You haven't been following this thread at all, have you?
As I stated, she was in labour for 15 hours. Furthermore, she only went into labour at 1am. You realise that any "normal" person would be quite tired by 1am as it is, right? Let alone someone that's giving birth. By about 4am, she was completely exhausted and the pain was too much, so they started giving her drugs. Gas and Air (50/50 Nitrous Oxide/Oxygen mix) came first and was quickly followed by diamorphine, which make you drowsy to say the least. I was there the whole time she would scream in agony, then almost immediately fall asleep before her head hit the pillow.
Not to mention that at any point, nobody has asked how my wife actually felt about this. Here, this is one of the first things that was tweeted:
You don't seem to realise that (rough estimate) about 75% of the people that were interested wouldn't even know what an RSS feed is, let alone how to subscribe to one.
Except, as I pointed out, the benefit of the social networking side is that people can ignore it if they want to. How many times have you ended up on an email list with constant emails coming through that you just don't care about?
Sure, I -COULD- have emailed every single person I happen to have on facebook (Which ranges from close family to old school friends whom I have the odd bit of banter with), but emails are a bit too linear. Even with just say 20 people replying and commenting on different things, you end up with conversations within conversations, topics jump back and forth and hundreds of emails get flung all over the place. Sure, it "works", but it's not very elegant. It's a bit like saying "people who drive cars just don't know how to ride a horse, which works just as well as a mode of transport".
Don't get me wrong, email is fantastic and I certainly use it every day (at work alone, I must get a few thousand emails a day) as an invaluable communication tool, but it is a bit "old hat", which is probably why google tried to replace it with Wave (shame it didn't take off).
With IRC or IM, you have to be there. What if you don't want to leave your computer running? What if you're not near your machine? Things like facebook happen to fill a very good niche. Sure, the "apps" are annoying as hell and it can get a bit spammy if just one or two of your friends are a bit "facebook-happy", but you can easily hide them.
I can't believe I'm on slashdot DEFENDING facebook, a site which I wouldn't necessarily miss if it died tomorrow, but while it's there and most people near and dear to me use it, I may as well make the most of it.
Social networking has never interested me much, but during the birth of my child, my wife was in labour for nearly 15 hours. Normally, we would have had all sorts of friends and family trying to ring us or text us or whatever, just to know what was going on. Instead, I opted to tweet various status updates (which were automatically posted on facebook). This turned out to be a brilliant idea (I was just looking for something to do at the time) as people were kept up to date, nobody could complain that they weren't "told first" (something that happened when we announced our wedding) and all the messages coming through could be read at our leisure.
It was also just as easy to post up a picture mere minutes after he was born, once again everyone that WANTED to know did and those that didn't could just ignore it. That would never work with email, or IRC or even instant messaging.
I never said they would, but if guns were illegal, they're a lot harder to come across. How many times do you have to read about someone taking a gun from their uncle or whatever and using it to murder someone? You'll never rule out this sort of thing completely, but as it gets less "convenient" to pull off, it's less likely to happen.
How can you honestly say that removing guns will do "nothing at all to prevent killing"? Look at any of the major shootings over the last couple of decades, do you seriously mean to say that the lone gunman who shoots and kills say 10 people would be able to stab 10 people before being taken down?
That's just one example off the top of my head. Yes, people who want to kill will still kill, but it's a lot harder to kill someone with a blade than it is to do it with a gun. Not impossible and certainly not as difficult as would be ideal, but definitely harder.
Plus, as for the wilderness thing, most countries that ban guns don't completely ban them, they often allow people to own a firearm license for a valid reason, such as hunting. Even in the UK.
No, you don't buy one now. Even Google themselves said that Android wasn't designed for Tablets yet (With Honeycomb being the first "proper" version for tablets). Furthermore, these first-gen Android tablets are pretty great in some ways, but they're still the first generation. Waiting for Honeycomb is by far the most sensible thing to do, particularly as it will coincide with a hardware refresh of sorts (such as nVidia's Tegra 2 being available). You COULD get an existing tablet and then hack Honeycomb onto it, but who knows how well that'll work out. You can wait 2 or 3 months and get a much better investment.
Who's debating this? Nobody. There will always be people out there who will use whatever is at their disposal to cause harm or even death. The argument here is that guns serve no purpose other than the intention of killing someone else. Knives, on the other hand, have many useful and practical applications. The fact that someone might use one for harm is irrelevant, particularly as your chances of surviving a knifing are far greater than your chances of surviving getting shot.
I happen to come from Northern Ireland, Belfast is my home town and I can tell you that you've just made that statement up about them having the "loosest gun laws". The gun laws in Northern Ireland don't differ that much from the rest of the UK.
That's all well and good, but I gave up when you touted your two completely opposite scenarios. I could just as easily do that myself. Watch:
Case A: Random lunatic breaks into a house, finds a gun and kills all 6 members of the household, as well as 3 neighbours and 1 police officer who attended the scene, before blowing his own head off.
