If they release a firmware upgrade, you have two options, neither of which wrecks your phone:
1) just don't perform the upgrade, or
2) restore, upgrade without jailbreak, and then wait for jailbreak for the new firmware.
Apple can be evil, but not as much as a lot of Slashdot posters think. (Cf. the constant wrong statements that using iTunes automatically infests your system with DRM.)
You're taking my response out of context. The original poster was asking, essentially, "how can anyone intelligent love the iPhone when it has all these drawbacks?"
You've explained that the drawbacks are fatal for you. That doesn't answer the OP's question. I'm saying there are many people, including myself, who don't care. That does answer the OP's question.
Apple, for better or worse, has made the choice that it's not worth the time and effort to support OSes other than Windows and OS X. Their financial and market share results appear to prove their product can appeal to many intelligent people despite that omission.
Similarly, they have decided not to get involved with the potential patent-infringement headaches of Vorbis and FLAC. Again, the evidence shows that many buyers don't care. Thus the answer to the OP's question.
I'd rather have a large desktop touchpad that works like a MacBook touchpad, but with more finger chording options. I'd replace my mouse with one if it were available.
I very much like having one large button and modifying the clicks with fingers on the pad. For whatever reason, I find that approach more congenial than multiple physical buttons, to the degree that I miss my trackpad when I'm docked. (Not enough to give up the full-size keyboard and 23" monitor, though.
I also would like to get rid of the substantial desk area currently held hostage by my mousepad. A smaller touchpad would help with that too.
I'm just one person. But I can answer your question, speaking for myself.
Those drawbacks have so far not affected me in any way (except that I paid a lot to get the iPhone).
1) I haven't yet found anything I want to do that a) is available but b) is NOT available in the App Store. When it happens, I'll jailbreak. (In any case, jailbreaking isn't that hard, and rarely affects any functionality.)
2) Since I have used iTunes as my jukebox for years anyway... yawn. I can see this would be a problem if you used a free OS as your everyday OS.
3) It plays everything you encounter in the wild. If you've converted everything you have to Vorbis/FLAC, then you're a) probably using Linux and b) even if you aren't, not on Apple's radar. iPods have never played those formats, so it's no shock the iPhone won't either.
4) Who cares? It has the best smartphone OS on the planet. If I have to wait 2 weeks (to avoid the lines) or pay a bit extra, it's worth it.
5) I'll have a new phone by the time the battery dies. A two-year-old phone is a dinosaur.
6) This is admittedly annoying. But, as with a removable battery, adding a storage slot would make the phone thicker and heavier. No thanks.
Your analogy is bad, too. The iPhone has plenty of power to do whatever people want. Buying and jailbreaking an iPhone is more like buying a truck, signing a contract that says "I won't tow boats," and then towing a boat.
Because OpenMoko is unusable, at least on the FreeRunner hardware. Seriously? A keyboard where the keys are so small that my relatively small fingers can't avoid hitting two at once?
Because iPhone OS, whether jailbroken or not, is superior to the competition. In particular, the applications are much more integrated and the browser is leaps and bounds ahead of anyone else's.
A jailbroken iPhone is a *better* smartphone than the alternatives, whether they're cracked or not.
I haven't seen the need to crack mine yet, anyway, but then again I'm not a developer.
No 720-line standard should have ever earned the "HD" moniker. The term "HD" should be reserved for displays and sources with resolution of 1920x1080 or greater. Real HD sources will look like ass on this display.
Life would have been much clearer if we had called 720p "extended definition" instead of HD. A lot of people would have been saved from buying lousy TVs and monitors.
We're probably thinking of different kinds of regulation. I expect you're thinking about the everyday bureaucratic hassles small business owners face, which I know can be onerous, and which I'd support reforming by reducing the regulatory burden on small businesses while increasing it on large ones. I don't think taxes, specifically, would be as much of a problem as people think... IF they were enforced against large corporations the same way they are against small businesses. After all, in such a world, taxes would burden everyone equally.
