today's standards of cinematography. Hell, imagine a murder mystery where in order to solve it along with the protagonist, you have to look at things that would traditionally be off camera. Don't let today's limitations affect tomorrow's technology
There is a reason to if it's likely that Oracle's lawsuits will be successful. If that came to pass, the handset manufacturers (or Google) would be required to pay Oracle. At that point it might be cheaper for them to use Windows Phone. Of course it may also drive the manufacturers to MeeGo as well.
Speculative future; oh hell yes, but there may be reasons for getting rid of Java.
If all of the computers are similarly programmed, they'll have a fairly level playing field. What I'm saying is that if only machines were allowed to trade, it would be impossible for insider trading to occur unless you could program that machines for that as well.
The point I was trying to make is that machines can only do what they're programmed to do. They're not smart enough yet to be dishonest of their own accord. You can program that act in such a manner, but they'll do so predictably. The idea is that one machine can't suddenly decide to go rouge and ruin an entire market for its own gain.
Someone could attempt to design a system that might act in such a way, but you could require that the trading algorithms go through some sort of certification process to ascertain whether or not they're designed to act maliciously.
There are a lot of complaints about automated trading on/., but at least the machines don't know how to be dishonest or cheat the system. Perhaps we should just leave trading to the machines and ban humans from participating. Something tells me that there would be fewer problems in the long run.
The real question is whether or not this style of combating terrorism is more effective than others. The United States hasn't had many large-scale hostage situations, but in smaller situations there's definitely more inclination towards negotiation and making sure that hostages survive. If if it is true that the Russian method of dealing with hostage situations is to resolve the situation by terminating those perpetuating it, does it make such incidents less likely to occur?
I'm not even sure how we can compare the rates of such incidents between countries as the motivators for these situations seems staggeringly different from country to country.
I think that this demonstrates how utterly pointless most of airport security we've implemented truly is now that terrorists have shown that they're completely willing to blow themselves up and kill hundreds of people before getting on the plane. Why go to all the hard work of actually getting on a plane when there's plenty of people queued up at a security checkpoint that you can easily kill and cause just as much panic and terror?
There's no easy way to prevent this, unless the security checkpoint is at the front door, in which case you still have a large queue of people, even more miserable and pissed off that they have to stand inline outside. Even if they made people strip naked, it still wouldn't stop the first clever terrorist to shove the bomb up his ass.
The funny part is that if you read TFA, you'll notice that for $10, they offer to sell you a screwdriver to "fix" this problem.
So go ahead, set your iPhone free with our iPhone 4 Liberation Kit! Rid your phone of those terrible Pentalobe screws forever. The $9.95 kit includes a Pentalobe driver, 2 replacement PHILLIPS screws, and a regular #00 Phillips screwdriver.
I suppose they weren't selling all that many of these so they decided to go ahead and do some mud-raking to generate sales. You can even get one of these screwdrivers for less if you shop around. How about iFixit's diabolical plan to screw you out of a few dollars on tools?
The probably dropped him as CEO because he just comes off as creepy and not giving a damn about privacy; and this from the CEO of a company that's collecting information about everything and everyone. His insights and abilities are probably appreciated, but when he's in front of a camera he ends up saying something stupid that makes Google look evil. Here's an example from the WSJ.Here's another from the Atlantic. The crap he says makes him sound like someone who's Google's enemy and trying to scaremonger the public.
Outside of that, of the thousands of people who've read that comment, there's a non-zero chance that one will develop diarrhea-like symptoms through natural causes. For all we know MrHanky just got done eating Taco Bell and has digestive system was going to get a kick in the gut regardless of the fact.
If you tell people you're psychic and ask them to randomly choose a number between 1 and 100, eventually you will get it right and look absolutely brilliant.
If you're HTC and had to come to some form of arrangement with Microsoft over the patens Microsoft alleged HTC was infringing upon, it might not actually be any cheaper to put Android on your handsets. Now that HTC is taken care of, they've started going after other big Android manufacturers.
Yeah, it's not the most interesting or greatest article to ever grace the front page of/., but it's better than the baseless speculation drivel that usually passes as an Apple article. Compared to the numerous slashvertisements and, well, pretty much anything posted by kdawson, this story is actually somewhat original. If nothing else this one stands a chance of not spiraling off into some giant iPhone vs. Android or MacOS vs. Windows flamewar like most Apple stories tend to do.
Sony knows that they can't put the cat back in the bag, but that's not the point. The point is to make life as hellish as possible for the person who let the cat out, so the next bloke who considers doing it might find something else to do. If nothing else they can haul him to court, ruin him financially, and hope for some kind of favorable legal precedent so that next time around it's even easier for them to come down with a hammer on the next poor bastard that dares to do whatever he wants with his own property.