Case B: Nutjob enters the home and is quickly subdued by the 6 people, who easily outnumber the crazy fool and keep him down long enough for police to arrive. Minor injuries were caused when the man attempted to cause harm with a bread knife but all involved made a full recovery.
So you see, these entirely hypothetical scenarios prove absolutely nothing useful.
It is easy to argue that letting everyone have guns is better than letting just the criminals have guns, but the idea is that it's harder for criminals to get guns. Furthermore, by making it illegal to own firearms, police can easily stop anyone that looks dodgy if they can prove they have a weapon on them. Without anti-gun laws, they would be forced to leave them be, not knowing what their intentions are.
Even if "gun crime" did rise after a ban, eventually it would fall as weapons are harder to obtain.
But in different ways. IOS will generate a lot more revnue than Android will, but Android will be on more devices (at least if the current trends keep up).
Over half of all android apps are free. For iOS, it's more like 25%. Yes, there may be more iOS apps overall, but when Android hits 300,000 apps (where iOS currently is), it'll still be about 50%. So I stand by my point - The android market is full of a lot more free apps, maybe not by raw number (iOS certainly has that covered in pretty much all areas), but in all categories.
And the android app store has more. Even titles apps that are absolutely sure to sell tend to get free versions on Android. Angry Birds is a primary example. Android seems to run best off of ad-supported apps, whereas, the iOS App Store seems slightly more geared towards paying for apps.
I know The Xperia phones have some issues, but that all sounds pretty serious. I'd have taken that phone back pretty quickly. It's also quite strange that they wont let you update the phone OTA, like the rest of the civilized world lets you.
You don't need to buy anything, the app I mentioned is free. There are many, many free Apps for Android, it's one of the things that really sets it apart from the iPhone app store.
Sadly, Sony's Android offerings are....lacking...to say the least. They're not even 2.1 as far as I'm aware, so despite the fact that the phone is on sale in shops today, it's 4 versions behind!
Well what phone have you got? Are you using any dedicated alarm apps or the stock one?
I have a HTC Desire and Sense's alarm never failed me once. Then I switched ROMs to one without Sense and use Alarm Clock Plus, which works just as well. It's even clever enough to up the volume if you happen to have your phone on Vibrate.
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You haven't been following this thread at all, have you?
As I stated, she was in labour for 15 hours. Furthermore, she only went into labour at 1am. You realise that any "normal" person would be quite tired by 1am as it is, right? Let alone someone that's giving birth. By about 4am, she was completely exhausted and the pain was too much, so they started giving her drugs. Gas and Air (50/50 Nitrous Oxide/Oxygen mix) came first and was quickly followed by diamorphine, which make you drowsy to say the least. I was there the whole time she would scream in agony, then almost immediately fall asleep before her head hit the pillow.
Not to mention that at any point, nobody has asked how my wife actually felt about this. Here, this is one of the first things that was tweeted:
http://i55.tinypic.com/sqjwwi.jpg
As you can see, she quite liked the idea.
A few decades ago, they also didn't have wonderful drugs that would knock her out between contractions.
You don't seem to realise that (rough estimate) about 75% of the people that were interested wouldn't even know what an RSS feed is, let alone how to subscribe to one.
Except, as I pointed out, the benefit of the social networking side is that people can ignore it if they want to. How many times have you ended up on an email list with constant emails coming through that you just don't care about?
Sure, I -COULD- have emailed every single person I happen to have on facebook (Which ranges from close family to old school friends whom I have the odd bit of banter with), but emails are a bit too linear. Even with just say 20 people replying and commenting on different things, you end up with conversations within conversations, topics jump back and forth and hundreds of emails get flung all over the place. Sure, it "works", but it's not very elegant. It's a bit like saying "people who drive cars just don't know how to ride a horse, which works just as well as a mode of transport".
Don't get me wrong, email is fantastic and I certainly use it every day (at work alone, I must get a few thousand emails a day) as an invaluable communication tool, but it is a bit "old hat", which is probably why google tried to replace it with Wave (shame it didn't take off).
With IRC or IM, you have to be there. What if you don't want to leave your computer running? What if you're not near your machine? Things like facebook happen to fill a very good niche. Sure, the "apps" are annoying as hell and it can get a bit spammy if just one or two of your friends are a bit "facebook-happy", but you can easily hide them.
I can't believe I'm on slashdot DEFENDING facebook, a site which I wouldn't necessarily miss if it died tomorrow, but while it's there and most people near and dear to me use it, I may as well make the most of it.
Your ideas and opinions intrigue me, I would like to hear more from you.
^ this,
Social networking has never interested me much, but during the birth of my child, my wife was in labour for nearly 15 hours. Normally, we would have had all sorts of friends and family trying to ring us or text us or whatever, just to know what was going on. Instead, I opted to tweet various status updates (which were automatically posted on facebook). This turned out to be a brilliant idea (I was just looking for something to do at the time) as people were kept up to date, nobody could complain that they weren't "told first" (something that happened when we announced our wedding) and all the messages coming through could be read at our leisure.
It was also just as easy to post up a picture mere minutes after he was born, once again everyone that WANTED to know did and those that didn't could just ignore it.
