No we're saying that America using them to end the second World War is the thing that taught us how devastating they could be. Pretending what happened then has any relevance whatsoever to modern nuclear weapons control now that we know a lot more about the devastation they can cause is something only a weak minded individual with a weak argument would resort to. It's a kind of pathetic one dimensional thinking where you ignore how geopolitics change over time as if you can't cope with factoring something as simple as the temporal element of the universe into your thought process.
We're also saying that any nation that's remotely likely to use them for anything other than self-defence or counter-attack in the modern world shouldn't have them. Given that Iran has a strong track record of exporting terrorism by funding groups like Hezbollah and has threatened to wipe Israel off the map including writing such ideas on the sides of the sorts of long range missiles they could use to do such a thing means it's not a nation that can be trusted to be allowed them. It may well be that we could let Iran have them and that we wont use them, but whilst it's an unstable dictatorship blurting such fiery rhetoric it's simply better to just not take that chance and not have to worry about finding out one way or the other.
I largely agree, I'm fairly anti-American because I think it's a nation of hypocrisy because there's something distinctly wrong about pretending to be a nation of freedom, liberty, and justice, whilst having things like Guantanamo bay. There are also a number of people who believe in American exceptionalism to the extreme - someone here the other day when talking about H1-B's suggested that it's supposed to be the case, yes, supposed to, as if there is some grand set of rules in the universe, that America should be able to trample other countries under foot and that they should bow down to it. Really, Americans like that are the reason America is so hated and understandably so and whilst these people aren't necessarily a majority, they are at least a non-negligible minority of American society.
But I also get sick of some of some other anti-American rhetoric here on here and have voiced my distaste for it before, a common example is "Iran is a nice innocent country that deserves nuclear weapons because America has been invading places like Iraq and Afghanistan this last decade!" - as I've pointed out, just because America has done wrong, doesn't make Iran right. It just means they're both in the wrong on different things.
I think there are basically two schools of thought on the issue:
1) People like me who hate America because it betrays what it claims to stand for and just wishes it would sort itself the fuck out so that we don't have to hate it. It's not that we have an inherent will for America to fail, we just don't want it to succeed if it's going to be such an affront to the things it's meant to stand for. Just because for example I dislike the way America is now and hate it for it, doesn't mean I wouldn't be rather happy to see a strong, successful America if it actually genuinely stood up for liberty, freedom and justice in the world rather than acting against it - I'd love nothing more.
and 2) People who just hate America for no good reason, because hating America is "cool" or whatever - the sorts of reasons you cite (and another you missed - jealousy of Western lifestyle and wealth can be an issue sometimes). These people are idiots. Period. If you're going to hate something you should be able to justify that hatred rationally, logically, reasonably, and be prepared to change your stance if the circumstance for which you hate that thing change, if you can't do those things, you're just an ignorant dick.
It's one thing to hate with good reason, it's another to just hate.
The iPhone has actually never been the most popular in the UK FWIW.
It's early iterations were overshadowed by sales of Nokia's phones, the N95 outsold it by a wide margin and the N96 just beat it. It was the top seller around the 3GS but by the 4 it had already been pushed into second place by Samsung - Samsung was outselling Apple here in the UK before it was outselling it globally so the UK was ahead of the trend in that respect.
It's still a big market for Apple but that's largely because it's a major smartphone market full stop so profits are good whoever you are, but Apple's time as the top seller was relatively fleeting in the UK compared to markets like the US, and even to a lesser extent the global market.
See here for example to note how far behind Apple's handsets are in the UK:
GP's post is evasive at best, dishonest at worst. He talks about market growth where profits have dropped, ignores the fact that where market growth has occurred it's been at one of the lowest rates in the industry and an order of magnitude lower than it's key competitors then pretends Apple is handing money back out of it's cash pile when it fact it's financing the buyback with debt. To put it kindly, he's cherry picked positive stats whilst ignoring negative stats which only tells half the story. When the full set of stats are taken into account a very different story is told to that the GP is pushing.
Parent clears up all that with the facts.
Oh sorry, nevermind, I forgot. Apple fanboys exist, so the facts don't matter.
"I've been there a half-dozen times so far and it is a bit oppressive if misbehaving is part of your makeup."
Because watching poor, demanding greater freedoms from your government and chewing gum are of course part of the makeup of a misbehavour. This is the no true Scotsman fallacy, you're saying that if someone falls foul of Singapore's laws then it's obviously because they were misbehaving because no true nice person could ever fall foul of the law!
"I'm a libertarian and opposed by principle to such laws but"...but you're actually not because you like the effects of a police state where everyone is too scared to dare speak out against the government, where numerous abuses occur and where such simple things as a porn DVD or chewing gum in your backpack can be grounds for you to be beaten, tortured, and jailed for a year?
