I don't know why people feel the need to even use a phone whilst driving full stop, there's no reason they shouldn't be banned from all use whilst on the road.
There's no real circumstance where you HAVE to answer a call the second it comes through, or HAVE to make one immediately. It's not hard to pull over somewhere quiet, and make the call or call someone back.
I've never once felt the need to use my phone whilst driving. I don't know why anyone else would- I have as many important calls as anyone else.
The only pet annoyance I do have is that I can't understand why the fuck using a phone whilst driving is illegal, but smoking is not. Lighting a cigarette, or dropping one whilst driving and having to find it, or have your car go up in flames is far more dangerous, so I do agree that our laws in this respect are inconsistent but I have no problem with banning phone use whilst actually driving, there's no real excuse for it.
No, I think it is what it was - a whining Google employee who possibly didn't even have any knowledge of the proposed Motorola takeover, because, as someone who has recently been involved in a large corporate takeover, I know full well that these things take time, but are kept very secretive until everything's in place to advance the takeover. Often only the board of directors will know about it, and even the people who will be key in managing any corporate integration wont know about it until things are pretty much set in stone.
That is of course one of the downsides of letting your employees blog freely though- they may sometimes say things without realising they only know half the picture because their managers have had to keep things from them, often through legal necessity. Although personally, I don't think it outweighs the upsides of employee blogging however, so it's still worth doing. It just means things like that can happen.
The problem is they wont get slapped hard enough to matter.
Apple got what they wanted- they fucked up Samsung's European launch, and we all know launch time is the most important, as it's where far and away most tablets are sold and sets the pace of sales for the duration of the product's life.
Apple were shit scared of the Galaxy 10.1 and they've pulled this stunt to gimp it's chances of becoming a serious competitor. It doesn't really matter if they're issued with a fine, it wont be enough to make up for the detriment to competition in the tablet market Apple has caused.
It wont help Apple in the long run - they can't do this to every competing product, but perhaps they're hoping they can fuck up their competitors with bogus legal claims just long enough to get the iPad 3 out, perhaps raising the game again and allowing them more of a chance against the newer tablets their competitors are churning out than the iPad 2 would have.
In cases like this though courts shouldn't be able to ban the sales, the sales should be able to go ahead and if the product is indeed found to be infringing then the company who made said product should forfeit all profits for that product to the company they infringed against. Allowing for European wide bans by one half assed court case like this just invites trolls to fuck their competitors over for what will likely be a minor slap on the wrist which wont even be able to begin to cover the damage done to competition in said market
Tablets are a new market, we need competition on it, I have an iPad 2 but frankly I feel not just the iPad 2 but tablets in general are a bit lacklustre. If the iPad remains largely uncontested in the market then it'll continue to be the half assed device it is currently with all it's pissy annoying little quirks. Competition would force Apple to fix those, and produce a better product for all of us consumers.
I think if they were genuinely bothered about the Nortel patents, and weren't aware of the Motorola buyout (which must've been underway during the Nortel bidding) then they would've simply bid more for the Nortel patents. Motorola has cost them more than they bid on that, so they were clearly happy to spend the cash.
I suspect this is also why they made such silly bids- because they weren't really that bothered about seriously winning. It was misdirection, I'll bet that they knew it didn't matter because they were grabbing Motorola mobile's patent chest instead whilst the other firms involved completely missed the opportunity to buy Motorola.
Frankly I'm amazed that a lot of this stuff hasn't been looked into in general.
Between technology like NFC, Wifi, Bluetooth and so forth I'm suprised the linked in kind of consumer friendly technology ecosystem I described hasn't been done already. We could have really vibrant plug and play digital home technology setups today, where you can add things to it at will- a wall mounted tablet in the kitchen to sync up to your computer to access it's music, a tablet to control your TV recordings, and to take TV with you screened from the TV if you want to walk off round the house and so on.
The technology is all there, and frankly it's not really too far fetched to put this sort of thing together. All the bits are there but they're really disaparate right now.
Personally I assumed Apple would be first- they have all the pieces, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and so forth but they haven't quite got it all together yet. They've largely been crippled by the desktop/laptop based iTunes tie in to this point, but at least with iOS5 they're stepping away from that, which helps them step towards this, but there's still quite some way to go yet to see the full potential here.
Hopefully with Google seemingly entering the gadget market now the competition will heat up and we'll see a far greater push in this area, just like we saw a great smartphone push when Apple entered the smartphone arena.
Fanboys like to pray that their "One True Company (tm)" will do everything perfectly, and take over the world, but really time and time again recent history has shown that sometimes it takes one company to kick your preferred company into gear. This is a notching up of the battle between Google, Microsoft, Apple, et al., and consumers whether they prefer Apple, Google, or whoever else are going to be the ones that truly benefit.
It doesn't really matter what side you're on, or if you're one of those more rational types and on no side at all. This news is really great for everyone.
Talk about going off on a tangent. What's this got to do with Apple? Oh, wait, if you're an Apple fanboy then it's always got something to do with Apple hasn't it?
Oh well, I hate to burst your reality distortion bubble, but it's probably worth pointing out that Motorola Mobility HAS been after Apple over patents:
If you're going to publicly try and comfort yourself over your brand insecurity you could at least try and get your facts right, so that you don't look too paranoid about the future of your favourite brand.
