The DRM is protecting you from watching the sheer dreck that is coming out of Hollywood these days passing for movies. It's protecting your wallet, your time, and in some cases, your sanity.
How you can find such protections objectionable is beyond me.
Where this might work is for the outdoorsy people who are in the woods, but not out of coverage (especially 911 coverage). I know people already bring portable solar recharging stations along with them. Something like this helps by increasing the amount of other equipment that could be included in the trip.
Cell phones need to be fairly low-powered to be powered directly by straight sunlight. There isn't much surface area for the solar cell, and the efficiency goes down when holding it to the ear. Not to mention, the efficiency isn't amazing to begin with, and degrades with use due to scratches, drops, and other normal usage effects.
Perhaps the lecture format in question is where there are 100+ students sitting in a lecture hall listening to the information the professor is madly trying to get through. In many of these classes, there is little if any time for questions, and certainly little time to review or repeat.
But then, there are good lecturers and bad lecturers. Most people fall into the latter category. The good lecturers engage and even entertain the audience. They move at a pace where both the slower students would be able to understand and the faster students won't get bored. They teach better because they understand the way the human mind works and learns (which in its fundamental form is surprisingly not as varied as you'd think).
But as most people are not good lecturers, the smaller class sizes and increase in interactivity would be a necessary start. Before education became widespread, people learned specialized skills by becoming an apprentice to a master. While there is an argument for teachers and classrooms, there's also a period in education where the class format starts to lose its effectiveness. And things like reducing class size and increasing interactivity is effectively changing the teacher-student relationship closer to a master-apprentice one.
Of course, despite this, there will always be the oddballs who have photographic memory, or who pick things up on their own intuitively with barely any external interaction. But those are the exceptions, not the norm. They typically need to and should be handled differently, in the same way as there is "special" education for those who are significantly slower. Unfortunately, a lot of potential is wasted trying to put both types of people into the same classroom, whether its by some misguided every-child-is-a-winner mentality or by the if-one-can-do-it-they-all-can mentality.
I do agree with your initial sentiments though. Subject matter is irrelevant. Good teachers will strive to do the same types of things in the classroom irrespective of subject, even if the approaches vary.
I still run Win2K at home. Lightweight, simple, without the clutter of XP. I can probably get XP to work that way, but it'd be more effort than I want to put into a fairly-customized home machine used for surfing the internet.
For security, it's hidden behind a NAT, and there's Tiny Personal Firewall 2 installed on it that's set to pop up on every unrecognized connection type by a new program. At this point in time, I don't even get the pop-ups anymore unless I install something and it phones home (at which time I just accept or deny it depending on what it is).
I haven't done any reinstallation in years, mostly because I keep it lean by installing only the bare essentials (with the occasional update).
The machine is work is dictated by company policy, and will get upgraded with the company policy. But I see no reason to upgrade to XP at home, much less to Windows 7.
Obviously, article is a troll. I thought everyone here runs Linux and has root access to our machines at work. What's up with this Microsoft article anyway? They are so 15 years ago./sarcasm
Last I heard, OSX was compromised faster than Windows. Maybe the version counts. But I doubt everybody's upgraded to Lion (and I hear it's still lacking).
If everybody thought like you, there'd be millions more zombies out there. Sure, Apple might be getting serious about security recently, but I wonder if it'll just be more of XP, where anything they do is reactive to existing exploits, rather than seriously making an effort to harden their code.
Actually, if any of your friends have facebook, you have no privacy either.
Nowadays, it's not so much that if you put it online, it will be forever remembered. It's, if you do it with other people and they are not individually interested in their own privacy, it will be remembered forever.
No. They're found in all orientations in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Indian religions and philosophies, as well as their offshoots and derivatives (though they mean slightly different things). Flipped, diagonal, straight, etc. They also sometimes come with dots in the squares, but that's not a necessity either.