Other than that what you say about Singapore offering safe passage is nonsense, it offers safe passage relatively free from piracy precisely because it is the route used right now for shipping through that region. You're assuming it's Singapore that makes it a good shipping route when in reality it's the chosen shipping route that makes Singapore - if it were to move Singapore would become irrelevant. As for refuelling I have to wonder if you've ever actually looked at a map, you do realise how small Singapore is right? refuelling before or after passing Singapore is a rather trivial exercise, again, the only reason it's chosen as a refuelling stop right now is because the world uses that shipping route.
The fact is that Singapore is entirely dependent on the world continuing to pass it's shores and pass through it's airport, it's the only reason it has some degree of wealth.
Right now Singapore is fine because it doesn't actually cause much trouble for the rest of the world, and because it's a Western ally but the reality is if any of that were to change it's simply way too small a nation to have a real impact. Closure of the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal would have a vastly larger impact due to the size of detour this would require but previous studies have shown it wouldn't be an insurmountable problem, it would be a pain but not the end of the world. Compare the size of Singapore's ocean territory, the locality of alternative paths, the locality of alternative ports, but perhaps most importantly, the number of close proximity nations that would gladly take Singapore's stopover trade for themselves.
It's not as if countries like China can't ramp up production to replace Singapore's historically significant manufacturing base overnight nowadays either. If anything Singapore needs the world to keep supporting it more than ever, because the things it used to do well are more and more trivially replaceable by other nations.
"Per employee, it's the most profitable company in the world."
Um no, just no.
This past year it made a relatively small profit ($142million), last year it made an outright loss.
Even with this past years profit that's only $28,000 per employee. In contrast even Microsoft with it's profits down for the year made $197,000 per employee, Google made $200,000 per employee and Apple made $573,000 per employee. That's right, Microsoft/Google made roughly 7 times the profit per employee and Apple 20 times the profit per employee of Apple.
You know fanboys are on desperate ground trying to justify their position when they have to resort to the most absurd of lies.
"I'd be happier about it if I thought that Nintendo were getting spanked for some reason other than the fact that they aren't releasing Mario Sequel X: HD Polygons as quickly and effectively as Microsoft and Sony are shoveling out their respective franchise warm-overs"
The difference is that Mario has been effectively the same game for about 30 years, whilst games like Halo and so forth at least have distinctly new story lines with distinctly new environments each time. That's why Nintendo is getting bitched at, because they're not just releasing a new iteration of the same franchise, they're releasing pretty much the exact same fucking game each time. Yes I know you can come up with absurdly weak arguments like "But Halo is just a shooter each year!" and ignore the fact that new multiplayer maps, new storyline, new environments is still infinitely more new content than Mario gets each time it's remade but it's silly because the amount of innovation and efforts put into rehashes at Nintendo with it's franchises is still clearly far less than that of it's competitors and that's the problem.
"and failing to get EA on board for FIFA 20-something-or-other-who-gives-a-fuck: Roster update edition..."
Where who-gives-a-fuck is one of the most numerous and profitable segments of the gaming market. FIFA isn't my thing but it's a top 3 or so selling game every single year so it's not surprising that there is demand given the popularity of such titles.
So the problem is effectively that Nintendo is doing nothing new with it's existing franchises rehashing the same old game over and over, whilst failing to get some of the most popular non-Nintendo franchises on board. Not surprisingly, that is why people are saying "What's the point of the Wii U?".
This strikes me as a rather silly argument, because I've seen plenty of closed devices running non-Android Linux over the years too, they still make the source code available but that doesn't stop the device being locked down.
Open source doesn't mandate that you must have openness on the hardware platform itself, just that the source must be available. In this respect it can sometimes offer no tangible advantage over proprietary software if you're using it pre-packaged on a locked down device.
But there is still one clear benefit of open source software used in this way, the source is available so you're perfectly able to manipulate it to run on a competing device or create a competing device yourself and there are Android projects and devices out there exactly like this that have taken advantage of this fact.
You're complaining that your Toshiba device isn't open but that's not a fault of Android and it's openness, that's a fault of people like you buying locked down hardware in the first place. If you don't want locked down hardware then why on earth would you buy it when there are plenty of options available?
It's not Android that's not open, it's the devices you've opted to buy. Android is an operating system, an open one, that doesn't mean the hardware you buy to run it on is - the Android name isn't on the hardware, things like "Samsung", "Motorola" and so forth are, the Android name is merely applied to the operating system those devices run. The fact there are plenty of projects out there making use of Android's open nature is evidence of the fact that there is nothing inherently not open about Android. Yes, I'm aware that there is a version Google controls that is generally ahead of the AOSP but just about all open source projects have more up to date versions controlled by the developers than is necessarily publicly available, you just have to be a little more patient for it to be released, and if you don't like it, then fork.
To be fair it's not quite that bad - this only applies to Metro apps written for the Metro interface, you can still access the same old desktop you always accessed and run Windowed applications there.
The problem is that the start menu has been replaced with the metro interface, so when you hit the windows key it fires up the metro interface and if all you want is say the calculator, then yes, it takes up the full screen, which is obviously stupid, because who the fuck ever wanted a 24" full screen 1080p simple calculator rather than the classic calc in a simple window?