The real crux of the matter is in the capital markets (and therefore the credit markets which they fund, which are the lifeblood of all business). When they are completely unregulated, only very, very high-value players even have access. What's worse, the situation is compounded because large players in the capital markets are specifically exempt from many securities and banking regulations meant to keep the markets honest, on the theory -- which Enron disproved once and for all -- that reputational concern is enough to deter large repeat players from bad behavior.
Such exceptions are justified by paeans to the "free market." A market with terms dictated by a few repeat players, who are exempt from the rules, is not free at all.
An analogous situation closer to home for the typical business owner is the pressure Wal-Mart exerts on suppliers. The market to supply Wal-Mart is not a free one. In some businesses, they have so much leverage that they can control the suppliers, to the suppliers' detriment.
In the current system, investing in large business carries vastly cheaper transaction costs than investing in small business. That's absurd and should be reversed to the extent possible.
I agree completely. Corporatism is what today's conservatives practice.
giving handouts to businesses stifles the free market. When they give handouts, it's pure hypocrisy. But that's often not what they're doing.
More often, they are removing the regulatory foundation necessary for the market to succeed, ironically in the name of a free market.
A completely unregulated market, far from being free, is bound to end up with a few large players and prohibitive barriers to entry for smaller players. Given that conservatives today represent those large players, they know this perfectly well, and it is their goal. But they hide it behind disingenuous free-market rhetoric.
Even the rhetoric betrays sharply divergent mindsets...
I might say it this way:
Conservatives say ceding control of our polity to large corporations and those lucky enough to control them will bring prosperity. Liberals say ensuring everyone has the opportunity to contribute will.
All the land remaining in DC came from Maryland. The Virginia land was returned to Virginia in 1846.
It would be amusing to watch Maryland voters, especially Republican ones, react to your proposal. People going blue in the face and sputtering is often funny.
But it might actually work OK (in an alternate universe where you could get it enacted), since the District's population is not large enough to overwhelm the existing Maryland electorate.
I dislike Massachusetts government enough that I'm actually going to respond to your post in detail. I can't speak for the whole state government, only those parts of it (and municipal subdivisions) that I ran into during my time there. Every one was problematic.
I've never applied for a job there, and would never do so for reasons that will shortly become obvious. To be blunt, the job I will start in DC in September is way better than *any* Massachusetts government job could be for a new lawyer.
My first experience was with the Mass RMV. On their website, they state that you need a certain set of documents to convert an out-of-state license. I brought with me the printout of the linked page along with everything on it. After waiting two hours in line, I was informed by the employee that I needed an original birth certificate to prove my date of birth, despite the fact that my passport, which I had with me, had the date as required by the RMV. I showed her the list of documents, and checked off each item with a pen. No dice; she would not transfer my license. I asked to speak with the office manager and showed her the website printout. She accused me of making a fake printout and repeated what the employee had said.
I gave up, went home, and came back later with a file box full of documents. This time, after another two-hour wait (and presenting more documents than the RMV claims to require), I got my license.
My next experience was attempting to register to vote. It turned out that my apartment literally straddled the Cambridge and Somerville city lines. I first tried to register to vote with the Cambridge city clerk, as the street the apartment abutted was in Cambridge, as was my street address. I was denied because, according to the city of Cambridge, my apartment was in Somerville. So I went to the Somerville city clerk and was told my apartment was in Cambridge. Repeated letters to both cities failed to get me registered (actually, failed to elicit any response) and I was unable to vote in two elections that occurred before I moved one year later to an apartment that was unambiguously in Cambridge. Constitutional rights? Who gives a shit?
Then I experienced the fun of dealing with the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. Silly me; I thought it would be handy to have an EZPass. So I tried to get one. Registering online was a cinch. But then I never received my EZPass transponder in the mail. They did take my money, and once again repeated contacts to various MTA officials resulted mostly in befuddlement. I eventually ate the $30 or so because it was just not worth my time to pursue the matter. I never saw an EZPass transponder before I moved out of the state. If you read the newspaper, none of this is a surprise. MTA officials are rarely in the news for turnpike-related decisions, but there has been a consistent stream of stories about their perks and inflated salaries.