I don't understand why they (and almost every other bit player in databases) are loading everything into main memory. I know disk is slow, but there are more efficient uses for main memory. Like creating a list of locked memory locations. The initial disk hit (which can be offset by intelligent caching and in this case, intelligent lookup) is probably not nearly as detrimental to the database's usability as the limitations from putting the entire database into main memory.
As for locking, one of their particular challenges is that as a document-oriented db, the granularity of the lock is indeterminate. For a relational db, it's easy, because the way the data is structured and stored follows a certain hierarchy (row=level, page-level, table-level, etc.). However, the meta-structure in Mongo is loose, which means the locking scheme really needs to be either at the root or the leaf level. To do so at an arbitrary branch level would be difficult to implement properly.
But I still don't see why they couldn't be storing a sychronized list of locked memory locations.
Prior to Elop taking over, it was pretty damn clear Symbian, MeeGo/Maemo/Harmatten was doomed.
I'm not sure about that. Immediately prior to Elop, Nokia had just bought QT. Nokia was about to go all-in into MeeGo.
You're right about them lacking a clear vision though. If they really wanted to compete, they would've cut Symbia and put MeeGo on every device. Instead of having a billion product lines, have three or four, with officially bundled add-ons (that could be bought separately) for specific markets.
Then, they should've dumped all of their marketing budget into these phones, made sure their developer tools were in good shape, and let the Nokia brand do the rest. Look at WebOS. It wasn't marketed at all, and yet the developer network was extensive and the apps were numerous. Certainly not as numerous as for iOS, but all of the major apps and arguably the only ones that matter are present in the WebOS app store.
I was of the opinion that the abrupt about-face for the company would turn out to be disastrous. It's not just the fact that they moved to an untested, unproven Windows mobile platform that if history had anything to say, would flop like Windows Mobile 6.5 did in the recent past. It's more that the move alienates not only developers and partners (who were expecting Symbian for a few more years and MeeGo to be the future), but also developers and engineers within Nokia itself. How would you feel if suddenly, a whole division of your company gets put onto the chopping block? I'd certainly be polishing up my resume ready to jump ship at any time. After all, if upper management can drop that kind of bombshell, who knows what others they have ready to be released at the right time. Phone hardware? Network hardware? Research? Marketing?
At this point, there's no turning back. They wasted too much money and too much clout in the transition to Windows Phone. Instead of putting all of their money into a viable and succeeding technology and working on a new strategy, they threw all of their resources and brand loyalty into the wind. If I was someone holding any of its stock, I'd cut my losses and sell, because it's going to be worth nothing very, very soon.
Democracies are slow. The kind of change you speak of happens in generations, not years or even months that's needed to combat the increasingly self-destructive nature of the U.S. government.
In this case, it really is a matter of the lesser of two evils. And besides, special interests is fairly lop-sided without a powerful lobbying presence from the tech sector. Information technology is a major U.S. industry and export. It needs to be represented in Washington equally beside the agriculture, finance, and media industries. Otherwise, all legislation will be in favor those other industries to the detriment of the information technology industry.
That isn't to say the populace shouldn't be more educated and more involved. But politicians have spent decades trying to dumb primary education down and make the populace less informed. It's going to take time to reverse that ship, and even more time to actually start producing a generation of individuals who hold their politicians accountable.
For starters, one's driving the cab, while the other's riding in the back.
I think the lesson here is that religious extremism is a bad thing in general. The difference between religions is how likely they tend towards extremism based on their founding doctrines.
As well, I think there's a cultural aspect involved. American Jews and Muslims tend to be less extreme than their European/Asian counterparts. And those in the middle class are more likely to tend towards centrism than either economic extreme.
It most certainly does apply to a cup of coffee. If I buy a cup of coffee and it tastes like water (if it tasted like crap, I might actually be pleasantly surprised), I'd never go back to that store or brand again. That's why people have regular places they'll prefer going to over other places, and also why new restaurants do not become viable easily.