A lot of the old apps are still there, windows key + r then typing calc.exe and enter will run the old one still IIRC, but that makes it about as user friendly as Linux:p
So you do still have flexible windows as you always have, the problem is Microsoft seems to not want you to use them and tries to force you towards the new Metro fixed width full screen completely-fucking-useless versions of applications instead.
The thing is though when I do the search terms without sticking iTunes in front I get far more useful results. For Call Me Maybe I get the YouTube copy of the song and that sort of thing and for Game of Thrones I get the official site.
This is why the AC(s) above are stupid, they're assuming Google is a search engine for iTunes content, obviously it's not, that's stupid. It's a search engine to find you the most relevant results and what's more relevant to a user? A link to a site where you can download and install a not exactly tiny application and go through a sign up process and enter your card details to buy a copy of Call Me Maybe or a direct link to the music video of the song where you can watch and listen to it by doing nothing more than clicking the link?
The fact is, as much as Apple fanboys like to think otherwise, iTunes web results just aren't even close to being the most relevant result for these sorts of search terms so Google is doing the exact right thing - it's linking to the places where users can get the most relevant content to the search in the easiest manner. The most obvious way for iTunes to increase it's ranking based on normal searches without "iTunes" put in front of the search query is to offer the content in an equally direct manner from a search result because an indirect manner that requires downloading of a 3rd party app followed by sign up and so forth is never going to make for a better search result than a direct link to the content itself - even if Apple required a login and let you stay logged in on the iTunes site to stream it over the web they'd get much more highly ranked but they wont do that because they primarily use iTunes to sell devices and because of that they suffer in the rankings but that's their choice, not that it's doing them any harm given the profits.
So really no one's to blame as such, Apple's doing what it wants with iTunes, and Google is ranking it sensibly in the results. The BPI is just asking for Apple to be given special treatment, which is grossly anti-competitive (because those who do offer easier access to content directly via the web - i.e. that offer more relevant links to search users suffer) and worsens the user experience when using Google search.
Rubbish. If the movie industries continue to not provide access because of no-DRM then they'll continue to suffer piracy and have physical media and cinema as their only distribution methods instead. Even the music industry eventually figure this out - that DRM was doing more harm than good.
We don't need DRM, we don't want DRM and if we avoid it and they refuse to publish their content then so be it, someone else will gladly come and take their place because there are many other film studios across the globe other than Hollywood that will gladly rake in $10million instead of the $0million Hollywood opts for because it decided not to publish at all unless it could have $100million.
DRM is about pushing the rental model and preventing ownership of things you've bought. If I pay for a film I want to be able to keep it and watch it when and where I want, not when and where the music industry says I can.
You're a fool for playing into their trap and pretending there is any kind of validity to their arguments. There's still no firm evidence that piracy even hurts them so to suggest it's a pragmatic necessity is utterly stupid.
Really? So why has the music industry pursued a decade of decline by completely ignoring what customers want?
The whole reason DRM exists is because the content industries have tried everything but following the money and it's taken technology firms (Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Last.fm and so on) to slap them about a bit and drag them and their content towards the money.
Content certainly wont follow the money by itself.
It's because the moderation system, despite Slashdot's FAQ saying you should focus on up modding good posts is designed for the exact opposite.
On Slashdot, if you have karma bonus, 2 + 2 = 4, but 4 - 2 = 1. Two up-mods gets you to 4, but two downmods takes to you 1 because it also strips your karma bonus. The moderation system is hence skewed towards downmodding because political downmodders always have the advantage. It's been a key component of Slashdot's decline over the years because political down-modding has the advantage over sensible up-modding.
Given how long you've been here I'm surprised you're surprised. If you go into a thread related to Apple and make a post stating facts that an Apple fanboy perceives as negative towards Apple you'll get at least one or two downmods, it's virtually guaranteed.
But at least it's still better than on other sites, even the likes of the BBC's comment system where if someone calls Labour or Tories "nobs" the post is allowed and they wont censor it but if you copy and paste the exact same post which they refuse to revoke and replace Tory with UKIP and call them nobs in the exact same way then it's rapidly censored because the BBC's moderation team is heavily slanted towards the very right/far right. Similarly I've seen posts there attacking European immigrants calling them lazy, benefits scroungers and so forth and that are frankly sometimes even outright racist that they refuse to act on but when I made a very polite post stating "I personally don't have a problem with Polish immigrants, I've found them hard working and often more so than their British equivalents in some professions." it gets rapidly removed. At least here there is some semblance of balance even if it's far from perfect and focussed towards political down-modding because that's still a massive step up from absolutely no balance whatsoever.
Of course, other sites do it even better again, but at least Slashdot's not as bad as it could be. Yet.
I've seen this exact same thing years ago when I worked in tech support too.
I used to think these sorts of people were rare and unique, but they're not, as your example demonstrates there is an awful lot of them.
