The only blu-ray movies I've bought that I've been really impressed with are Stanley Kubrick films and others from that era. The reason is that those were all shot with analogue film. With blu-ray, you can really see the graininess of the film and it reminds me of watching those movies in the actual theater, with the DVDs the resolution is low enough that it becomes limiting.
That said, I also thought Avatar wasn't too bad after you ripped the !#@$$%%^ copy protection off of it. But then, that's my biggest gripe against blu-ray in general: in order to watch my legally purchased blu-ray discs on my legally purchased blu-ray drive, I have to break the DRM and copy them to my hard drive. Why? Because there's no blu-ray playing software for linux that works without breaking the DRM.
I view this issue as a universal problem with movies, not just Jackson's. In a high budget flick, they'll go to the utmost detail to get the props (especially costumes) and special effects convincing, yet the plot at times takes turns that are stupid beyond belief. Jackson's movies were particularly bad about this. For example, in the commentary they insisted that the dragons the ring wraiths were riding have the proper number of fingers for a large bird or lizard. Yet, Saruman's orcs have never heard of saws to cut trees, despite having the ability to make arms and armor, and insist on ripping the trees near Saruman's house down. In another point, the Ents all decide not to go to war, then the hobbits trick the leader Ent into going south, where he encounters what was once a grove of trees, recently "pulled" down by Saruman's orcs. There he gives a yell and all the other Ents magically appear. What, were they following the leader Ent the whole time? Or do they just walk at the speed of light?
These may seem like trivial details, but it's annoying to sit and have to watch them spend so much effort on one hand getting things just right and believable, but on the other expect the audience to throw "suspension of disbelief" out of the window at the drop of a hat. Tolkien actually thought about things like plot and believability. Having been a soldier in the trenches of WWI, he knew about things like troop movements and how nations go to war as well as the emotional duress one goes through in these situations (see Frodo in the last book). Jackson, as talented as he is as a director, does not have the same level of expertise that Tolkien did in these matters, and he shouldn't have fucked with the plot and characters so much.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” Right now we have an entire political party that is built on lies. Don't believe me? Check the interest rates on the 10 year treasury notes. I guarantee you that the federal government can borrow at a lower interest rate than you. Does that look like raging inflation is right around the corner? Does that look like a government that is borrowing beyond it's means? No.
You are aware that nedit has a precompiled OS X binary up on their sourceforge web-site? Yeah sure, it runs in emulation but it's a text editor, it's not exactly resource heavy (and the fact is, a guy like you who is an OS X neophyte probably won't even be able to tell that it's running in emulation. When you start wondering what those dashes and at symbols are in top, maybe you'll learn how you can tell).
Maybe you should spend some more time with your computer before you start bashing it for not having available things it actually does.
On a side note, as someone who has used OS X since beta, I find all these clueless windows users who just recently bought a mac sort of annoying. Of course it doesn't work the way windows does, that's the point!
I know it's just a joke, but the reason behind this joke is that the WSJ is known as a financial journal. But if you've been reading the wall street journal in the last decade and actually acted on their financial advice, odds are you've lost a lot of money. This goes from failing to even acknowledge that there was a housing bubble in the 2000s, to predicting that interest rates were going to start rising last year and massive inflation. The reason for this is the Murdoch effect, where he goes, conservative ideologues follow, and the quality of the reporting in the WSJ has gotten worse, probably because of this.
The fact is, no newspaper is infallible and even with stupid things like the Miller stories I find the NYT still has more in depth and accurate reporting than the vast majority of media. PBS and NPR are too ham strung by politics and the constant Republican threat to cut their funding to report on controversial political topics, the Washington Post has become the WSJ light (i.e., politically motivated and untrustworthy) and the cable and broadcast stations only really seem to be interested in selling ads, "news" is secondary.
So, I guess I'd say that NYT is bad only when you don't start looking around at the other news media.
That the number of deaths due to nuclear power is zero is not actually true. There are deaths due to typical mining activities, but also many people died due to radiation exposure. Think about it... miners trapped down in an inclosed space breathing air full of radon and uranium for 10 hours a day. It's not a healthy way to live. Not to mention that the waste produced from the mining laced all the water downstream of them with uranium (in the article). The number of deaths due to coal is much, much higher, but nuclear power is not without it's own particular form of nastiness.
Actually, there is pretty good data on the deaths directly associated with coal mining at least. See here. This data only goes back to the 30s when most of the miners had already unionized in the U.S. That's significant because on the top of their list when striking were things like an 8 hour work day, and being paid to construct safety equipment. The status quo was that miners only got paid for tons of coal and didn't get paid to create construction equipment. All told, in excess of 100k people have died directly due to coal mining accidents.