First thing I do on a morning is scan through my favourite news sites- BBC, Slashdot etc. and check the headlines that are interesting, I open each in a new tab that sounds interesting.
I tend to program at work in 30minute time slots, then take a 5minute break, during those breaks, at lunch time and so forth I'll have a look through the news tabs I opened up. Sometimes I wont bother to read more than the introductory paragraph if the story isn't as interesting as it seemed, other times I'll read the whole thing.
Some days I open up more stories than I can read, other days I read more stories than I opened. Sometimes I have 200 tabs open, other times I manage to eliminate all but maybe 10.
It's not just news stories, sometimes I open tabs to read later that contain longer articles, and you can't get through these in 5minutes. These tabs tend to hang around for weeks, sometimes months before I get round to reading them. If they've been there too long, like, 3months+ and I get round to it, I'll just bookmark them into a "To read later" folder.
Sometimes also if I'm looking for a solution to a problem on Google and there's say, 8 useful posts about my problem on the first page, I'll open up all of them, then sometimes read the first one, find it solves the problem and get on with what I was doing, forgetting to close the other tabs, but I usually notice them again within a day or two and just close them.
So some of it the answer is that I simply don't manage it well- i.e. those I forget to close immediately. But much of it is that I basically hoarde useful pages in tabs, and eliminate them bit by bit.
It's not hard to work through the tabs to find what you want- click the tab dropdown to the right of the tabs and anything with a BBC or Slashdot icon or whatever is a quick story to eliminate in my 5 minute breaks!
I didn't even realise Motorola produced some of these things, but could it mean we'll see Google SatNavs, Google Car Kits, Google Cable/DSL modems, Google DVRs, and er, Google Baby Monitors?
I'll be intrigued to know if Google discontinues some of those less relevant lines, but this is kind of exciting if you're a fan of Android, because if Motorola does DVRs, SatNavs and Car Kits too then Google may well be planning to extend Android into the car and living room with a bit more seriousness than previously the case. It looks like Motorola Mobility has it's fingers in all the pies a tech company might want to be able to produce a full lifestyle ecosystem encompassing home, and travel (god, I feel like I just spat out some sales speak there, excuse me whilst I go vomit).
I've always wanted to be able to just add things to my calendar on my tablet in the kitchen, then walk into the living room and use it to display TVs listings to tell my TV what to play, or to choose some content from my fileserver to stream to the TV, then set it to play some music. Then when that's done, walk out to my car and automatically have my car continue playing whatever music I'd previously set playing on my TV, and when I reach my destination have my phone take over that playlist as I put my headphones on and plug them into it. Obviously you can kind of do all this now, but it requires some serious hackery, and is far from being a pleasant, seamless, system. You need to really know what you're doing.
Let's face it, it's the future, it's just waiting for someone to take a serious stab at it. Will Google make an attempt at that now that they've got the hardware base to go with their software division? I'm hoping so!
The only thing we'll need then is for it to be standardised so that you can buy a product from any manufacturer whether it's an iPad or a Playbook,a Xoom, or a Tab and have it integrate into such a system. Okay, well, maybe now I'm REALLY asking too much;)
I read this on the BBC and I have to admit, I didn't see this one coming!
At least we know now why Google didn't seem too bothered about winning the Nortel patents. This gives it a serious cell phone patents battle chest, and a manufacturer of decent tablets and handsets to boot.
The question is, if it's going to be Google owned, will this mean Motorola devices will be opened up as up until now they seemed to be the most locked down Android devices. Judging by the openness of the Nexus One etc. I'd imagine and hope this will be the case!
"1. Memory leaks have been a major issue of recent Firefox development. Current FF 8 nightly builds use a tiny fraction of older versions, and they're extremely stable. This is accomplished by no longer caching previous pages (so if you go back, you'll have to reload from scratch.) I've got a cool 200 tabs open right now in a very old session and it's only using about 500 MB of RAM. "
That's great, it's just a shame it's too late for me, as just last week FF5 managed to completely lose my ~200 tab session which was the final straw.
It's nice they've finally realised this is an issue, but for 3 years of memory leaks and slow downs it's just too little too late. It used to be great, then it became bearable, but still better than the alternatives. Now it's just shit.
Requiring a 3rd party addon to restore a basic staple UI element? No I'll pass thanks.
One thing that illustrated how much bollocks goes into market cap was when the story broke last week and a financial "expert" said Apple's strong because they typically release a groundbreaking new product line that builds new markets every 3 years, and as the iPhone was released in 2007, and the iPad in 2010, then something else will be due in 2013.
Sounds good right? but wait, let's stop and think about this. He's based that entire theory on a gap between two single products- what possible evidence does he have that because the iPad was released 3 years after the iPhone that this cycle is going to repeat?
Effectively this guy has taken one random and utterly arbitrary gap between product releases and decided to extrapolate this indefinitely into the future as a pattern that's now going to begin. You cannot possibly assume that the gap between two new product releases is now going to become some standardised gap, anymore than you can say that because Steve Jobs said the app store had sold 4 billions apps or whatever, that 4 billion is now the figure by which Apple's profits are going to be multiplied by each year.