On a similar note I had a call once saying "Hi there's no paper in the printer, there's an orange light on it and it's not printing", I actually had to do a double take for a second before asking if she'd tried putting paper in at which point rather flustered she just says "Can you just come down here and have a look?" so I thought okay, fair enough, it was fairly quiet. I went down there, put some paper in and sure enough the orange light went away and it started printing.
It's not just the movement of icons, even a simple orange LED is enough to throw some people's brains into complete and utter disarray causing a complete breakdown of all ability to perform even the most basic of logical thought when things don't go as they want to. Also there was the time someone from another site came to use one of our computers and complained that we "didn't have any left handed facilities which is disgusting and shocking", now, being left handed I did what I normally do, picked up the mouse and mouse pad and sarcastically placed it the other side of the keyboard to which her response was "Oh, thank you, that's much better", I actually expected her to tell me off for being sarcastic, but no, she was actually seriously appeased by the mere movement of said device for her, because approaching the computer to find the mouse on the wrong side of the keyboard was just way too much for her to otherwise cope with.
It's easy to forget that some real actual people simply cannot cope with the most simplistic and basic of fault or change. If things don't go exactly as planned or aren't exactly as expected it can in fact cause complete mental breakdown for them. It would be nice to suggest something like a cull, but apparently this is bad taste and we have to put up with the existence of these people appearing in our day to day lives, so as you say the easiest solution for all of us seems to be to just not really mess with relatively common standardised things unless we absolutely have to. You see it's almost infectious, when aforementioned person had her breakdown over this simple orange light it nearly followed with me having a breakdown and committing murder when I found out that it was as simple as what she'd stated to me herself over the phone - that the printer wasn't printing BECAUSE THERE WAS NO FUCKING PAPER IN THE PRINTER YOU THICK COW. Which was basically my line of thought at the time whilst I desperately fought hard not to blow a gasket at her myself. This wasn't a unique occurrence with this particular person though, I eventually dealt with the problem by making calls from her number to my number re-route back to her number on the old internal Nortel exchange we had such that each time she called me my line appeared to be engaged forcing her to actually think for herself.
Hey, who am I kidding, I loved it. Dealing with these people and watching them get baffled over the simplest things was comedy gold. Maybe we should start putting North at the bottom for the sheer comedy value of it all.
I can tell you don't work in software development, or at least have very little experience.
It really costs nothing more to write maintainable code from the outset, but if the APIs aren't there to support that then there's only so much you can do. Any programmer worth his/her salt will always write code with future potential areas of change in mind when it's possible as it costs far more to fix a monolithic hardcoded mess later on than it does to just write flexible code from the outset.
That is by the way one of the key reasons why a lot of app developers probably haven't bothered updating their apps now that the functionality is there.
I've never really seen any qualitative difference between Android and iOS tablet apps in recent years though I agree Android had a lack of tablet oriented apps prior to Android 4 so I'm not really sure it makes any difference.
It is however still just an ugly hack that persists to this day with some apps and as Android tablet app quality has improved (along with Android itself) it's become a glaring scar on iOS.
It's also of little benefit to the user, the user doesn't care what the app developer may or may not do, they just don't expect their shiny new tablet to have such an ugly hack. This is a company whose products are supposed to "just work" and it runs completely counter to that ideology.
I think it's a twist on the saying "Keeping up with the Joneses" which basically means trying to compete with the neighbours in the context of a middle-class suburban class war, i.e. "Mr Jones next door has a new Porsche, this means we'll have to get a better model!".
In other words they're saying that because Apple hasn't come up with anything newsworthy the media is having to make up stories to try and out-compete each other for views and that one paper saying "Is Apple running out of ideas?" will be followed by "Apple has run out of ideas" in another paper, which will be followed by "Apple is dying, SELL SELL SELL" in another paper, followed by "Apple is dead and has gone bankrupt and has killed all it's employees and it's the EU's fault and gay people don't deserve equal rights" in The Daily Mail.
Yeah, I think fundamentally the problem is that Android always made it clear hardware was going to be different between devices, whilst Apple spent a few iterations pretending you could just write for the first few iterations with very few differences, until you couldn't.
Effectively many early Android apps were built to work with different resolutions, iOS apps weren't and so it meant Apple had this scenario where they had a whole app store full of apps not built to support anything other than 320x480 then all of a sudden along comes the iPad and the iPhone 4 and the app store is full of apps not designed for their respective resolutions resulting in the massively letter boxed/tap to double size hack for those apps that didn't get updated.
I agree this doesn't preclude the fact that bad developers can still fuck up on any platform of course though as you quite rightly point out, but ultimately Apple should have been honest with themselves (and with developers) from the outset - that they weren't going to stick at 320x480 forever. Had they done this there would be no need for said aforementioned ugly hack.
Slashdot Mirror
No we're saying that America using them to end the second World War is the thing that taught us how devastating they could be. Pretending what happened then has any relevance whatsoever to modern nuclear weapons control now that we know a lot more about the devastation they can cause is something only a weak minded individual with a weak argument would resort to. It's a kind of pathetic one dimensional thinking where you ignore how geopolitics change over time as if you can't cope with factoring something as simple as the temporal element of the universe into your thought process.