If I buy an app that sucks from the Apple app store, I'm shit outta luck. The next time I have to buy an app, well, it's going to have to be from the exact same place. Sure, it's a different developer, but it's the same store, with the same checks and controls, and presumably selling apps with the same inflated worth.
You're correct about the lack of a constant "supply". In Firefox's case, supply is a function of the number of eyeballs looking at it. Being the default search provider is basically Google's marketing and advertising. Which leads me to wonder, since Mozilla is basically making money off advertising Google's product, does Mozilla consider their userbase the product too? Because it would explain a hell of a lot about Firefox's direction if it was true.
Actually, Firefox comes with several search options besides Google (Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, etc.). I believe these are all paid for, similar to the higher and lower shelves in the supermarket isle. But because there's only one search box, somebody has to be the default search provider.
The main reason why people will look higher or lower on the shelf in a supermarket is because they're paying for the product directly. People won't care about switching their (default) search provider because it's free either way, and for the most part, whatever search engine they're using turns up decent results. In a browser, the only reason to pay for one of those other spots is when the default engine is insufficient due to specialization.
There are the occasional IT initiatives that benefit the company. Infrastructure upgrades, security, redundancy, even personal computer support, these are all IT initiatives that don't really fall into any other department and should be coming out of an IT-specific budget. For the most part, PHB's don't and won't spend the money for these things until there's a crisis. How else can you explain the ease with which people hacked into Sony.
That having been said, in this case, I have to agree that there's no reason to spin it off from an existing engineering department. There's already a department handling the technical stuff, and the engineers are probably dealing with both computer-related equipment and non-general computing electronics. Since the engineers probably already handle a lot of the infrastructure, there's no real place for a separate, independent IT department. In this case, IT would be most useful managing software rollouts and drive images as well as being the front line on tech support. That kind of thing doesn't require a completely separate department, just one that sits under the head of engineering.
You'll see the same at restaurants, where you have to bring your own napkin.
Free napkins and toilet paper are mostly subsidized by the cost of the food. This is made possible because the commodity is so inexpensive, and the primary product is priced sufficiently high enough to cover the cost of the commodity.
In places like India and China (and numerous other places), natural resources (per capita) are relatively expensive, i.e. the cost of a roll of toilet paper or a stack of napkins or other such is significantly higher relative to the general cost of living.
IMHO, this is actually a good thing. It keeps people from wasting the resource, because they're paying out of their own pocket for it. The price of the freebie is not hidden behind something else, like the price of the food or the entrance price. They know exactly how much each napkin is costing them, because they bought it. Which means they're not going to use it on things that are not worthwhile.
Amazon is not Google. And even Google is not "good" in any moral sense; it just doesn't engage in evil business practices. Where in the spectrum Amazon falls in, whether it's between Apple and Microsoft, or between Oracle and eBay, or some other combination thereof, is arguable. But to think that Amazon is somehow good because it's not Apple or Microsoft is just being naive (likewise for Google, but there's a strong case that Google is closer to the opposite side than the side Amazon is on).
Slashdot had plenty of articles on Atlantis being found too. Slightly different, since the records of its existence is are a little more recent and a little more reliable, but just as hyperbolic and inflaming.
The whole U.S. is established on the idea of God and religion.
There's a fairly large body of evidence that despite the constant mentions of "God", the founding fathers were all secular.
The separation of Church and State is one of the founding principles. As well, religious freedom is specifically addressed by the Bill of Rights, and even prior to that when the second constutional congress thought it unnecessary to enumerate what rights the State may not violate because it was so obvious.
So no, the United States was not founded on religion specifically, though religious freedom was one cause of the breakaway from British--specifically English--rule.
All of the founding fathers, and other influential people at that time, were highly educated and equally understood and accepted the founding principles of freedom.
Religion's role in politics is largely an invention of the 20th century going into the 21st century. Prior to that, it was race, which cumulated in the civil rights movement of the 1960's. And before that was the issue of slavery, which resulted in the Civil War. Interesting digression: there never was division in the government about how to treat Native Americans. Anyway, you can say that the civil rights movement was finishing what the Civil War began.