It's complete and utterly bunk logic, it's the sort of crap I'd expect from a fortune teller in a tent after paying £1, not something I'd expect from a multi-millionaire financial expert whose responsible for playing with billions of dollars of money.
This little episode demonstrated what a complete and utter waste of time market cap is, it really is based on little more than a bunch of fairy tales where the gullable believe the fairy tales and buy, and the cunning and cruel sell to the gullable to rake in the profits after spreading those fairy tales which the terminally stupid fall hook, line, and sinker for.
Fundamentally, if you're talking about cycling then I actually agree with you- if you can cycle in, then you should do it. Just as if you can find usable public transport that gets you into work in a sensible time you should do it. But my point is this- what about all those essential workers who can't do either of these things? Society needs them, a healthy economy needs them, but road tax proposes just isolating them from economic centres- a frankly fucking stupid move. It's something that may work in small areas like London's congestion zones, but outside of that, as a nationwide thing does far far more harm than good, and lowers the cost for non-essential car users, and heightens the cost for essential car users.
Let me give you another example. What about the country vet? He'll have to travel a long long way to help sick farm animals. If he can't afford to do that, or boosts his prices to cover it so that farmers can't afford him, then the farming industry suffers and loses profits. Of course, they'll also be paying more to transport their produce into cities, so that'll become unaffordable, which means cities either do without, or prices of food rise yet again- far more than they have already.
I think you're focussing on far too narrow a situation- you're talking about how people who could use other methods should be charged road pricing and I agree with you on this. But you're completely ignoring the other half of society who can't use other methods. I don't mind inner city congestion zones for lazy people, but you shouldn't be charging this to essential workers who come from elsewhere, and have to cross the country. It'll only hurt your economy, and finally you've got the idea of subsidies the wrong way round. You genuinely think people who who have sought after, high end skills, and genuinely make a difference in companies because of those skills, and hence tend to get paid more, and help generate more revenue for the company- hence paying more out of their pay cheques in tax, and hence generating more corporate tax revenues, are being subsidised over the high school run moms who don't work, or work low paid/part time jobs and so pay little to no tax, but also in countries like the UK get tax credits, and also consume tax resources for schools etc.? Seriously? The people you're talking about taxing more are the sort of people that generate the tax revenues that allow for schools to be built and run in the first place.
One might equally take your idea- of realising costs, and building them into wages and such to suggest that people with kids should pay for their schools. I don't think it'd go down too well though - well, unless you're one of those free market extreme nutjobs.
"It makes the tax more fair to charge road-users by the mile and the ton over the road"
More "fair" possibly, but not more rational.
It hurts essential car users like couriers, commuters, and so forth, but does nothing to combat lazy people who take their kids 1 mile each way to school in the SUV when they could just as easily walk.
This sort of tax basically says "Yeah it's okay to use your car wastefully, for pointless journeys because you're lazy. But want to be a salesman? want to fill a skill gap in an area - such as doctors - by commuting to it? want to be a courier? want to live in and support a rural community? Well tough shit".
This sort of tax is a sure way to gimp your economy, making it harder for companies to find the skills they need by hiring commuters whilst failing to make any impact on wasteful road use and emissions.
All? Only one is really serious and that's Frances, but even that seems to be completely ineffective. Britain has one but disconnection is off the books. A few others have been struck down. It's not like three strikes laws are particularly common, and not one of them is succesful, and not one of them has come close to actually disconnecting anyone yet afaik.
As for coutnries own great firewalls, who? Australia's was dropped, I'm not aware of any other plans in the West, there's a bit of noise in various countries, including the UK, but it doesn't have chance of becoming law. The closest we had in the UK was recently ruling that BT must block a site, but technical details haven't been decided and OFCOM kinda overruled that saying site blocking is not a suitable step so it looks like even that's out the window again.
The paranoia is neither understandable, or approriate. People are quick on Slashdot to slag off Fox news and it's viewers for falling for the politics of fear and then they fall hook line and sinker for the exact same sensationalism on Slashdot when it comes to technology issues.
"Silly? Banning someone from using a computer nowadays isolates them from both knowledge and communications, and in fact disqualifies them from most jobs. It's a monstrous punishment that is passed whenever the judge happens to feel like it."
Silly because it wont work, because they'll just go to their friend's house and use the internet there, or just phone an ISP up who wasn't aware of their ban and get internet anyway, or something like that. I didn't mean that I thought it was silly because it's a weak punishment, but silly because as I mentioned - it's an impotent method of punishment, it will have no effect. If people are willing to publicly try and start a riot, then I don't think they'll give a toss about some silly thing like an ASBO- they've been a complete failure with other issues, so they're not going to work with enforcing internet bans either, yet that's the sort of ineffectual tosh politicians think up- just like site blocking, and three strikes in fact which fail because the former is easily bypassed, and the latter because it's impossible to prove to a legally acceptable standard that an IP relates to a specific individual infringing, so three strikes always gets raped in the courts in the end as a result.
I think they do understand it, it's just that the summary has, as is routine on Slashdot, taken the worst possible misinterpretation of what was said.