We're also saying that any nation that's remotely likely to use them for anything other than self-defence or counter-attack in the modern world shouldn't have them. Given that Iran has a strong track record of exporting terrorism by funding groups like Hezbollah and has threatened to wipe Israel off the map including writing such ideas on the sides of the sorts of long range missiles they could use to do such a thing means it's not a nation that can be trusted to be allowed them. It may well be that we could let Iran have them and that we wont use them, but whilst it's an unstable dictatorship blurting such fiery rhetoric it's simply better to just not take that chance and not have to worry about finding out one way or the other.
Maybe one day they'd like to get revenge on Britain for the whole empire thing too?
I largely agree, I'm fairly anti-American because I think it's a nation of hypocrisy because there's something distinctly wrong about pretending to be a nation of freedom, liberty, and justice, whilst having things like Guantanamo bay. There are also a number of people who believe in American exceptionalism to the extreme - someone here the other day when talking about H1-B's suggested that it's supposed to be the case, yes, supposed to, as if there is some grand set of rules in the universe, that America should be able to trample other countries under foot and that they should bow down to it. Really, Americans like that are the reason America is so hated and understandably so and whilst these people aren't necessarily a majority, they are at least a non-negligible minority of American society.
But I also get sick of some of some other anti-American rhetoric here on here and have voiced my distaste for it before, a common example is "Iran is a nice innocent country that deserves nuclear weapons because America has been invading places like Iraq and Afghanistan this last decade!" - as I've pointed out, just because America has done wrong, doesn't make Iran right. It just means they're both in the wrong on different things.
I think there are basically two schools of thought on the issue:
1) People like me who hate America because it betrays what it claims to stand for and just wishes it would sort itself the fuck out so that we don't have to hate it. It's not that we have an inherent will for America to fail, we just don't want it to succeed if it's going to be such an affront to the things it's meant to stand for. Just because for example I dislike the way America is now and hate it for it, doesn't mean I wouldn't be rather happy to see a strong, successful America if it actually genuinely stood up for liberty, freedom and justice in the world rather than acting against it - I'd love nothing more.
and 2) People who just hate America for no good reason, because hating America is "cool" or whatever - the sorts of reasons you cite (and another you missed - jealousy of Western lifestyle and wealth can be an issue sometimes). These people are idiots. Period. If you're going to hate something you should be able to justify that hatred rationally, logically, reasonably, and be prepared to change your stance if the circumstance for which you hate that thing change, if you can't do those things, you're just an ignorant dick.
It's one thing to hate with good reason, it's another to just hate.
If they use the iPod touch camera and are taken out of an airplane window then they can't be that beautiful.
The iPhone has actually never been the most popular in the UK FWIW.
It's early iterations were overshadowed by sales of Nokia's phones, the N95 outsold it by a wide margin and the N96 just beat it. It was the top seller around the 3GS but by the 4 it had already been pushed into second place by Samsung - Samsung was outselling Apple here in the UK before it was outselling it globally so the UK was ahead of the trend in that respect.
It's still a big market for Apple but that's largely because it's a major smartphone market full stop so profits are good whoever you are, but Apple's time as the top seller was relatively fleeting in the UK compared to markets like the US, and even to a lesser extent the global market.
See here for example to note how far behind Apple's handsets are in the UK:
http://www.intomobile.com/2013/02/07/samsung-smartphones-top-charts-uk-january/
"I think you do not know what a troll is."
Yes, and I think you incurred the wrath of Apple fanboys by not instead just posting "OMG I WANT ONE OF THESE NEW iPODS".
GP's post is evasive at best, dishonest at worst. He talks about market growth where profits have dropped, ignores the fact that where market growth has occurred it's been at one of the lowest rates in the industry and an order of magnitude lower than it's key competitors then pretends Apple is handing money back out of it's cash pile when it fact it's financing the buyback with debt. To put it kindly, he's cherry picked positive stats whilst ignoring negative stats which only tells half the story. When the full set of stats are taken into account a very different story is told to that the GP is pushing.
Parent clears up all that with the facts.
Oh sorry, nevermind, I forgot. Apple fanboys exist, so the facts don't matter.
"I've been there a half-dozen times so far and it is a bit oppressive if misbehaving is part of your makeup."
Because watching poor, demanding greater freedoms from your government and chewing gum are of course part of the makeup of a misbehavour. This is the no true Scotsman fallacy, you're saying that if someone falls foul of Singapore's laws then it's obviously because they were misbehaving because no true nice person could ever fall foul of the law!
"I'm a libertarian and opposed by principle to such laws but" ...but you're actually not because you like the effects of a police state where everyone is too scared to dare speak out against the government, where numerous abuses occur and where such simple things as a porn DVD or chewing gum in your backpack can be grounds for you to be beaten, tortured, and jailed for a year?