And, of course, there's the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority. Constant track fires, track infrastructure that is not as good as that in many Third World countries, speeds literally half those in either the New York or Washington subway systems, equipment that ages before its time due to neglect, a brand-new headhouse (Charles/MGH) with platforms so misaligned that wheelchair users can't get on the trains, an epic light-rail vehicle procurement fiasco (Google "type 8 chronology of events"), and buses that should be impounded and taken off the road for defects (5 bus fires in my 3 years there).
I've already mentioned the entertaining Department of Revenue tax procedure above, although, in fairness, they don't ever seem to have messed anything up for me, only designed a laughable procedure.
My last episode was with the RMV again; this time, they mistyped the VIN on my car registration. I should have known better than to try to fix it. No dice, and an indignant RMV official telling me that my lease contract (which matched my car) was w
Haha. Interesting theory, but try again. I was in Massachusetts to go to law school (at the only law school in the state that would make it worth it to live there).
I did work twice for government: the University of Washington in Seattle, and the King County Metro transit system in the same city. I experienced no more than the usual frustrations of working for government in either job; in fact, I loved my KC Metro job. (I left to go to law school.)
My comments about Mass. are the sad truth. Besides being plagued by corruption, the state has horrible weather 10 months of the year, and is dingy and falling apart. I won't miss it one bit.
Touche. I'm still hoping the situation will finally be fixed, at least as respects the House, with an expanded Democratic majority in Congress and a Democratic president. (In fairness, it would be very difficult to design a sensible plan to give DC representation in the Senate.)
Although I was really talking about the MA state government. I do have a say in the District government, on those occasions when Congress doesn't randomly override it for some bullshit reason.
Their income tax procedure is quite interesting. You can pay online, but you still have to send in a paper return, and you never get any kind of confirmation that the return and your payment were successfully linked. You either have to call them manually or just hope you don't get a letter accusing you of nonpayment.
If you want to pay by check, you again have to send it separately from your return, and you again get no confirmation that your payment was successfully linked to your account.
My first MA income tax return was just one of many moments during my three years there when I said to myself: "Only in Massachusetts."
Government employees in Massachusetts, the state that is so corrupt and dysfunctional it gives government all over the rest of the U.S. a black eye.
Seriously. I just escaped (to D.C., which, despite its warts is a million times better) from three years of living in that hellhole. I don't think I encountered a single effective or competently run state agency the whole time.
I expect the employee who would have been responsible for wiping this laptop is probably a relative of some high official, and probably doesn't know how to do anything except reinstall Windows from a factory CD.
Check your configuration. You have something wrong.
10.5.0 was very buggy. So was 10.4.0. With both, things have gotten a lot better since.
For me, using two Leopard Macs all day every day, there are fewer application crashes with Leopard than Tiger.
It always surprises me how people forget that the first release of virtually every new OS ever has been buggy. 10.4.0, 10.3.0, and 10.2.0 were no different.
Transferring wealth down (as Democrats like to do) is rather different than transferring wealth up (as Republicans like to do).
Our system is set up to be a two-party system. We would need quite fundamental reform before a third party could get any traction, which won't happen because the Constitution is so difficult to amend. I suppose I should be happy that libertarians are pissing away their votes, but the fact remains that third parties are an exercise in futility and the fundamental nature of the system is the reason why.
A much better model for change is the Ron Paul model (as much as I think Ron Paul is a deluded fool): to agitate within one of the parties in order to shift its conventional ideological wisdom.
Why is it that the people in America, at least over the last couple of decades, continue to vote into office, hmmm, shall we say "substandard" presidents?
You are reading insightful posts from the 50% of Americans who did not vote for the idiots.
One reason it's so easy for Republicans to win, whether or not they're liked, is that there is an inbuilt bias in our system toward small states, and small states tend to be conservative. If you don't already know about it, check out the workings of the electoral college. In a nutshell, each state gets the number of electors corresponding to the number of congresssional representatives it has. A state has a number of House representatives proportional to its population and two senators, regardless of population.
So Alaska, South Dakota, and Wyoming, three extremely Republican states and three of the four least populous states in the Union, have almost a third as much clout in the presidential election as New York (for example), even though they have about 8% of the population.