Reading the story about it on the BBC, and other comments surrounding it sounds like they're merely just considering what can be done about people who use such tools to organise trouble.
It doesn't sound like they're looking at making much of a stretch from where we are now - where, police can arrest someone, release them on bail, and ban them from using a computer as part of their bail conditions. Realistically, knowing politicians, it'll just be something as impotent as introducing ASBOs that ban computer usage for a fixed period or something silly like that.
Certainly I don't think it's clear that they're planning to just try blanket prevent access to sites like Facebook etc.
Of course it's possible I'm wrong, time will tell I guess. But far more often than not when Slashdot has jumped to the extreme interpretation of something related to British politics it's not actually turned out that way in practice.
Besides, that's one thing I really don't think they'd be able to get past their coalition partners, although I suppose they may not need to, it's the sort of thing Labour would probably back too I guess going on their past track record.
The organised cleanups were far more prominently featured as a benefit of social networking, and involved far more law abiding citizens than there were rioters during this whole debacle so people aren't going to let that be lost on the politicians.
"You clearly don't understand the purpose of the right to own guns. It's about the ability to overthrow a tyrannical regime without getting slaughtered in the streets."
No, I do understand this. The problem is it's never actually happened.
America has never had to do it since it's independence and creation of the constitution, and despite countries in the Middle East and Africa having a variety of gun laws the ability to own handguns hasn't helped the Syrians, and gun control in Egypt didn't prevent them overthrowing their leader without guns. In other words, your theory is great, but is irrelevant in reality.
History has shown that firearms play no part in revolutions beyond those that the military has. If the military supports your revolution then you don't need guns, if it doesn't then it doesn't matter if you have guns, you'll still be oppressed and lose.
Call me when your tyrannical government overthrow gun ownership theory actually plays out in real life. Then I'll pay a bit more attention to it, until then it's mere fantasy used to justify needless gun ownership.
It's called Google. My mistake for thinking people on Slashdot would be technically competent enough to use it to check things for themselves if they feel so inclined. Try it, it's not hard.
I don't suggest people shouldn't have the right to defend their property, I just think allowing guns whereby it's much easier for criminals to obtain them, and whereby law abiding citizens wont obtain them doesn't solve the problem.
In the UK recently 4 men tried to break into a house, the owner stabbed one of them and killed him. Everyone was fine with this, he wasn't charged, the guy defended his property, no guns needed on either side.
Bringing guns into the equation just makes it more deadly for everyone- if one of the burglars had a gun which would be likely under US style gun laws it would've almost certainly gone the other way because criminals have the initiative, but the initiative doesn't help so much when the fighting is hand to hand as it does with firearms.
We being the majority, and where the majority have presented the same view as me based on every survey on the subject done in recent years, I think you'll find you couldn't be more wrong.
"You don't seem to understand, our leaders are bastards, but your leaders are bastards too. That's OK though, most of our people don't get this about our leaders either, so you're in lots of company. Our leaders are more successful bastards than yours, that is all."
An American saying this in the face of the economic embarassment they're facing is one of the most comic things I've read on Slashdot for a while.
It's like you actually think America is still a superpower with a bright future and that the whole world respects or something. It's like you don't realise that it's already too late, the balance of power has tipped beyond a point of no return. America simply no longer has the power it has enjoyed over the last century, and it'd take a miracle to change that back. A miracle that has zero chance of happening under the current US political climate.
Our country? most of us recognise we're a fallen empire, some don't certainly, the rest of us? We know our place in the world has changed, and we're quite content with that thanks.
Don't be silly. It's about weighing the benefits of something against the downsides. Cars are kind of useful, so whilst the US should certainly look at how it can improve road safety, there's no need to ban cars because they're essential and the benefits far outweight the downsides.
The benefit of guns for private citizens isn't really measurable. They're useful for entertainment and ego, but that's a weak justification from all the problems that result from such gun ownership.
It's the usual Slashdot idiocy. You get moderated up for pointing out the flaws in the arguments of American gun nuts throughout most the day until around the time Americans start working, and until they go to bed. Sanity is sometimes restored by morning at Asian and European peak, but retarded moderations in relation to right wing Republican/American ideology always occur in relation to American time zones.
Because it's a fair bit harder to have control to end your life at the end of the spree. Guns are pretty foolproof and quick as a suicide tool at the end of it all. Burning down a building and trying to make sure you die in it? not so much.
I don't think that's true. Hostility against Polish people is at least as bad if not worse for one important reason- because they're so hard working they genuinely are getting employment over many local people simply because they have a better work ethic than many white, native, British people.
In recent years much of the BNPs campaign has been against Polish people at least as much as it has Islam and so forth. They definitely have at least as hard a time, they just deal with it better.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why people feel the need to even use a phone whilst driving full stop, there's no reason they shouldn't be banned from all use whilst on the road.
There's no real circumstance where you HAVE to answer a call the second it comes through, or HAVE to make one immediately. It's not hard to pull over somewhere quiet, and make the call or call someone back.
I've never once felt the need to use my phone whilst driving. I don't know why anyone else would- I have as many important calls as anyone else.