I've always thought the birth certificate thing was a stroke of genius from Obama's political advisors. They could have easily provided a real birth certificate years ago and disproven the whole thing, but they didn't. They know that the far right are going to bitch about something, so why not have it be about something that isn't going to resonate with anyone else? If Obama pulled out a birth certificate, they'd just move on to something else that might actually hold water with people outside of their own group. No one in the center is going to be swayed over a birth certificate conspiracy, because it seems petty and completely stupid. It also makes people who keep parroting it look like raving idiots and therefor makes any intelligent points that they may have seem as though they are more suspect or less reasonable.
It takes so many work hours to ensure that the new version doesn't cause the device to completely brick for any number of reasons. It takes more hours to make sure the carrier will let the device be upgraded and that it will work on their network.
There's a strong incentive not to update the device at all. Everyone having the latest and greatest reduces the incentive to buy a new device. There's also less incentive when you don't know when the next update will come from Google, meaning the whole support process must start again.
They probably didn't sell enough of those devices to make it worth their time or effort to keep updating them with the newest versions of Android. Updates aren't coming. Either jailbreak your device and do it yourself or buy a new phone.
Which is why there are some people who are still waiting for a MeeGo phone. Given Nokia's past track record, I don't foresee MeeGo users running into the same walls that Android phone owners have.
Good luck with that. Most customers don't understand the technology behind what they're buying, let alone care. A small minority of phone buyers might even be able to understand what your post is about.
It is funny you mention that since I believe Microsoft managed to negotiate terms for their new WP7 phones so that the carriers couldn't block an update for more than one update cycle. They've also been more aggressive about ensuring the manufacturers meet some minimal hardware specification.
The truth of the matter is that Google probably doesn't care. They just want a phone out their that's making Google searches and serving up Google ads through apps. They don't care if it's a 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, or 2.3 Android phone. They just wanted to ensure that they couldn't be cut out of the new mobile market that was starting to take off. Google is only as open as serves their own interests. They're perfectly willing to make Android entirely open so that manufacturers will adopt it instead of something else like Windows Phone 7, but it will be a cold day in hell before Google open sources their search algorithms.
HEVC is aiming for a 50% reduction in bit rate for the same subjective quality, while increasing the complexity no more than 200%. A few candidate solutions have been able to get similar quality, at lower bit rates, all while decreasing the complexity. It's likely that by the time the standard is completed, it will be a lot better than h.264.
This doesn't matter as much for disc-based media, but a 50% reduction in bit rate means its cheaper to push it over the web, even if decoding it on the other end takes more time. If it takes off like AVC, then a lot of devices will include dedicated hardware to decode it. A big part of the reason phones, iPods, etc. are able to get such good life on video playback is that they have dedicated hardware to deal with certain codecs.
The reason that good codecs stick around is that there's a lot of hardware that will play/display them. A lot of people still have DVD-players so MPEG-2 still gets used because that's what the player expects, even though MPEG-2 isn't all that good compared to h.264. MP3 is still around because there are still tons of MP3 players and almost any device that can output audio continues to include MP3 support because it's cheap to do so.
h.264 is good, but h.265 of whatever they decide to call it will be even better, especially if it significantly reduces bandwidth consumption.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we definitely have those parties as well, but much like the Libertarian party, they don't get much coverage or traction. Also, stop portraying Europe as some bastion of far-left politics. It's not nearly as far to the left as you're portraying. There are certainly more far-left political parties, but they're usually not the ones leading the coalitions forming the government. Here's the political compass chart for the major candidates in the last U.S. presidential election. Here's the political compass chart for the European governments as of 2008. They're not too terribly different.
None of the listed countries are even left of center. The Scandinavian countries are some of the closest to that line, but what really separates them is the gap on the Authoritarian-Libertarian between them and the rest of the pack. If the broad range of European parties is similar to the ones for the 2007 Irish election there certainly is more choice available, but your governments as a whole tend to be quite similar to the U.S. There are also several far-left groups that get even less media coverage than the Green party. Many states still have candidates that run under the Socialist party and there are a number of different anarchist parties, some of which don't choose to participate in the system. You almost never hear about any of these on the news.
I can see how you might come away with your impression if you watched Fox news, where almost anything is lambasted for being "socialist" regardless of whether it has anything to do with socialism. The other American news networks aren't really any better about promoting third party candidates or policies, possibly due to the vicious circle that only effectively allows for a two-party system. I don't follow European politics so I have no way of knowing how much media coverage some of the smaller parties manage to garner, but I don't expect it's as much as the major parties get. The only reason the Libertarian party has been getting any coverage is because it got lumped in with the Tea Party, to which I think several Libertarians would object.
Have you considered that perhaps they know this, but are hoping that the current regime won't be in existence much longer. At that point it really doesn't matter what the powers that be would do as they will cease being the powers that, well, be. Regardless, it's their own call to provide the service and anyone else's call to take them up on the offer.