Not everyone who uses IE6 does so by choice. The admins at my last workplace refuse to upgrade, install an alternate browser, or allow users to install an alternate browser.
From a user perspective, the best thing about Microsoft's decision in IE8 is that it will force IT admins to phase out IE6 as sites increasingly stop working with IE6.
One area where lawyers' general technological illiteracy really hurts them is in document management.
Most larger law offices (including all three I've worked in during law school) have sophisticated, expensive document management systems which are supposed to allow attorneys to build off of each other's past work and avoid reinventing the wheel. From an end-user perspective, using these systems is generally like using any other simple database. You can save documents into the system and organize them in a number of ways. You can search for documents by keyword, subject matter, case, client, and so on. When the system works, it does indeed save a lot of hassle and provide tons of useful information to the (always time-crunched) attorney.
But the systems often (even mostly) fail, because, despite repeated trainings, attorneys are often unable to grasp the simplest concepts related to them (even how to save documents into the system, and especially how to organize the documents and tag them with the proper information). I would guess that most lawfirms lose a significant portion of their past work because it ends up on local hard drives, or even on thumb drives, and never gets put into the system. Furthermore, attorneys are often unable to search effectively, even though their livelihood depends on searching effectively for information in other contexts.
These are actions the attorneys should be doing every hour of every day, and have usually had demonstrated to them on multiple occasions. The problem may be fear, but my experience leads me to think it's some kind of mental disconnect where basic computer concepts such as directories, database records and fields, and keywords are simply unintelligible to them for some reason.
It's worse in law. I just graduated from a law school whose name any joe on the street anywhere in the world would recognize. Most of the students there don't even know how to create a PDF.
Expecting these law students to sum a column in Excel would be like expecting typical/. posters to build a Core 2 Duo from stuff lying around their garage.
I've never understood how people who are generally very intelligent can fail to grasp the most basic computer concepts so completely.
Slashdot Mirror
And neither can Apple.
If they release a firmware upgrade, you have two options, neither of which wrecks your phone:
1) just don't perform the upgrade, or
2) restore, upgrade without jailbreak, and then wait for jailbreak for the new firmware.
Apple can be evil, but not as much as a lot of Slashdot posters think. (Cf. the constant wrong statements that using iTunes automatically infests your system with DRM.)
You're taking my response out of context. The original poster was asking, essentially, "how can anyone intelligent love the iPhone when it has all these drawbacks?"
You've explained that the drawbacks are fatal for you. That doesn't answer the OP's question. I'm saying there are many people, including myself, who don't care. That does answer the OP's question.
Apple, for better or worse, has made the choice that it's not worth the time and effort to support OSes other than Windows and OS X. Their financial and market share results appear to prove their product can appeal to many intelligent people despite that omission.
Similarly, they have decided not to get involved with the potential patent-infringement headaches of Vorbis and FLAC. Again, the evidence shows that many buyers don't care. Thus the answer to the OP's question.
I'd rather have a large desktop touchpad that works like a MacBook touchpad, but with more finger chording options. I'd replace my mouse with one if it were available.
I very much like having one large button and modifying the clicks with fingers on the pad. For whatever reason, I find that approach more congenial than multiple physical buttons, to the degree that I miss my trackpad when I'm docked. (Not enough to give up the full-size keyboard and 23" monitor, though.
I also would like to get rid of the substantial desk area currently held hostage by my mousepad. A smaller touchpad would help with that too.
I'm just one person. But I can answer your question, speaking for myself.
Those drawbacks have so far not affected me in any way (except that I paid a lot to get the iPhone).
1) I haven't yet found anything I want to do that a) is available but b) is NOT available in the App Store. When it happens, I'll jailbreak. (In any case, jailbreaking isn't that hard, and rarely affects any functionality.)
2) Since I have used iTunes as my jukebox for years anyway... yawn. I can see this would be a problem if you used a free OS as your everyday OS.