The only pet annoyance I do have is that I can't understand why the fuck using a phone whilst driving is illegal, but smoking is not. Lighting a cigarette, or dropping one whilst driving and having to find it, or have your car go up in flames is far more dangerous, so I do agree that our laws in this respect are inconsistent but I have no problem with banning phone use whilst actually driving, there's no real excuse for it.
No, I think it is what it was - a whining Google employee who possibly didn't even have any knowledge of the proposed Motorola takeover, because, as someone who has recently been involved in a large corporate takeover, I know full well that these things take time, but are kept very secretive until everything's in place to advance the takeover. Often only the board of directors will know about it, and even the people who will be key in managing any corporate integration wont know about it until things are pretty much set in stone.
That is of course one of the downsides of letting your employees blog freely though- they may sometimes say things without realising they only know half the picture because their managers have had to keep things from them, often through legal necessity. Although personally, I don't think it outweighs the upsides of employee blogging however, so it's still worth doing. It just means things like that can happen.
The problem is they wont get slapped hard enough to matter.
Apple got what they wanted- they fucked up Samsung's European launch, and we all know launch time is the most important, as it's where far and away most tablets are sold and sets the pace of sales for the duration of the product's life.
Apple were shit scared of the Galaxy 10.1 and they've pulled this stunt to gimp it's chances of becoming a serious competitor. It doesn't really matter if they're issued with a fine, it wont be enough to make up for the detriment to competition in the tablet market Apple has caused.
It wont help Apple in the long run - they can't do this to every competing product, but perhaps they're hoping they can fuck up their competitors with bogus legal claims just long enough to get the iPad 3 out, perhaps raising the game again and allowing them more of a chance against the newer tablets their competitors are churning out than the iPad 2 would have.
In cases like this though courts shouldn't be able to ban the sales, the sales should be able to go ahead and if the product is indeed found to be infringing then the company who made said product should forfeit all profits for that product to the company they infringed against. Allowing for European wide bans by one half assed court case like this just invites trolls to fuck their competitors over for what will likely be a minor slap on the wrist which wont even be able to begin to cover the damage done to competition in said market
Tablets are a new market, we need competition on it, I have an iPad 2 but frankly I feel not just the iPad 2 but tablets in general are a bit lacklustre. If the iPad remains largely uncontested in the market then it'll continue to be the half assed device it is currently with all it's pissy annoying little quirks. Competition would force Apple to fix those, and produce a better product for all of us consumers.
I think if they were genuinely bothered about the Nortel patents, and weren't aware of the Motorola buyout (which must've been underway during the Nortel bidding) then they would've simply bid more for the Nortel patents. Motorola has cost them more than they bid on that, so they were clearly happy to spend the cash.
I suspect this is also why they made such silly bids- because they weren't really that bothered about seriously winning. It was misdirection, I'll bet that they knew it didn't matter because they were grabbing Motorola mobile's patent chest instead whilst the other firms involved completely missed the opportunity to buy Motorola.
Frankly I'm amazed that a lot of this stuff hasn't been looked into in general.
Between technology like NFC, Wifi, Bluetooth and so forth I'm suprised the linked in kind of consumer friendly technology ecosystem I described hasn't been done already. We could have really vibrant plug and play digital home technology setups today, where you can add things to it at will- a wall mounted tablet in the kitchen to sync up to your computer to access it's music, a tablet to control your TV recordings, and to take TV with you screened from the TV if you want to walk off round the house and so on.
The technology is all there, and frankly it's not really too far fetched to put this sort of thing together. All the bits are there but they're really disaparate right now.
Personally I assumed Apple would be first- they have all the pieces, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and so forth but they haven't quite got it all together yet. They've largely been crippled by the desktop/laptop based iTunes tie in to this point, but at least with iOS5 they're stepping away from that, which helps them step towards this, but there's still quite some way to go yet to see the full potential here.
Hopefully with Google seemingly entering the gadget market now the competition will heat up and we'll see a far greater push in this area, just like we saw a great smartphone push when Apple entered the smartphone arena.
Fanboys like to pray that their "One True Company (tm)" will do everything perfectly, and take over the world, but really time and time again recent history has shown that sometimes it takes one company to kick your preferred company into gear. This is a notching up of the battle between Google, Microsoft, Apple, et al., and consumers whether they prefer Apple, Google, or whoever else are going to be the ones that truly benefit.
It doesn't really matter what side you're on, or if you're one of those more rational types and on no side at all. This news is really great for everyone.
Talk about going off on a tangent. What's this got to do with Apple? Oh, wait, if you're an Apple fanboy then it's always got something to do with Apple hasn't it?
Oh well, I hate to burst your reality distortion bubble, but it's probably worth pointing out that Motorola Mobility HAS been after Apple over patents:
http://mediacenter.motorola.com/Press-Releases/Motorola-Mobility-Sues-Apple-for-Patent-Infringement-344d.aspx
If you're going to publicly try and comfort yourself over your brand insecurity you could at least try and get your facts right, so that you don't look too paranoid about the future of your favourite brand.
Fanboys. The worst kind of idiot.
First thing I do on a morning is scan through my favourite news sites- BBC, Slashdot etc. and check the headlines that are interesting, I open each in a new tab that sounds interesting.