Other than that what you say about Singapore offering safe passage is nonsense, it offers safe passage relatively free from piracy precisely because it is the route used right now for shipping through that region. You're assuming it's Singapore that makes it a good shipping route when in reality it's the chosen shipping route that makes Singapore - if it were to move Singapore would become irrelevant. As for refuelling I have to wonder if you've ever actually looked at a map, you do realise how small Singapore is right? refuelling before or after passing Singapore is a rather trivial exercise, again, the only reason it's chosen as a refuelling stop right now is because the world uses that shipping route.
The fact is that Singapore is entirely dependent on the world continuing to pass it's shores and pass through it's airport, it's the only reason it has some degree of wealth.
Right now Singapore is fine because it doesn't actually cause much trouble for the rest of the world, and because it's a Western ally but the reality is if any of that were to change it's simply way too small a nation to have a real impact. Closure of the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal would have a vastly larger impact due to the size of detour this would require but previous studies have shown it wouldn't be an insurmountable problem, it would be a pain but not the end of the world. Compare the size of Singapore's ocean territory, the locality of alternative paths, the locality of alternative ports, but perhaps most importantly, the number of close proximity nations that would gladly take Singapore's stopover trade for themselves.
It's not as if countries like China can't ramp up production to replace Singapore's historically significant manufacturing base overnight nowadays either. If anything Singapore needs the world to keep supporting it more than ever, because the things it used to do well are more and more trivially replaceable by other nations.
"Per employee, it's the most profitable company in the world."
Um no, just no.
This past year it made a relatively small profit ($142million), last year it made an outright loss.
Even with this past years profit that's only $28,000 per employee. In contrast even Microsoft with it's profits down for the year made $197,000 per employee, Google made $200,000 per employee and Apple made $573,000 per employee. That's right, Microsoft/Google made roughly 7 times the profit per employee and Apple 20 times the profit per employee of Apple.
You know fanboys are on desperate ground trying to justify their position when they have to resort to the most absurd of lies.
"I'd be happier about it if I thought that Nintendo were getting spanked for some reason other than the fact that they aren't releasing Mario Sequel X: HD Polygons as quickly and effectively as Microsoft and Sony are shoveling out their respective franchise warm-overs"
The difference is that Mario has been effectively the same game for about 30 years, whilst games like Halo and so forth at least have distinctly new story lines with distinctly new environments each time. That's why Nintendo is getting bitched at, because they're not just releasing a new iteration of the same franchise, they're releasing pretty much the exact same fucking game each time. Yes I know you can come up with absurdly weak arguments like "But Halo is just a shooter each year!" and ignore the fact that new multiplayer maps, new storyline, new environments is still infinitely more new content than Mario gets each time it's remade but it's silly because the amount of innovation and efforts put into rehashes at Nintendo with it's franchises is still clearly far less than that of it's competitors and that's the problem.
"and failing to get EA on board for FIFA 20-something-or-other-who-gives-a-fuck: Roster update edition..."
Where who-gives-a-fuck is one of the most numerous and profitable segments of the gaming market. FIFA isn't my thing but it's a top 3 or so selling game every single year so it's not surprising that there is demand given the popularity of such titles.
So the problem is effectively that Nintendo is doing nothing new with it's existing franchises rehashing the same old game over and over, whilst failing to get some of the most popular non-Nintendo franchises on board. Not surprisingly, that is why people are saying "What's the point of the Wii U?".
"* Anything that involves DRM of any kind causes a fuss."
Not really, DRM in Steam gets a free pass on Slashdot.
This strikes me as a rather silly argument, because I've seen plenty of closed devices running non-Android Linux over the years too, they still make the source code available but that doesn't stop the device being locked down.
Open source doesn't mandate that you must have openness on the hardware platform itself, just that the source must be available. In this respect it can sometimes offer no tangible advantage over proprietary software if you're using it pre-packaged on a locked down device.
But there is still one clear benefit of open source software used in this way, the source is available so you're perfectly able to manipulate it to run on a competing device or create a competing device yourself and there are Android projects and devices out there exactly like this that have taken advantage of this fact.
You're complaining that your Toshiba device isn't open but that's not a fault of Android and it's openness, that's a fault of people like you buying locked down hardware in the first place. If you don't want locked down hardware then why on earth would you buy it when there are plenty of options available?
It's not Android that's not open, it's the devices you've opted to buy. Android is an operating system, an open one, that doesn't mean the hardware you buy to run it on is - the Android name isn't on the hardware, things like "Samsung", "Motorola" and so forth are, the Android name is merely applied to the operating system those devices run. The fact there are plenty of projects out there making use of Android's open nature is evidence of the fact that there is nothing inherently not open about Android. Yes, I'm aware that there is a version Google controls that is generally ahead of the AOSP but just about all open source projects have more up to date versions controlled by the developers than is necessarily publicly available, you just have to be a little more patient for it to be released, and if you don't like it, then fork.
To be fair it's not quite that bad - this only applies to Metro apps written for the Metro interface, you can still access the same old desktop you always accessed and run Windowed applications there.