Oh, by the way, since you went off on the "anti-nuclear hippies", I'd just like to point out an example of a conservative lifestyle choice leading to deaths: in 2007 there were 613 accidental gun deaths and ~18,000 injured, and if you keep a gun in your home, you are four times as likely to shoot yourself or your family than use it in self defense. The point is that people act irrationally sometimes, not just liberals or conservatives.
And yet here we are, arguing about what other people buy. My contention is that it's profitable and successful, I'm not clear what yours is, aside from that people who buy Apple are morons and suckers.
Hah! I think you just summarized every single Apple thread on slashdot. It almost makes it worth it wading through the multitude of useless "I hate apple because they don't do what I want" posts to get here...almost.
As for the ipad2, looks nice. I hate flash, after years of 64 bit flash on linux being abused and ignored by Adobe, I'm now attempting to go flash free (I still keep a copy of Chrome around just in case, which has its own flash implmentation).
In general, I used to think being able to upgrade a computing device was a good thing, but as I get older I find more and more often that I just buy the fastest one they offer at the time with enough memory and enough hard drive space and then I don't have to upgrade it down the road. See? It's like upgrading but I just do that first, when I'm buying the product. It's quite convenient. I bought two batteries for my laptop in about 2005, a couple of years later I realized it was a silly decision since here I was lugging around an extra battery all the time and only actually found myself needing it a handful of times. Now I use a macbook air, I love it. It's like a netbook that doesn't suck.
The bottom line is that Apple's products appeal to lots of people, more non-techie people, but while I'm not a "computer programmer" per se, I can script bash, code c++ and I made my own theme for e17 on linux for my home machine and I still like most of their design decisions, so they're obviously doing something right.
I'd just like to point out that in our secretary's office is a windows XP box that is constantly rebooting ever since the IT department pushed a bad update. While I don't doubt that users installing their own software is a big issue, over-zealous system administrators or software companies who don't fully test their updates are also a problem. Perhaps not a security problem, but one that costs boku money & time nonetheless.
SAY WHAT?!? Rarely first at anything? Wait for a market to be at a tipping point? What are you smoking??? While I'll give you that yes there were mp3 players, "smart" cell phones, laptops and tablets before Apple got into those markets, saying Apple isn't an innovator is a lot like saying that there were wheeled vehicles before the automobile so the internal combustion engine wasn't really innovative. You're completely batshit loony if you think that apple didn't innovate in those markets. You can discount UI design as saying that's not innovative, fine, let's not argue about that (but dollars to donuts that Win7 wouldn't be nearly as good without OS X showing up XP and Vista)... but show me another laptop that put automatic backlit keyboards on their laptops before Apple, an easy to navigate and logically organized mp3 player, a single piece chassis and case laptop, a magnetically attached power cord, or a laptop 19 mm thick (macbook air).
I swear, I don't know why I even read comments on slashdot any more... the FUD, ignorance and stupidity about technology on this tech site never ceases to astound.
Since this is an Intel standard (albeit sponsored and pushed by Apple) it doesn't come with the restrictions that Apple would have placed on it if it were their own standard.
This is complete and total bullshit. Apple has promoted open standards FOR YEARS. Webkit? Apple's (yes I know it was built off of khtml). CUPS? Apple owns and maintains it. HTML5 vs. flash? Apple supports the open standard. Firewire? Apple was one of the few major players to support it. USB? Apple helped drive the wide-spread adoption of USB by forcing its use with the imacs.
The bottom line is that if you think Apple doesn't support open standards, you're either a troll or badly misinformed. It could be you're thinking of another major industry player who likes to buy off standards committees.
I suspect the real reason for his upping his ante of crazy in his shows is that his ratings are in freefall. When your entire product is based off of irrational fear, scape-goating and paranoia, one way to maintain that fear and paranoia once it starts to fade through constant exposure is to make more fear and paranoia. I guess the George Soros smear didn't stick and he's looking for a new target and Google probably seemed like a good one to take on.
If making gasoline from coal was so great, why didn't the Germans keep doing it after WWII? Surely energy independence is a great idea and should be done. The coal industry has said that it could compete if oil stays above $50/barrel. It's been above $50/barrel for years now, where is all this great gasoline that's going to solve our problems?
Brazil, the largest world producer of etahnol from sugar cane, only exports 4% of the ethanol it produces from it. Good luck trying to get enough to produce for the rest of the world!