I tend to program at work in 30minute time slots, then take a 5minute break, during those breaks, at lunch time and so forth I'll have a look through the news tabs I opened up. Sometimes I wont bother to read more than the introductory paragraph if the story isn't as interesting as it seemed, other times I'll read the whole thing.
Some days I open up more stories than I can read, other days I read more stories than I opened. Sometimes I have 200 tabs open, other times I manage to eliminate all but maybe 10.
It's not just news stories, sometimes I open tabs to read later that contain longer articles, and you can't get through these in 5minutes. These tabs tend to hang around for weeks, sometimes months before I get round to reading them. If they've been there too long, like, 3months+ and I get round to it, I'll just bookmark them into a "To read later" folder.
Sometimes also if I'm looking for a solution to a problem on Google and there's say, 8 useful posts about my problem on the first page, I'll open up all of them, then sometimes read the first one, find it solves the problem and get on with what I was doing, forgetting to close the other tabs, but I usually notice them again within a day or two and just close them.
So some of it the answer is that I simply don't manage it well- i.e. those I forget to close immediately. But much of it is that I basically hoarde useful pages in tabs, and eliminate them bit by bit.
It's not hard to work through the tabs to find what you want- click the tab dropdown to the right of the tabs and anything with a BBC or Slashdot icon or whatever is a quick story to eliminate in my 5 minute breaks!
I actually made an assumption there, but you have a good point. I Googled Motorola mobility though, and got this:
http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/GB-EN/Home
The page title says:
Motorola Android Mobile Smart Phones and Tablets - Bluetooth Accessories - Home Video Networks - Motorola Mobility, Inc. United Kingdom
So it looks like it does include tablets. But what I didn't assume was the other things it appears to include:
http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/GB-EN/Consumer-Products-and-Services
I didn't even realise Motorola produced some of these things, but could it mean we'll see Google SatNavs, Google Car Kits, Google Cable/DSL modems, Google DVRs, and er, Google Baby Monitors?
I'll be intrigued to know if Google discontinues some of those less relevant lines, but this is kind of exciting if you're a fan of Android, because if Motorola does DVRs, SatNavs and Car Kits too then Google may well be planning to extend Android into the car and living room with a bit more seriousness than previously the case. It looks like Motorola Mobility has it's fingers in all the pies a tech company might want to be able to produce a full lifestyle ecosystem encompassing home, and travel (god, I feel like I just spat out some sales speak there, excuse me whilst I go vomit).
I've always wanted to be able to just add things to my calendar on my tablet in the kitchen, then walk into the living room and use it to display TVs listings to tell my TV what to play, or to choose some content from my fileserver to stream to the TV, then set it to play some music. Then when that's done, walk out to my car and automatically have my car continue playing whatever music I'd previously set playing on my TV, and when I reach my destination have my phone take over that playlist as I put my headphones on and plug them into it. Obviously you can kind of do all this now, but it requires some serious hackery, and is far from being a pleasant, seamless, system. You need to really know what you're doing.
Let's face it, it's the future, it's just waiting for someone to take a serious stab at it. Will Google make an attempt at that now that they've got the hardware base to go with their software division? I'm hoping so!
The only thing we'll need then is for it to be standardised so that you can buy a product from any manufacturer whether it's an iPad or a Playbook,a Xoom, or a Tab and have it integrate into such a system. Okay, well, maybe now I'm REALLY asking too much ;)
I read this on the BBC and I have to admit, I didn't see this one coming!
At least we know now why Google didn't seem too bothered about winning the Nortel patents. This gives it a serious cell phone patents battle chest, and a manufacturer of decent tablets and handsets to boot.
The question is, if it's going to be Google owned, will this mean Motorola devices will be opened up as up until now they seemed to be the most locked down Android devices. Judging by the openness of the Nexus One etc. I'd imagine and hope this will be the case!
"1. Memory leaks have been a major issue of recent Firefox development. Current FF 8 nightly builds use a tiny fraction of older versions, and they're extremely stable. This is accomplished by no longer caching previous pages (so if you go back, you'll have to reload from scratch.) I've got a cool 200 tabs open right now in a very old session and it's only using about 500 MB of RAM. "
That's great, it's just a shame it's too late for me, as just last week FF5 managed to completely lose my ~200 tab session which was the final straw.
It's nice they've finally realised this is an issue, but for 3 years of memory leaks and slow downs it's just too little too late. It used to be great, then it became bearable, but still better than the alternatives. Now it's just shit.
Requiring a 3rd party addon to restore a basic staple UI element? No I'll pass thanks.
One thing that illustrated how much bollocks goes into market cap was when the story broke last week and a financial "expert" said Apple's strong because they typically release a groundbreaking new product line that builds new markets every 3 years, and as the iPhone was released in 2007, and the iPad in 2010, then something else will be due in 2013.
Sounds good right? but wait, let's stop and think about this. He's based that entire theory on a gap between two single products- what possible evidence does he have that because the iPad was released 3 years after the iPhone that this cycle is going to repeat?