If anything, this country was founded on extreme duality and compromises. Religion just happens to be the current subject of the duality, though even that could be argued to have grown out of the race and ultimately slavery issue. But once the religion issue is settled (if it ever does), there will be the next fad.
If you take a close look at U.S. history, the root cause of all the current spate of problems goes back to the slavery issue. Religion wasn't written into the Constitution, but slavery certainly was. And the hostility towards Obama has to do with those very same sentiments (and look at how the GOP treated Herman Cain). But since race is a taboo, the same bigoted elements switched to religion, only, said elements found religion to be a much more effective motivator, and much harder to make taboo.
The unfortunate side effect of religion being the subject of the duality is that education, specifically higher education subjects including math, science, engineering, and philosophy, gets thrown under the bus. But that's what taking extreme positions on religion does. Look at the Muslim world to see the results. Look at the dark ages for an example a little closer to home (considering that the U.S. started as an extension of Europe).
There are certainly other problems caused by other deep-rooted sentiments. E.g. current and past foreign policy is largely due to manifest destiny and the way Native Americans were treated. But the extreme duality of the country with regards to religion is not ultimately about religion itself, but about race and slavery.
No, it wasn't. Apple's terrified of Android--not necessarily what it is, but what it may become, which is another Windows against their MacOS. That's history they don't want to see repeated on the smartphone and tablet. Except, they're a little too late, so they're scrambling around desparately throwing out whatever they can against Android hardware manufacturers in hopes it'll be enough to cripple Android and Android's ecosystem for the near future.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is just stalling while they try to get their house in order and put out a decent smartphone and tablet OS. This is why they're compelling other companies to pay royalty instead of outright taking them to court over the supposed infringed patents. They want these same companies to make Windows Mobile phones, not to go out of business.
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The DRM is protecting you from watching the sheer dreck that is coming out of Hollywood these days passing for movies. It's protecting your wallet, your time, and in some cases, your sanity.
How you can find such protections objectionable is beyond me.
Where this might work is for the outdoorsy people who are in the woods, but not out of coverage (especially 911 coverage). I know people already bring portable solar recharging stations along with them. Something like this helps by increasing the amount of other equipment that could be included in the trip.
Cell phones need to be fairly low-powered to be powered directly by straight sunlight. There isn't much surface area for the solar cell, and the efficiency goes down when holding it to the ear. Not to mention, the efficiency isn't amazing to begin with, and degrades with use due to scratches, drops, and other normal usage effects.
Perhaps the lecture format in question is where there are 100+ students sitting in a lecture hall listening to the information the professor is madly trying to get through. In many of these classes, there is little if any time for questions, and certainly little time to review or repeat.
But then, there are good lecturers and bad lecturers. Most people fall into the latter category. The good lecturers engage and even entertain the audience. They move at a pace where both the slower students would be able to understand and the faster students won't get bored. They teach better because they understand the way the human mind works and learns (which in its fundamental form is surprisingly not as varied as you'd think).
But as most people are not good lecturers, the smaller class sizes and increase in interactivity would be a necessary start. Before education became widespread, people learned specialized skills by becoming an apprentice to a master. While there is an argument for teachers and classrooms, there's also a period in education where the class format starts to lose its effectiveness. And things like reducing class size and increasing interactivity is effectively changing the teacher-student relationship closer to a master-apprentice one.
Of course, despite this, there will always be the oddballs who have photographic memory, or who pick things up on their own intuitively with barely any external interaction. But those are the exceptions, not the norm. They typically need to and should be handled differently, in the same way as there is "special" education for those who are significantly slower. Unfortunately, a lot of potential is wasted trying to put both types of people into the same classroom, whether its by some misguided every-child-is-a-winner mentality or by the if-one-can-do-it-they-all-can mentality.
I do agree with your initial sentiments though. Subject matter is irrelevant. Good teachers will strive to do the same types of things in the classroom irrespective of subject, even if the approaches vary.