That would never work with email, or IRC or even instant messaging.
I think you missed the post where I said that I was blatantly being sarcastic.
I never said they would, but if guns were illegal, they're a lot harder to come across. How many times do you have to read about someone taking a gun from their uncle or whatever and using it to murder someone? You'll never rule out this sort of thing completely, but as it gets less "convenient" to pull off, it's less likely to happen.
How can you honestly say that removing guns will do "nothing at all to prevent killing"? Look at any of the major shootings over the last couple of decades, do you seriously mean to say that the lone gunman who shoots and kills say 10 people would be able to stab 10 people before being taken down?
That's just one example off the top of my head. Yes, people who want to kill will still kill, but it's a lot harder to kill someone with a blade than it is to do it with a gun. Not impossible and certainly not as difficult as would be ideal, but definitely harder.
Plus, as for the wilderness thing, most countries that ban guns don't completely ban them, they often allow people to own a firearm license for a valid reason, such as hunting. Even in the UK.
No, you don't buy one now. Even Google themselves said that Android wasn't designed for Tablets yet (With Honeycomb being the first "proper" version for tablets).
Furthermore, these first-gen Android tablets are pretty great in some ways, but they're still the first generation. Waiting for Honeycomb is by far the most sensible thing to do, particularly as it will coincide with a hardware refresh of sorts (such as nVidia's Tegra 2 being available).
You COULD get an existing tablet and then hack Honeycomb onto it, but who knows how well that'll work out. You can wait 2 or 3 months and get a much better investment.
Who's debating this? Nobody.
There will always be people out there who will use whatever is at their disposal to cause harm or even death. The argument here is that guns serve no purpose other than the intention of killing someone else. Knives, on the other hand, have many useful and practical applications. The fact that someone might use one for harm is irrelevant, particularly as your chances of surviving a knifing are far greater than your chances of surviving getting shot.
I happen to come from Northern Ireland, Belfast is my home town and I can tell you that you've just made that statement up about them having the "loosest gun laws". The gun laws in Northern Ireland don't differ that much from the rest of the UK.
That's all well and good, but I gave up when you touted your two completely opposite scenarios. I could just as easily do that myself. Watch:
Case A: Random lunatic breaks into a house, finds a gun and kills all 6 members of the household, as well as 3 neighbours and 1 police officer who attended the scene, before blowing his own head off.
Case B: Nutjob enters the home and is quickly subdued by the 6 people, who easily outnumber the crazy fool and keep him down long enough for police to arrive. Minor injuries were caused when the man attempted to cause harm with a bread knife but all involved made a full recovery.
So you see, these entirely hypothetical scenarios prove absolutely nothing useful.
It is easy to argue that letting everyone have guns is better than letting just the criminals have guns, but the idea is that it's harder for criminals to get guns. Furthermore, by making it illegal to own firearms, police can easily stop anyone that looks dodgy if they can prove they have a weapon on them. Without anti-gun laws, they would be forced to leave them be, not knowing what their intentions are.
Even if "gun crime" did rise after a ban, eventually it would fall as weapons are harder to obtain.
For those asking, yes I meant that in an extremely sarcastic way.
Indeed, Gun Crime is much, much worse in those countries where guns are banned.
That's the BT way!
But in different ways. IOS will generate a lot more revnue than Android will, but Android will be on more devices (at least if the current trends keep up).
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough -
http://www.cnet.com/8301-19736_1-20009717-251.html
Over half of all android apps are free. For iOS, it's more like 25%. Yes, there may be more iOS apps overall, but when Android hits 300,000 apps (where iOS currently is), it'll still be about 50%. So I stand by my point - The android market is full of a lot more free apps, maybe not by raw number (iOS certainly has that covered in pretty much all areas), but in all categories.
And the android app store has more. Even titles apps that are absolutely sure to sell tend to get free versions on Android. Angry Birds is a primary example. Android seems to run best off of ad-supported apps, whereas, the iOS App Store seems slightly more geared towards paying for apps.
I know The Xperia phones have some issues, but that all sounds pretty serious. I'd have taken that phone back pretty quickly.
It's also quite strange that they wont let you update the phone OTA, like the rest of the civilized world lets you.
I should clarify: That alarm app in particular has a free version and a paid version. I use the free one.
It's a user configurable option. It's as clever as you are.
You don't need to buy anything, the app I mentioned is free. There are many, many free Apps for Android, it's one of the things that really sets it apart from the iPhone app store.
Sadly, Sony's Android offerings are....lacking...to say the least. They're not even 2.1 as far as I'm aware, so despite the fact that the phone is on sale in shops today, it's 4 versions behind!
Well what phone have you got? Are you using any dedicated alarm apps or the stock one?
I have a HTC Desire and Sense's alarm never failed me once. Then I switched ROMs to one without Sense and use Alarm Clock Plus, which works just as well. It's even clever enough to up the volume if you happen to have your phone on Vibrate.
My favourite android hack is when I set the alarm last year and it still works this year!