3) It plays everything you encounter in the wild. If you've converted everything you have to Vorbis/FLAC, then you're a) probably using Linux and b) even if you aren't, not on Apple's radar. iPods have never played those formats, so it's no shock the iPhone won't either.
4) Who cares? It has the best smartphone OS on the planet. If I have to wait 2 weeks (to avoid the lines) or pay a bit extra, it's worth it.
5) I'll have a new phone by the time the battery dies. A two-year-old phone is a dinosaur.
6) This is admittedly annoying. But, as with a removable battery, adding a storage slot would make the phone thicker and heavier. No thanks.
Your analogy is bad, too. The iPhone has plenty of power to do whatever people want. Buying and jailbreaking an iPhone is more like buying a truck, signing a contract that says "I won't tow boats," and then towing a boat.
Because OpenMoko is unusable, at least on the FreeRunner hardware. Seriously? A keyboard where the keys are so small that my relatively small fingers can't avoid hitting two at once?
Because iPhone OS, whether jailbroken or not, is superior to the competition. In particular, the applications are much more integrated and the browser is leaps and bounds ahead of anyone else's.
A jailbroken iPhone is a *better* smartphone than the alternatives, whether they're cracked or not.
I haven't seen the need to crack mine yet, anyway, but then again I'm not a developer.
No 720-line standard should have ever earned the "HD" moniker. The term "HD" should be reserved for displays and sources with resolution of 1920x1080 or greater. Real HD sources will look like ass on this display.
Life would have been much clearer if we had called 720p "extended definition" instead of HD. A lot of people would have been saved from buying lousy TVs and monitors.
We're probably thinking of different kinds of regulation. I expect you're thinking about the everyday bureaucratic hassles small business owners face, which I know can be onerous, and which I'd support reforming by reducing the regulatory burden on small businesses while increasing it on large ones. I don't think taxes, specifically, would be as much of a problem as people think... IF they were enforced against large corporations the same way they are against small businesses. After all, in such a world, taxes would burden everyone equally.
The real crux of the matter is in the capital markets (and therefore the credit markets which they fund, which are the lifeblood of all business). When they are completely unregulated, only very, very high-value players even have access. What's worse, the situation is compounded because large players in the capital markets are specifically exempt from many securities and banking regulations meant to keep the markets honest, on the theory -- which Enron disproved once and for all -- that reputational concern is enough to deter large repeat players from bad behavior.
Such exceptions are justified by paeans to the "free market." A market with terms dictated by a few repeat players, who are exempt from the rules, is not free at all.
An analogous situation closer to home for the typical business owner is the pressure Wal-Mart exerts on suppliers. The market to supply Wal-Mart is not a free one. In some businesses, they have so much leverage that they can control the suppliers, to the suppliers' detriment.
In the current system, investing in large business carries vastly cheaper transaction costs than investing in small business. That's absurd and should be reversed to the extent possible.
I agree completely. Corporatism is what today's conservatives practice.
giving handouts to businesses stifles the free market. When they give handouts, it's pure hypocrisy. But that's often not what they're doing. More often, they are removing the regulatory foundation necessary for the market to succeed, ironically in the name of a free market. A completely unregulated market, far from being free, is bound to end up with a few large players and prohibitive barriers to entry for smaller players. Given that conservatives today represent those large players, they know this perfectly well, and it is their goal. But they hide it behind disingenuous free-market rhetoric.Even the rhetoric betrays sharply divergent mindsets...
I might say it this way:
Conservatives say ceding control of our polity to large corporations and those lucky enough to control them will bring prosperity. Liberals say ensuring everyone has the opportunity to contribute will.
All the land remaining in DC came from Maryland. The Virginia land was returned to Virginia in 1846.
It would be amusing to watch Maryland voters, especially Republican ones, react to your proposal. People going blue in the face and sputtering is often funny.
But it might actually work OK (in an alternate universe where you could get it enacted), since the District's population is not large enough to overwhelm the existing Maryland electorate.
I dislike Massachusetts government enough that I'm actually going to respond to your post in detail. I can't speak for the whole state government, only those parts of it (and municipal subdivisions) that I ran into during my time there. Every one was problematic.