From a purely self-interested point of view, the company may believe they have more to benefit than to lose. From other views, they may believe that this is the right thing to do, even if it does cost a few extra bucks. Either way, motivations are complex.
While that's helpful, that's absolutely horrible. That's not something mom and pop are going to be able to figure out or even understand.
This almost feels like a +5 black comedy moderation. Just read through that list of 8 steps, many of which can be further broken down to more steps. Step 4 is especially endearing if taken literally, which may sadly be true. Shit like this is why people will buy the Apple product even if it's locked down or forces the purchaser to hand over his first-born child.
Who's to say that movies as we understand them now will persist as technology like this becomes better and better. Theaters only exist because once upon a time it was impractical to show films in any other way. Modern technology has made them mostly pointless, but society has its own flavor of inertia that keeps things like theaters around long after they're useful.
By the time this technology reaches maturity and directors actively use if for film projects, I don't believe that movie theaters will be necessary for the viewing experience. It's entirely likely that 3D scenes will be devised for small room, or home viewing. If you can have great looking holograms, I don't think that creative individuals will choose to limit themselves to today's standards of cinematography. Hell, imagine a murder mystery where in order to solve it along with the protagonist, you have to look at things that would traditionally be off camera. Don't let today's limitations affect tomorrow's technology
It's really sad that this is the best scapegoat they could drag out; but, because the majority of the population hasn't played the game, it'll fly.
There is a reason to if it's likely that Oracle's lawsuits will be successful. If that came to pass, the handset manufacturers (or Google) would be required to pay Oracle. At that point it might be cheaper for them to use Windows Phone. Of course it may also drive the manufacturers to MeeGo as well.
Speculative future; oh hell yes, but there may be reasons for getting rid of Java.
If all of the computers are similarly programmed, they'll have a fairly level playing field. What I'm saying is that if only machines were allowed to trade, it would be impossible for insider trading to occur unless you could program that machines for that as well.
The point I was trying to make is that machines can only do what they're programmed to do. They're not smart enough yet to be dishonest of their own accord. You can program that act in such a manner, but they'll do so predictably. The idea is that one machine can't suddenly decide to go rouge and ruin an entire market for its own gain.
Someone could attempt to design a system that might act in such a way, but you could require that the trading algorithms go through some sort of certification process to ascertain whether or not they're designed to act maliciously.
There are a lot of complaints about automated trading on /., but at least the machines don't know how to be dishonest or cheat the system. Perhaps we should just leave trading to the machines and ban humans from participating. Something tells me that there would be fewer problems in the long run.
The real question is whether or not this style of combating terrorism is more effective than others. The United States hasn't had many large-scale hostage situations, but in smaller situations there's definitely more inclination towards negotiation and making sure that hostages survive. If if it is true that the Russian method of dealing with hostage situations is to resolve the situation by terminating those perpetuating it, does it make such incidents less likely to occur?
I'm not even sure how we can compare the rates of such incidents between countries as the motivators for these situations seems staggeringly different from country to country.
I think that this demonstrates how utterly pointless most of airport security we've implemented truly is now that terrorists have shown that they're completely willing to blow themselves up and kill hundreds of people before getting on the plane. Why go to all the hard work of actually getting on a plane when there's plenty of people queued up at a security checkpoint that you can easily kill and cause just as much panic and terror?
There's no easy way to prevent this, unless the security checkpoint is at the front door, in which case you still have a large queue of people, even more miserable and pissed off that they have to stand inline outside. Even if they made people strip naked, it still wouldn't stop the first clever terrorist to shove the bomb up his ass.
So go ahead, set your iPhone free with our iPhone 4 Liberation Kit! Rid your phone of those terrible Pentalobe screws forever. The $9.95 kit includes a Pentalobe driver, 2 replacement PHILLIPS screws, and a regular #00 Phillips screwdriver.
I suppose they weren't selling all that many of these so they decided to go ahead and do some mud-raking to generate sales. You can even get one of these screwdrivers for less if you shop around. How about iFixit's diabolical plan to screw you out of a few dollars on tools?
The probably dropped him as CEO because he just comes off as creepy and not giving a damn about privacy; and this from the CEO of a company that's collecting information about everything and everyone. His insights and abilities are probably appreciated, but when he's in front of a camera he ends up saying something stupid that makes Google look evil. Here's an example from the WSJ. Here's another from the Atlantic. The crap he says makes him sound like someone who's Google's enemy and trying to scaremonger the public.
Outside of that, of the thousands of people who've read that comment, there's a non-zero chance that one will develop diarrhea-like symptoms through natural causes. For all we know MrHanky just got done eating Taco Bell and has digestive system was going to get a kick in the gut regardless of the fact.
If you tell people you're psychic and ask them to randomly choose a number between 1 and 100, eventually you will get it right and look absolutely brilliant.