The problem is that the start menu has been replaced with the metro interface, so when you hit the windows key it fires up the metro interface and if all you want is say the calculator, then yes, it takes up the full screen, which is obviously stupid, because who the fuck ever wanted a 24" full screen 1080p simple calculator rather than the classic calc in a simple window?
A lot of the old apps are still there, windows key + r then typing calc.exe and enter will run the old one still IIRC, but that makes it about as user friendly as Linux :p
So you do still have flexible windows as you always have, the problem is Microsoft seems to not want you to use them and tries to force you towards the new Metro fixed width full screen completely-fucking-useless versions of applications instead.
"I imagine google could do the same."
It can, and for me at least, it does.
The thing is though when I do the search terms without sticking iTunes in front I get far more useful results. For Call Me Maybe I get the YouTube copy of the song and that sort of thing and for Game of Thrones I get the official site.
This is why the AC(s) above are stupid, they're assuming Google is a search engine for iTunes content, obviously it's not, that's stupid. It's a search engine to find you the most relevant results and what's more relevant to a user? A link to a site where you can download and install a not exactly tiny application and go through a sign up process and enter your card details to buy a copy of Call Me Maybe or a direct link to the music video of the song where you can watch and listen to it by doing nothing more than clicking the link?
The fact is, as much as Apple fanboys like to think otherwise, iTunes web results just aren't even close to being the most relevant result for these sorts of search terms so Google is doing the exact right thing - it's linking to the places where users can get the most relevant content to the search in the easiest manner. The most obvious way for iTunes to increase it's ranking based on normal searches without "iTunes" put in front of the search query is to offer the content in an equally direct manner from a search result because an indirect manner that requires downloading of a 3rd party app followed by sign up and so forth is never going to make for a better search result than a direct link to the content itself - even if Apple required a login and let you stay logged in on the iTunes site to stream it over the web they'd get much more highly ranked but they wont do that because they primarily use iTunes to sell devices and because of that they suffer in the rankings but that's their choice, not that it's doing them any harm given the profits.
So really no one's to blame as such, Apple's doing what it wants with iTunes, and Google is ranking it sensibly in the results. The BPI is just asking for Apple to be given special treatment, which is grossly anti-competitive (because those who do offer easier access to content directly via the web - i.e. that offer more relevant links to search users suffer) and worsens the user experience when using Google search.
Rubbish. If the movie industries continue to not provide access because of no-DRM then they'll continue to suffer piracy and have physical media and cinema as their only distribution methods instead. Even the music industry eventually figure this out - that DRM was doing more harm than good.
We don't need DRM, we don't want DRM and if we avoid it and they refuse to publish their content then so be it, someone else will gladly come and take their place because there are many other film studios across the globe other than Hollywood that will gladly rake in $10million instead of the $0million Hollywood opts for because it decided not to publish at all unless it could have $100million.
DRM is about pushing the rental model and preventing ownership of things you've bought. If I pay for a film I want to be able to keep it and watch it when and where I want, not when and where the music industry says I can.
You're a fool for playing into their trap and pretending there is any kind of validity to their arguments. There's still no firm evidence that piracy even hurts them so to suggest it's a pragmatic necessity is utterly stupid.
"Content follows the money."
Really? So why has the music industry pursued a decade of decline by completely ignoring what customers want?
The whole reason DRM exists is because the content industries have tried everything but following the money and it's taken technology firms (Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Last.fm and so on) to slap them about a bit and drag them and their content towards the money.
Content certainly wont follow the money by itself.
No, shoot whoever decided it would be a good idea instead.
It's because the moderation system, despite Slashdot's FAQ saying you should focus on up modding good posts is designed for the exact opposite.
On Slashdot, if you have karma bonus, 2 + 2 = 4, but 4 - 2 = 1. Two up-mods gets you to 4, but two downmods takes to you 1 because it also strips your karma bonus. The moderation system is hence skewed towards downmodding because political downmodders always have the advantage. It's been a key component of Slashdot's decline over the years because political down-modding has the advantage over sensible up-modding.
Given how long you've been here I'm surprised you're surprised. If you go into a thread related to Apple and make a post stating facts that an Apple fanboy perceives as negative towards Apple you'll get at least one or two downmods, it's virtually guaranteed.
But at least it's still better than on other sites, even the likes of the BBC's comment system where if someone calls Labour or Tories "nobs" the post is allowed and they wont censor it but if you copy and paste the exact same post which they refuse to revoke and replace Tory with UKIP and call them nobs in the exact same way then it's rapidly censored because the BBC's moderation team is heavily slanted towards the very right/far right. Similarly I've seen posts there attacking European immigrants calling them lazy, benefits scroungers and so forth and that are frankly sometimes even outright racist that they refuse to act on but when I made a very polite post stating "I personally don't have a problem with Polish immigrants, I've found them hard working and often more so than their British equivalents in some professions." it gets rapidly removed. At least here there is some semblance of balance even if it's far from perfect and focussed towards political down-modding because that's still a massive step up from absolutely no balance whatsoever.
Of course, other sites do it even better again, but at least Slashdot's not as bad as it could be. Yet.