Effectively this guy has taken one random and utterly arbitrary gap between product releases and decided to extrapolate this indefinitely into the future as a pattern that's now going to begin. You cannot possibly assume that the gap between two new product releases is now going to become some standardised gap, anymore than you can say that because Steve Jobs said the app store had sold 4 billions apps or whatever, that 4 billion is now the figure by which Apple's profits are going to be multiplied by each year.
It's complete and utterly bunk logic, it's the sort of crap I'd expect from a fortune teller in a tent after paying £1, not something I'd expect from a multi-millionaire financial expert whose responsible for playing with billions of dollars of money.
This little episode demonstrated what a complete and utter waste of time market cap is, it really is based on little more than a bunch of fairy tales where the gullable believe the fairy tales and buy, and the cunning and cruel sell to the gullable to rake in the profits after spreading those fairy tales which the terminally stupid fall hook, line, and sinker for.
Fundamentally, if you're talking about cycling then I actually agree with you- if you can cycle in, then you should do it. Just as if you can find usable public transport that gets you into work in a sensible time you should do it. But my point is this- what about all those essential workers who can't do either of these things? Society needs them, a healthy economy needs them, but road tax proposes just isolating them from economic centres- a frankly fucking stupid move. It's something that may work in small areas like London's congestion zones, but outside of that, as a nationwide thing does far far more harm than good, and lowers the cost for non-essential car users, and heightens the cost for essential car users.
Let me give you another example. What about the country vet? He'll have to travel a long long way to help sick farm animals. If he can't afford to do that, or boosts his prices to cover it so that farmers can't afford him, then the farming industry suffers and loses profits. Of course, they'll also be paying more to transport their produce into cities, so that'll become unaffordable, which means cities either do without, or prices of food rise yet again- far more than they have already.
I think you're focussing on far too narrow a situation- you're talking about how people who could use other methods should be charged road pricing and I agree with you on this. But you're completely ignoring the other half of society who can't use other methods. I don't mind inner city congestion zones for lazy people, but you shouldn't be charging this to essential workers who come from elsewhere, and have to cross the country. It'll only hurt your economy, and finally you've got the idea of subsidies the wrong way round. You genuinely think people who who have sought after, high end skills, and genuinely make a difference in companies because of those skills, and hence tend to get paid more, and help generate more revenue for the company- hence paying more out of their pay cheques in tax, and hence generating more corporate tax revenues, are being subsidised over the high school run moms who don't work, or work low paid/part time jobs and so pay little to no tax, but also in countries like the UK get tax credits, and also consume tax resources for schools etc.? Seriously? The people you're talking about taxing more are the sort of people that generate the tax revenues that allow for schools to be built and run in the first place.
One might equally take your idea- of realising costs, and building them into wages and such to suggest that people with kids should pay for their schools. I don't think it'd go down too well though - well, unless you're one of those free market extreme nutjobs.
"It makes the tax more fair to charge road-users by the mile and the ton over the road"
More "fair" possibly, but not more rational.
It hurts essential car users like couriers, commuters, and so forth, but does nothing to combat lazy people who take their kids 1 mile each way to school in the SUV when they could just as easily walk.
This sort of tax basically says "Yeah it's okay to use your car wastefully, for pointless journeys because you're lazy. But want to be a salesman? want to fill a skill gap in an area - such as doctors - by commuting to it? want to be a courier? want to live in and support a rural community? Well tough shit".
This sort of tax is a sure way to gimp your economy, making it harder for companies to find the skills they need by hiring commuters whilst failing to make any impact on wasteful road use and emissions.
"With all the tree-strike laws on books nowadays"
All? Only one is really serious and that's Frances, but even that seems to be completely ineffective. Britain has one but disconnection is off the books. A few others have been struck down. It's not like three strikes laws are particularly common, and not one of them is succesful, and not one of them has come close to actually disconnecting anyone yet afaik.
As for coutnries own great firewalls, who? Australia's was dropped, I'm not aware of any other plans in the West, there's a bit of noise in various countries, including the UK, but it doesn't have chance of becoming law. The closest we had in the UK was recently ruling that BT must block a site, but technical details haven't been decided and OFCOM kinda overruled that saying site blocking is not a suitable step so it looks like even that's out the window again.
The paranoia is neither understandable, or approriate. People are quick on Slashdot to slag off Fox news and it's viewers for falling for the politics of fear and then they fall hook line and sinker for the exact same sensationalism on Slashdot when it comes to technology issues.
"Silly? Banning someone from using a computer nowadays isolates them from both knowledge and communications, and in fact disqualifies them from most jobs. It's a monstrous punishment that is passed whenever the judge happens to feel like it."
Silly because it wont work, because they'll just go to their friend's house and use the internet there, or just phone an ISP up who wasn't aware of their ban and get internet anyway, or something like that. I didn't mean that I thought it was silly because it's a weak punishment, but silly because as I mentioned - it's an impotent method of punishment, it will have no effect. If people are willing to publicly try and start a riot, then I don't think they'll give a toss about some silly thing like an ASBO- they've been a complete failure with other issues, so they're not going to work with enforcing internet bans either, yet that's the sort of ineffectual tosh politicians think up- just like site blocking, and three strikes in fact which fail because the former is easily bypassed, and the latter because it's impossible to prove to a legally acceptable standard that an IP relates to a specific individual infringing, so three strikes always gets raped in the courts in the end as a result.