Petroleum from shale WILL NEVER BE economically viable. Even if it were, nobody has enough water rights to produce any significant quantity from the Green river formation, which is the largest oil shale formation. Given the choice between water and gas, what do you think people would pick?
But sure, stick your head back in the sand, I'm sure the magical energy fairy will make all our problems go away.
It's just come out from some wikileaks cables that Saudi Arabia has been overstating its reserves for years and can no longer elevate production to keep prices in check. More than that, we're likely sitting at peak oil, the odds that conventional oil production will never again climb up are getting better and better. While something might replace that, what that something is is not known. Running mass transit off the grid will always be more energy efficient than using cars, even electric ones. The smart and intelligent thing to do us utilize known technology to take up the slack.
Obama is doing the right thing here. The airlines that run those airplanes that the GP thinks are so great were hovering on the edge bankruptcy when gas prices were high. If gas goes up to $4/gallon again this summer, watch what happens to their bottom line, it won't be pretty. Someone else in this thread commented that we should go to Mars, but what good will having a man on mars do us if we can't get to work because gas is too expensive?
Not being a console gamer, I have actually heard of the kinect, and I guess it is pretty innovative. But, if you judge the number of sales, this tells you kinect is not a revolution: weekly sales of the Xbox 360 are still below the Wii and the DS3.
On the software side, Kinect Adventures is selling quite well, but it's only slightly above Wii Sports which has been out for 218 weeks. Moreover, if you plot the total sales of Kinect Adventures, you see that sales have collapsed. Part of this is due to the holiday season being ended, but there's a very likely chance that your "most innovative product" is a fad. In contrast, Wii Sports is picking up in its sales, yet again. Granted, the Kinect could pick up and make a splash, but so far, it looks like only people who already bought an xbox 360 really want it.
Other highlights included Kinect and Xbox sales, which helped the Entertainment and Devices business beat $1 billion in annual operating profit for the first time ever... Microsoft's Xbox business racked up more than $7 billion in operating losses in the early years, but if it continues to crank at the current rate, the company might finally start earning back its investment in a few years.
I hate to say it, but if the Kinect is the most innovative MS can get after spending $7 billion, they're screwed.
Lastly, as anecdotal evidence, I visited my sister and her gamer husband over the holidays. They did have a kinect, but we spent the time playing guitar band instead. They didn't even mention it as a "must see".
Not just on a holiday, Apple releases their quarterly earnings statement tomorrow. Obviously they know it will be a big quarter which will further cushion the impact. As I said earlier in the thread, I suspect Jobs returning to his job after his liver transplant was just to appease wall street and the media, and that he hasn't been doing his full work week for some time.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Cook has been pretty much running the show for quite some time. Jobs likes to work, he wouldn't be taking a medical leave unless it was interfering with his job. Things like this don't just crop up, he's probably been dealing with these new complications for some time and hasn't been putting in his full work week and handing off a lot of power to Cook.
Also, how do we know that Jobs coming back after his liver transplant isn't just to appease the stock market and that Cook has been running the whole show since the first time Jobs left? From their perspective, it would make sense. Jobs hasn't been such a big voice lately, ever since his medical problems started in fact.
I watched that video you linked to. You're comparing something that is real which is linked to in the summary to something that is just necessary to look good on camera. The link in the summary shows functional, wearable technology, whereas who knows what the helmet in the video is good for. By your logic, none of us should ever want do anything interesting at all, because odds are someone has done that much more seamlessly in a movie previously with the aid of a camera crew and multiple takes. In any case, neither of them is hardly the first time someone has worn a television or monitor on their head.
Frankly, I don't see what the problem with this helmet is, I think it was pretty cool. A nice mix of styles which gave a retro. feel from the 80s but enhanced by new tech. I thought it was very artistic. But since slashdotters wouldn't know art from a hole in the ground, let me put it more clearly: It's no different from any other case mod where the original functionality of the PC is lost (e.g. a case turned into an aquarium).
But the US government and Microsoft have something of a strange yet cooperative relationship.
You mean the relationship between a large corporation and one of their largest clients? (If not THE largest client?) Speaking as someone caught in the middle of that relationship, I see nothing especially out of the ordinary, certainly not what you are insinuating.
Personally, I think you and the GP are off: Google has every reason to collect our data because they sell that data to advertising clients. MS is probably collecting data for just the same reason google is.
Yup, tanstaafl. It's still true. On the other hand, I'm guessing there are only a small number of people who would like an iphone but don't want to deal with AT&T. A better option for Verizon might be to offer unlimited data for a limited time or something as a loss leader to get people to switch over from AT&T, or get people who are on the fence about an iphone to take the plunge.