If you're HTC and had to come to some form of arrangement with Microsoft over the patens Microsoft alleged HTC was infringing upon, it might not actually be any cheaper to put Android on your handsets. Now that HTC is taken care of, they've started going after other big Android manufacturers.
Yeah, it's not the most interesting or greatest article to ever grace the front page of /., but it's better than the baseless speculation drivel that usually passes as an Apple article. Compared to the numerous slashvertisements and, well, pretty much anything posted by kdawson, this story is actually somewhat original. If nothing else this one stands a chance of not spiraling off into some giant iPhone vs. Android or MacOS vs. Windows flamewar like most Apple stories tend to do.
Sony knows that they can't put the cat back in the bag, but that's not the point. The point is to make life as hellish as possible for the person who let the cat out, so the next bloke who considers doing it might find something else to do. If nothing else they can haul him to court, ruin him financially, and hope for some kind of favorable legal precedent so that next time around it's even easier for them to come down with a hammer on the next poor bastard that dares to do whatever he wants with his own property.
I've always thought the birth certificate thing was a stroke of genius from Obama's political advisors. They could have easily provided a real birth certificate years ago and disproven the whole thing, but they didn't. They know that the far right are going to bitch about something, so why not have it be about something that isn't going to resonate with anyone else? If Obama pulled out a birth certificate, they'd just move on to something else that might actually hold water with people outside of their own group. No one in the center is going to be swayed over a birth certificate conspiracy, because it seems petty and completely stupid. It also makes people who keep parroting it look like raving idiots and therefor makes any intelligent points that they may have seem as though they are more suspect or less reasonable.
As soon as you do that, let me know. I might consider buying one.
The reality of the situation is that it results in a worse experience because there aren't people making super-awesome homemade Android tablets.
It's all attributable to economics.
It takes so many work hours to ensure that the new version doesn't cause the device to completely brick for any number of reasons. It takes more hours to make sure the carrier will let the device be upgraded and that it will work on their network.
There's a strong incentive not to update the device at all. Everyone having the latest and greatest reduces the incentive to buy a new device. There's also less incentive when you don't know when the next update will come from Google, meaning the whole support process must start again.
They probably didn't sell enough of those devices to make it worth their time or effort to keep updating them with the newest versions of Android. Updates aren't coming. Either jailbreak your device and do it yourself or buy a new phone.
Which is why there are some people who are still waiting for a MeeGo phone. Given Nokia's past track record, I don't foresee MeeGo users running into the same walls that Android phone owners have.
Customers should demand—
Good luck with that. Most customers don't understand the technology behind what they're buying, let alone care. A small minority of phone buyers might even be able to understand what your post is about.
It is funny you mention that since I believe Microsoft managed to negotiate terms for their new WP7 phones so that the carriers couldn't block an update for more than one update cycle. They've also been more aggressive about ensuring the manufacturers meet some minimal hardware specification.
The truth of the matter is that Google probably doesn't care. They just want a phone out their that's making Google searches and serving up Google ads through apps. They don't care if it's a 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, or 2.3 Android phone. They just wanted to ensure that they couldn't be cut out of the new mobile market that was starting to take off. Google is only as open as serves their own interests. They're perfectly willing to make Android entirely open so that manufacturers will adopt it instead of something else like Windows Phone 7, but it will be a cold day in hell before Google open sources their search algorithms.
The good thing about Android is that it's open and anyone can add features, customizations, etc. to it.
The bad thing about Android is that the manufacturers and the carriers usually end up raping it and making it a worse experience.
The ugly part is that Google doesn't seem to care all that much and is perfectly willing to put up with this kind of crap.
HEVC is aiming for a 50% reduction in bit rate for the same subjective quality, while increasing the complexity no more than 200%. A few candidate solutions have been able to get similar quality, at lower bit rates, all while decreasing the complexity. It's likely that by the time the standard is completed, it will be a lot better than h.264.
This doesn't matter as much for disc-based media, but a 50% reduction in bit rate means its cheaper to push it over the web, even if decoding it on the other end takes more time. If it takes off like AVC, then a lot of devices will include dedicated hardware to decode it. A big part of the reason phones, iPods, etc. are able to get such good life on video playback is that they have dedicated hardware to deal with certain codecs.
The reason that good codecs stick around is that there's a lot of hardware that will play/display them. A lot of people still have DVD-players so MPEG-2 still gets used because that's what the player expects, even though MPEG-2 isn't all that good compared to h.264. MP3 is still around because there are still tons of MP3 players and almost any device that can output audio continues to include MP3 support because it's cheap to do so.
h.264 is good, but h.265 of whatever they decide to call it will be even better, especially if it significantly reduces bandwidth consumption.
Does this mean that they'll be dropping h.264 support from Android as well?