I think they do understand it, it's just that the summary has, as is routine on Slashdot, taken the worst possible misinterpretation of what was said.
Reading the story about it on the BBC, and other comments surrounding it sounds like they're merely just considering what can be done about people who use such tools to organise trouble.
It doesn't sound like they're looking at making much of a stretch from where we are now - where, police can arrest someone, release them on bail, and ban them from using a computer as part of their bail conditions. Realistically, knowing politicians, it'll just be something as impotent as introducing ASBOs that ban computer usage for a fixed period or something silly like that.
Certainly I don't think it's clear that they're planning to just try blanket prevent access to sites like Facebook etc.
Of course it's possible I'm wrong, time will tell I guess. But far more often than not when Slashdot has jumped to the extreme interpretation of something related to British politics it's not actually turned out that way in practice.
Besides, that's one thing I really don't think they'd be able to get past their coalition partners, although I suppose they may not need to, it's the sort of thing Labour would probably back too I guess going on their past track record.
The organised cleanups were far more prominently featured as a benefit of social networking, and involved far more law abiding citizens than there were rioters during this whole debacle so people aren't going to let that be lost on the politicians.
"You clearly don't understand the purpose of the right to own guns. It's about the ability to overthrow a tyrannical regime without getting slaughtered in the streets."
No, I do understand this. The problem is it's never actually happened.
America has never had to do it since it's independence and creation of the constitution, and despite countries in the Middle East and Africa having a variety of gun laws the ability to own handguns hasn't helped the Syrians, and gun control in Egypt didn't prevent them overthrowing their leader without guns. In other words, your theory is great, but is irrelevant in reality.
History has shown that firearms play no part in revolutions beyond those that the military has. If the military supports your revolution then you don't need guns, if it doesn't then it doesn't matter if you have guns, you'll still be oppressed and lose.
Call me when your tyrannical government overthrow gun ownership theory actually plays out in real life. Then I'll pay a bit more attention to it, until then it's mere fantasy used to justify needless gun ownership.
It's called Google. My mistake for thinking people on Slashdot would be technically competent enough to use it to check things for themselves if they feel so inclined. Try it, it's not hard.
But if you're lazy/struggling still try here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
or here:
http://www.data360.org/graph_group.aspx?Graph_Group_Id=441
I don't suggest people shouldn't have the right to defend their property, I just think allowing guns whereby it's much easier for criminals to obtain them, and whereby law abiding citizens wont obtain them doesn't solve the problem.
In the UK recently 4 men tried to break into a house, the owner stabbed one of them and killed him. Everyone was fine with this, he wasn't charged, the guy defended his property, no guns needed on either side.
Bringing guns into the equation just makes it more deadly for everyone- if one of the burglars had a gun which would be likely under US style gun laws it would've almost certainly gone the other way because criminals have the initiative, but the initiative doesn't help so much when the fighting is hand to hand as it does with firearms.
We being the majority, and where the majority have presented the same view as me based on every survey on the subject done in recent years, I think you'll find you couldn't be more wrong.
Right, which is why no one rose up in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain etc.
Oh wait. Slight flaw with your theory.
"You don't seem to understand, our leaders are bastards, but your leaders are bastards too. That's OK though, most of our people don't get this about our leaders either, so you're in lots of company. Our leaders are more successful bastards than yours, that is all."
An American saying this in the face of the economic embarassment they're facing is one of the most comic things I've read on Slashdot for a while.
It's like you actually think America is still a superpower with a bright future and that the whole world respects or something. It's like you don't realise that it's already too late, the balance of power has tipped beyond a point of no return. America simply no longer has the power it has enjoyed over the last century, and it'd take a miracle to change that back. A miracle that has zero chance of happening under the current US political climate.
Our country? most of us recognise we're a fallen empire, some don't certainly, the rest of us? We know our place in the world has changed, and we're quite content with that thanks.
Don't be silly. It's about weighing the benefits of something against the downsides. Cars are kind of useful, so whilst the US should certainly look at how it can improve road safety, there's no need to ban cars because they're essential and the benefits far outweight the downsides.
The benefit of guns for private citizens isn't really measurable. They're useful for entertainment and ego, but that's a weak justification from all the problems that result from such gun ownership.
"+5 Informative, seriously!?! Let's see..."
It's the usual Slashdot idiocy. You get moderated up for pointing out the flaws in the arguments of American gun nuts throughout most the day until around the time Americans start working, and until they go to bed. Sanity is sometimes restored by morning at Asian and European peak, but retarded moderations in relation to right wing Republican/American ideology always occur in relation to American time zones.
Because it's a fair bit harder to have control to end your life at the end of the spree. Guns are pretty foolproof and quick as a suicide tool at the end of it all. Burning down a building and trying to make sure you die in it? not so much.
I don't think that's true. Hostility against Polish people is at least as bad if not worse for one important reason- because they're so hard working they genuinely are getting employment over many local people simply because they have a better work ethic than many white, native, British people.
In recent years much of the BNPs campaign has been against Polish people at least as much as it has Islam and so forth. They definitely have at least as hard a time, they just deal with it better.