I've never applied for a job there, and would never do so for reasons that will shortly become obvious. To be blunt, the job I will start in DC in September is way better than *any* Massachusetts government job could be for a new lawyer.
My first experience was with the Mass RMV. On their website, they state that you need a certain set of documents to convert an out-of-state license. I brought with me the printout of the linked page along with everything on it. After waiting two hours in line, I was informed by the employee that I needed an original birth certificate to prove my date of birth, despite the fact that my passport, which I had with me, had the date as required by the RMV. I showed her the list of documents, and checked off each item with a pen. No dice; she would not transfer my license. I asked to speak with the office manager and showed her the website printout. She accused me of making a fake printout and repeated what the employee had said.
I gave up, went home, and came back later with a file box full of documents. This time, after another two-hour wait (and presenting more documents than the RMV claims to require), I got my license.
My next experience was attempting to register to vote. It turned out that my apartment literally straddled the Cambridge and Somerville city lines. I first tried to register to vote with the Cambridge city clerk, as the street the apartment abutted was in Cambridge, as was my street address. I was denied because, according to the city of Cambridge, my apartment was in Somerville. So I went to the Somerville city clerk and was told my apartment was in Cambridge. Repeated letters to both cities failed to get me registered (actually, failed to elicit any response) and I was unable to vote in two elections that occurred before I moved one year later to an apartment that was unambiguously in Cambridge. Constitutional rights? Who gives a shit?
Then I experienced the fun of dealing with the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. Silly me; I thought it would be handy to have an EZPass. So I tried to get one. Registering online was a cinch. But then I never received my EZPass transponder in the mail. They did take my money, and once again repeated contacts to various MTA officials resulted mostly in befuddlement. I eventually ate the $30 or so because it was just not worth my time to pursue the matter. I never saw an EZPass transponder before I moved out of the state. If you read the newspaper, none of this is a surprise. MTA officials are rarely in the news for turnpike-related decisions, but there has been a consistent stream of stories about their perks and inflated salaries.
And, of course, there's the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority. Constant track fires, track infrastructure that is not as good as that in many Third World countries, speeds literally half those in either the New York or Washington subway systems, equipment that ages before its time due to neglect, a brand-new headhouse (Charles/MGH) with platforms so misaligned that wheelchair users can't get on the trains, an epic light-rail vehicle procurement fiasco (Google "type 8 chronology of events"), and buses that should be impounded and taken off the road for defects (5 bus fires in my 3 years there).
I've already mentioned the entertaining Department of Revenue tax procedure above, although, in fairness, they don't ever seem to have messed anything up for me, only designed a laughable procedure.
My last episode was with the RMV again; this time, they mistyped the VIN on my car registration. I should have known better than to try to fix it. No dice, and an indignant RMV official telling me that my lease contract (which matched my car) was w
Haha. Interesting theory, but try again. I was in Massachusetts to go to law school (at the only law school in the state that would make it worth it to live there).
I did work twice for government: the University of Washington in Seattle, and the King County Metro transit system in the same city. I experienced no more than the usual frustrations of working for government in either job; in fact, I loved my KC Metro job. (I left to go to law school.)
My comments about Mass. are the sad truth. Besides being plagued by corruption, the state has horrible weather 10 months of the year, and is dingy and falling apart. I won't miss it one bit.
Touche. I'm still hoping the situation will finally be fixed, at least as respects the House, with an expanded Democratic majority in Congress and a Democratic president. (In fairness, it would be very difficult to design a sensible plan to give DC representation in the Senate.)
Although I was really talking about the MA state government. I do have a say in the District government, on those occasions when Congress doesn't randomly override it for some bullshit reason.
Anytime. It was so satisfying, I'd leave again if I weren't already gone. Maybe I'll fly up there just to leave again.
Haha. Funny you mention that.
Their income tax procedure is quite interesting. You can pay online, but you still have to send in a paper return, and you never get any kind of confirmation that the return and your payment were successfully linked. You either have to call them manually or just hope you don't get a letter accusing you of nonpayment.
If you want to pay by check, you again have to send it separately from your return, and you again get no confirmation that your payment was successfully linked to your account.