I've seen this exact same thing years ago when I worked in tech support too.
I used to think these sorts of people were rare and unique, but they're not, as your example demonstrates there is an awful lot of them.
On a similar note I had a call once saying "Hi there's no paper in the printer, there's an orange light on it and it's not printing", I actually had to do a double take for a second before asking if she'd tried putting paper in at which point rather flustered she just says "Can you just come down here and have a look?" so I thought okay, fair enough, it was fairly quiet. I went down there, put some paper in and sure enough the orange light went away and it started printing.
It's not just the movement of icons, even a simple orange LED is enough to throw some people's brains into complete and utter disarray causing a complete breakdown of all ability to perform even the most basic of logical thought when things don't go as they want to. Also there was the time someone from another site came to use one of our computers and complained that we "didn't have any left handed facilities which is disgusting and shocking", now, being left handed I did what I normally do, picked up the mouse and mouse pad and sarcastically placed it the other side of the keyboard to which her response was "Oh, thank you, that's much better", I actually expected her to tell me off for being sarcastic, but no, she was actually seriously appeased by the mere movement of said device for her, because approaching the computer to find the mouse on the wrong side of the keyboard was just way too much for her to otherwise cope with.
It's easy to forget that some real actual people simply cannot cope with the most simplistic and basic of fault or change. If things don't go exactly as planned or aren't exactly as expected it can in fact cause complete mental breakdown for them. It would be nice to suggest something like a cull, but apparently this is bad taste and we have to put up with the existence of these people appearing in our day to day lives, so as you say the easiest solution for all of us seems to be to just not really mess with relatively common standardised things unless we absolutely have to. You see it's almost infectious, when aforementioned person had her breakdown over this simple orange light it nearly followed with me having a breakdown and committing murder when I found out that it was as simple as what she'd stated to me herself over the phone - that the printer wasn't printing BECAUSE THERE WAS NO FUCKING PAPER IN THE PRINTER YOU THICK COW. Which was basically my line of thought at the time whilst I desperately fought hard not to blow a gasket at her myself. This wasn't a unique occurrence with this particular person though, I eventually dealt with the problem by making calls from her number to my number re-route back to her number on the old internal Nortel exchange we had such that each time she called me my line appeared to be engaged forcing her to actually think for herself.
Hey, who am I kidding, I loved it. Dealing with these people and watching them get baffled over the simplest things was comedy gold. Maybe we should start putting North at the bottom for the sheer comedy value of it all.
I can tell you don't work in software development, or at least have very little experience.
It really costs nothing more to write maintainable code from the outset, but if the APIs aren't there to support that then there's only so much you can do. Any programmer worth his/her salt will always write code with future potential areas of change in mind when it's possible as it costs far more to fix a monolithic hardcoded mess later on than it does to just write flexible code from the outset.
That is by the way one of the key reasons why a lot of app developers probably haven't bothered updating their apps now that the functionality is there.
I'll have to hang around with more heroin addicts to make sure I know all the slang in future.
Well there goes my innocence.
I've never really seen any qualitative difference between Android and iOS tablet apps in recent years though I agree Android had a lack of tablet oriented apps prior to Android 4 so I'm not really sure it makes any difference.
It is however still just an ugly hack that persists to this day with some apps and as Android tablet app quality has improved (along with Android itself) it's become a glaring scar on iOS.
It's also of little benefit to the user, the user doesn't care what the app developer may or may not do, they just don't expect their shiny new tablet to have such an ugly hack. This is a company whose products are supposed to "just work" and it runs completely counter to that ideology.
I think it's a twist on the saying "Keeping up with the Joneses" which basically means trying to compete with the neighbours in the context of a middle-class suburban class war, i.e. "Mr Jones next door has a new Porsche, this means we'll have to get a better model!".
In other words they're saying that because Apple hasn't come up with anything newsworthy the media is having to make up stories to try and out-compete each other for views and that one paper saying "Is Apple running out of ideas?" will be followed by "Apple has run out of ideas" in another paper, which will be followed by "Apple is dying, SELL SELL SELL" in another paper, followed by "Apple is dead and has gone bankrupt and has killed all it's employees and it's the EU's fault and gay people don't deserve equal rights" in The Daily Mail.
Yeah, I think fundamentally the problem is that Android always made it clear hardware was going to be different between devices, whilst Apple spent a few iterations pretending you could just write for the first few iterations with very few differences, until you couldn't.
Effectively many early Android apps were built to work with different resolutions, iOS apps weren't and so it meant Apple had this scenario where they had a whole app store full of apps not built to support anything other than 320x480 then all of a sudden along comes the iPad and the iPhone 4 and the app store is full of apps not designed for their respective resolutions resulting in the massively letter boxed/tap to double size hack for those apps that didn't get updated.
I agree this doesn't preclude the fact that bad developers can still fuck up on any platform of course though as you quite rightly point out, but ultimately Apple should have been honest with themselves (and with developers) from the outset - that they weren't going to stick at 320x480 forever. Had they done this there would be no need for said aforementioned ugly hack.