I still run Win2K at home. Lightweight, simple, without the clutter of XP. I can probably get XP to work that way, but it'd be more effort than I want to put into a fairly-customized home machine used for surfing the internet.
For security, it's hidden behind a NAT, and there's Tiny Personal Firewall 2 installed on it that's set to pop up on every unrecognized connection type by a new program. At this point in time, I don't even get the pop-ups anymore unless I install something and it phones home (at which time I just accept or deny it depending on what it is).
I haven't done any reinstallation in years, mostly because I keep it lean by installing only the bare essentials (with the occasional update).
The machine is work is dictated by company policy, and will get upgraded with the company policy. But I see no reason to upgrade to XP at home, much less to Windows 7.
Obviously, article is a troll. I thought everyone here runs Linux and has root access to our machines at work. What's up with this Microsoft article anyway? They are so 15 years ago. /sarcasm
Last I heard, OSX was compromised faster than Windows. Maybe the version counts. But I doubt everybody's upgraded to Lion (and I hear it's still lacking).
If everybody thought like you, there'd be millions more zombies out there. Sure, Apple might be getting serious about security recently, but I wonder if it'll just be more of XP, where anything they do is reactive to existing exploits, rather than seriously making an effort to harden their code.
Actually, if any of your friends have facebook, you have no privacy either.
Nowadays, it's not so much that if you put it online, it will be forever remembered. It's, if you do it with other people and they are not individually interested in their own privacy, it will be remembered forever.
No. They're found in all orientations in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Indian religions and philosophies, as well as their offshoots and derivatives (though they mean slightly different things). Flipped, diagonal, straight, etc. They also sometimes come with dots in the squares, but that's not a necessity either.
I don't understand why they (and almost every other bit player in databases) are loading everything into main memory. I know disk is slow, but there are more efficient uses for main memory. Like creating a list of locked memory locations. The initial disk hit (which can be offset by intelligent caching and in this case, intelligent lookup) is probably not nearly as detrimental to the database's usability as the limitations from putting the entire database into main memory.
As for locking, one of their particular challenges is that as a document-oriented db, the granularity of the lock is indeterminate. For a relational db, it's easy, because the way the data is structured and stored follows a certain hierarchy (row=level, page-level, table-level, etc.). However, the meta-structure in Mongo is loose, which means the locking scheme really needs to be either at the root or the leaf level. To do so at an arbitrary branch level would be difficult to implement properly.
But I still don't see why they couldn't be storing a sychronized list of locked memory locations.
Prior to Elop taking over, it was pretty damn clear Symbian, MeeGo/Maemo/Harmatten was doomed.
I'm not sure about that. Immediately prior to Elop, Nokia had just bought QT. Nokia was about to go all-in into MeeGo.
You're right about them lacking a clear vision though. If they really wanted to compete, they would've cut Symbia and put MeeGo on every device. Instead of having a billion product lines, have three or four, with officially bundled add-ons (that could be bought separately) for specific markets.
Then, they should've dumped all of their marketing budget into these phones, made sure their developer tools were in good shape, and let the Nokia brand do the rest. Look at WebOS. It wasn't marketed at all, and yet the developer network was extensive and the apps were numerous. Certainly not as numerous as for iOS, but all of the major apps and arguably the only ones that matter are present in the WebOS app store.
I was of the opinion that the abrupt about-face for the company would turn out to be disastrous. It's not just the fact that they moved to an untested, unproven Windows mobile platform that if history had anything to say, would flop like Windows Mobile 6.5 did in the recent past. It's more that the move alienates not only developers and partners (who were expecting Symbian for a few more years and MeeGo to be the future), but also developers and engineers within Nokia itself. How would you feel if suddenly, a whole division of your company gets put onto the chopping block? I'd certainly be polishing up my resume ready to jump ship at any time. After all, if upper management can drop that kind of bombshell, who knows what others they have ready to be released at the right time. Phone hardware? Network hardware? Research? Marketing?