My first MA income tax return was just one of many moments during my three years there when I said to myself: "Only in Massachusetts."
Government employees in Massachusetts, the state that is so corrupt and dysfunctional it gives government all over the rest of the U.S. a black eye.
Seriously. I just escaped (to D.C., which, despite its warts is a million times better) from three years of living in that hellhole. I don't think I encountered a single effective or competently run state agency the whole time.
I expect the employee who would have been responsible for wiping this laptop is probably a relative of some high official, and probably doesn't know how to do anything except reinstall Windows from a factory CD.
Check your configuration. You have something wrong.
10.5.0 was very buggy. So was 10.4.0. With both, things have gotten a lot better since.
For me, using two Leopard Macs all day every day, there are fewer application crashes with Leopard than Tiger.
It always surprises me how people forget that the first release of virtually every new OS ever has been buggy. 10.4.0, 10.3.0, and 10.2.0 were no different.
Transferring wealth down (as Democrats like to do) is rather different than transferring wealth up (as Republicans like to do).
Our system is set up to be a two-party system. We would need quite fundamental reform before a third party could get any traction, which won't happen because the Constitution is so difficult to amend. I suppose I should be happy that libertarians are pissing away their votes, but the fact remains that third parties are an exercise in futility and the fundamental nature of the system is the reason why.
A much better model for change is the Ron Paul model (as much as I think Ron Paul is a deluded fool): to agitate within one of the parties in order to shift its conventional ideological wisdom.
You are reading insightful posts from the 50% of Americans who did not vote for the idiots.
One reason it's so easy for Republicans to win, whether or not they're liked, is that there is an inbuilt bias in our system toward small states, and small states tend to be conservative. If you don't already know about it, check out the workings of the electoral college. In a nutshell, each state gets the number of electors corresponding to the number of congresssional representatives it has. A state has a number of House representatives proportional to its population and two senators, regardless of population.
So Alaska, South Dakota, and Wyoming, three extremely Republican states and three of the four least populous states in the Union, have almost a third as much clout in the presidential election as New York (for example), even though they have about 8% of the population.
Not everyone who uses IE6 does so by choice. The admins at my last workplace refuse to upgrade, install an alternate browser, or allow users to install an alternate browser.
From a user perspective, the best thing about Microsoft's decision in IE8 is that it will force IT admins to phase out IE6 as sites increasingly stop working with IE6.
Or the MacBook Air, or the Lenovo x300.
One area where lawyers' general technological illiteracy really hurts them is in document management.
Most larger law offices (including all three I've worked in during law school) have sophisticated, expensive document management systems which are supposed to allow attorneys to build off of each other's past work and avoid reinventing the wheel. From an end-user perspective, using these systems is generally like using any other simple database. You can save documents into the system and organize them in a number of ways. You can search for documents by keyword, subject matter, case, client, and so on. When the system works, it does indeed save a lot of hassle and provide tons of useful information to the (always time-crunched) attorney.
But the systems often (even mostly) fail, because, despite repeated trainings, attorneys are often unable to grasp the simplest concepts related to them (even how to save documents into the system, and especially how to organize the documents and tag them with the proper information). I would guess that most lawfirms lose a significant portion of their past work because it ends up on local hard drives, or even on thumb drives, and never gets put into the system. Furthermore, attorneys are often unable to search effectively, even though their livelihood depends on searching effectively for information in other contexts.
These are actions the attorneys should be doing every hour of every day, and have usually had demonstrated to them on multiple occasions. The problem may be fear, but my experience leads me to think it's some kind of mental disconnect where basic computer concepts such as directories, database records and fields, and keywords are simply unintelligible to them for some reason.
Ha ha. That is an excellent and very true point.
It's worse in law. I just graduated from a law school whose name any joe on the street anywhere in the world would recognize. Most of the students there don't even know how to create a PDF.
Expecting these law students to sum a column in Excel would be like expecting typical /. posters to build a Core 2 Duo from stuff lying around their garage.
I've never understood how people who are generally very intelligent can fail to grasp the most basic computer concepts so completely.