At this point, there's no turning back. They wasted too much money and too much clout in the transition to Windows Phone. Instead of putting all of their money into a viable and succeeding technology and working on a new strategy, they threw all of their resources and brand loyalty into the wind. If I was someone holding any of its stock, I'd cut my losses and sell, because it's going to be worth nothing very, very soon.
Your post needs to be turned into a television commercial.
Democracies are slow. The kind of change you speak of happens in generations, not years or even months that's needed to combat the increasingly self-destructive nature of the U.S. government.
In this case, it really is a matter of the lesser of two evils. And besides, special interests is fairly lop-sided without a powerful lobbying presence from the tech sector. Information technology is a major U.S. industry and export. It needs to be represented in Washington equally beside the agriculture, finance, and media industries. Otherwise, all legislation will be in favor those other industries to the detriment of the information technology industry.
That isn't to say the populace shouldn't be more educated and more involved. But politicians have spent decades trying to dumb primary education down and make the populace less informed. It's going to take time to reverse that ship, and even more time to actually start producing a generation of individuals who hold their politicians accountable.
The web brings in 100 times more revenue than the MAFIAA does.
Not to politicians it doesn't.
For starters, one's driving the cab, while the other's riding in the back.
I think the lesson here is that religious extremism is a bad thing in general. The difference between religions is how likely they tend towards extremism based on their founding doctrines.
As well, I think there's a cultural aspect involved. American Jews and Muslims tend to be less extreme than their European/Asian counterparts. And those in the middle class are more likely to tend towards centrism than either economic extreme.
He's pretty much looking for a personal assistant.
It most certainly does apply to a cup of coffee. If I buy a cup of coffee and it tastes like water (if it tasted like crap, I might actually be pleasantly surprised), I'd never go back to that store or brand again. That's why people have regular places they'll prefer going to over other places, and also why new restaurants do not become viable easily.
If I buy an app that sucks from the Apple app store, I'm shit outta luck. The next time I have to buy an app, well, it's going to have to be from the exact same place. Sure, it's a different developer, but it's the same store, with the same checks and controls, and presumably selling apps with the same inflated worth.
You're correct about the lack of a constant "supply". In Firefox's case, supply is a function of the number of eyeballs looking at it. Being the default search provider is basically Google's marketing and advertising. Which leads me to wonder, since Mozilla is basically making money off advertising Google's product, does Mozilla consider their userbase the product too? Because it would explain a hell of a lot about Firefox's direction if it was true.
Actually, Firefox comes with several search options besides Google (Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, etc.). I believe these are all paid for, similar to the higher and lower shelves in the supermarket isle. But because there's only one search box, somebody has to be the default search provider.
The main reason why people will look higher or lower on the shelf in a supermarket is because they're paying for the product directly. People won't care about switching their (default) search provider because it's free either way, and for the most part, whatever search engine they're using turns up decent results. In a browser, the only reason to pay for one of those other spots is when the default engine is insufficient due to specialization.
There are the occasional IT initiatives that benefit the company. Infrastructure upgrades, security, redundancy, even personal computer support, these are all IT initiatives that don't really fall into any other department and should be coming out of an IT-specific budget. For the most part, PHB's don't and won't spend the money for these things until there's a crisis. How else can you explain the ease with which people hacked into Sony.
That having been said, in this case, I have to agree that there's no reason to spin it off from an existing engineering department. There's already a department handling the technical stuff, and the engineers are probably dealing with both computer-related equipment and non-general computing electronics. Since the engineers probably already handle a lot of the infrastructure, there's no real place for a separate, independent IT department. In this case, IT would be most useful managing software rollouts and drive images as well as being the front line on tech support. That kind of thing doesn't require a completely separate department, just one that sits under the head of engineering.
You'll see the same at restaurants, where you have to bring your own napkin.
Free napkins and toilet paper are mostly subsidized by the cost of the food. This is made possible because the commodity is so inexpensive, and the primary product is priced sufficiently high enough to cover the cost of the commodity.
In places like India and China (and numerous other places), natural resources (per capita) are relatively expensive, i.e. the cost of a roll of toilet paper or a stack of napkins or other such is significantly higher relative to the general cost of living.
IMHO, this is actually a good thing. It keeps people from wasting the resource, because they're paying out of their own pocket for it. The price of the freebie is not hidden behind something else, like the price of the food or the entrance price. They know exactly how much each napkin is costing them, because they bought it. Which means they're not going to use it on things that are not worthwhile.
Amazon is not Google. And even Google is not "good" in any moral sense; it just doesn't engage in evil business practices. Where in the spectrum Amazon falls in, whether it's between Apple and Microsoft, or between Oracle and eBay, or some other combination thereof, is arguable. But to think that Amazon is somehow good because it's not Apple or Microsoft is just being naive (likewise for Google, but there's a strong case that Google is closer to the opposite side than the side Amazon is on).
Slashdot had plenty of articles on Atlantis being found too. Slightly different, since the records of its existence is are a little more recent and a little more reliable, but just as hyperbolic and inflaming.
Time for another beer.
Are you sure that's not the urinary system you're counting on?
Dave: Give me my money back, Paul.
Paul: I'm sorry, Dan. I'm afraid I can't do that.
The whole U.S. is established on the idea of God and religion.
There's a fairly large body of evidence that despite the constant mentions of "God", the founding fathers were all secular.
The separation of Church and State is one of the founding principles. As well, religious freedom is specifically addressed by the Bill of Rights, and even prior to that when the second constutional congress thought it unnecessary to enumerate what rights the State may not violate because it was so obvious.
So no, the United States was not founded on religion specifically, though religious freedom was one cause of the breakaway from British--specifically English--rule.
All of the founding fathers, and other influential people at that time, were highly educated and equally understood and accepted the founding principles of freedom.
Religion's role in politics is largely an invention of the 20th century going into the 21st century. Prior to that, it was race, which cumulated in the civil rights movement of the 1960's. And before that was the issue of slavery, which resulted in the Civil War. Interesting digression: there never was division in the government about how to treat Native Americans. Anyway, you can say that the civil rights movement was finishing what the Civil War began.
If anything, this country was founded on extreme duality and compromises. Religion just happens to be the current subject of the duality, though even that could be argued to have grown out of the race and ultimately slavery issue. But once the religion issue is settled (if it ever does), there will be the next fad.
If you take a close look at U.S. history, the root cause of all the current spate of problems goes back to the slavery issue. Religion wasn't written into the Constitution, but slavery certainly was. And the hostility towards Obama has to do with those very same sentiments (and look at how the GOP treated Herman Cain). But since race is a taboo, the same bigoted elements switched to religion, only, said elements found religion to be a much more effective motivator, and much harder to make taboo.
The unfortunate side effect of religion being the subject of the duality is that education, specifically higher education subjects including math, science, engineering, and philosophy, gets thrown under the bus. But that's what taking extreme positions on religion does. Look at the Muslim world to see the results. Look at the dark ages for an example a little closer to home (considering that the U.S. started as an extension of Europe).
There are certainly other problems caused by other deep-rooted sentiments. E.g. current and past foreign policy is largely due to manifest destiny and the way Native Americans were treated. But the extreme duality of the country with regards to religion is not ultimately about religion itself, but about race and slavery.
No, it wasn't. Apple's terrified of Android--not necessarily what it is, but what it may become, which is another Windows against their MacOS. That's history they don't want to see repeated on the smartphone and tablet. Except, they're a little too late, so they're scrambling around desparately throwing out whatever they can against Android hardware manufacturers in hopes it'll be enough to cripple Android and Android's ecosystem for the near future.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is just stalling while they try to get their house in order and put out a decent smartphone and tablet OS. This is why they're compelling other companies to pay royalty instead of outright taking them to court over the supposed infringed patents. They want these same companies to make Windows Mobile phones, not to go out of business.