I'm in that last category myself: I'm toying with the idea of getting a new phone and having played with other people's Androids and iphones, I think one of these will be fun to have. That said, I'm not big on the $70/mo. for unlimited that AT&T, $55/mo. is a little more reasonable for what I anticipate my usage habits to be, but I'll wait to see how the Verizon thingy shakes out before I make a decision one way or the other.
As a user, this made me crack up (Also I borked a moderated comment so I'm posting to undo it). I've just recently moved to a situation where I needed exchange, and I do like some of its features. What alternatives would you recommend? What I really like is that my iCal (OS X) will sync wherever I am. I guess some other webmail clients do that, like Zimbra? Is that what you mean?
Excuse me, but have worked at a small ISP? How do you know that the FBI didn't ask ahead time to obtain the info. and only when the ISP refused to cooperate did they didn't start confiscating things?
Actually, in this case the servers are evidence, and the FBI has every right to confiscate it. This happens all the time in hacking cases. Think about what would happen if the FBI didn't confiscate evidence -- it would be trivially easy to conduct illegal behavior because your provider would not give up the evidence necessary to convict you.
It sucks, but that's what you get for having a society that actually investigates crimes against members of society. You can move to Somalia if you want a more laissez-faire style society.
Oh so now we need "good deregulation" instead of just deregulation? No true Scotsman, indeed! Why is it that, when faced with yet another failure of their favored policies, the response of conservatives invariably is, "you just didn't do it right." It seems to me that the correct policy is the one that works in the real world and doesn't require ideal conditions. Face it, regulation is a necessary fact of life to keep markets functioning the way they should. Deregulation simply isn't a panacea for economic issues.
Ummm, I hate to break it to you, but it WASN'T in the 90s that the U.S. debt soared. Since WWII, there are have been precisely two periods where the ratio of U.S debt to GDP rose in a sustained way. The first was under Reagan/Bush, when under Reagan especially, the (democratic) congress consistently approved a budget that was lower than what the president recommended. The second was under Bush Jr./Obama. Regarding the latter, Obama isn't spending at any greater rate than Bush Jr. did, but at least he has the excuse that deficit spending is the only thing that has kept the economy from going into a full blown depression.
The bottom line however, isn't that this is the end of the world, the U.S. just needs to ensure that the deficit spending is being spent on things that will improve the economy in the long-term. However, tax cuts are absolutely the worst way to improve the GDP in the long-term. It would be better to spend the money on replacing aging infrastructure and building new infrastructure, or other things that have a direct and unambiguous effect on the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
The only blu-ray movies I've bought that I've been really impressed with are Stanley Kubrick films and others from that era. The reason is that those were all shot with analogue film. With blu-ray, you can really see the graininess of the film and it reminds me of watching those movies in the actual theater, with the DVDs the resolution is low enough that it becomes limiting.
That said, I also thought Avatar wasn't too bad after you ripped the !#@$$%%^ copy protection off of it. But then, that's my biggest gripe against blu-ray in general: in order to watch my legally purchased blu-ray discs on my legally purchased blu-ray drive, I have to break the DRM and copy them to my hard drive. Why? Because there's no blu-ray playing software for linux that works without breaking the DRM.
I view this issue as a universal problem with movies, not just Jackson's. In a high budget flick, they'll go to the utmost detail to get the props (especially costumes) and special effects convincing, yet the plot at times takes turns that are stupid beyond belief. Jackson's movies were particularly bad about this. For example, in the commentary they insisted that the dragons the ring wraiths were riding have the proper number of fingers for a large bird or lizard. Yet, Saruman's orcs have never heard of saws to cut trees, despite having the ability to make arms and armor, and insist on ripping the trees near Saruman's house down. In another point, the Ents all decide not to go to war, then the hobbits trick the leader Ent into going south, where he encounters what was once a grove of trees, recently "pulled" down by Saruman's orcs. There he gives a yell and all the other Ents magically appear. What, were they following the leader Ent the whole time? Or do they just walk at the speed of light?
These may seem like trivial details, but it's annoying to sit and have to watch them spend so much effort on one hand getting things just right and believable, but on the other expect the audience to throw "suspension of disbelief" out of the window at the drop of a hat. Tolkien actually thought about things like plot and believability. Having been a soldier in the trenches of WWI, he knew about things like troop movements and how nations go to war as well as the emotional duress one goes through in these situations (see Frodo in the last book). Jackson, as talented as he is as a director, does not have the same level of expertise that Tolkien did in these matters, and he shouldn't have fucked with the plot and characters so much.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” Right now we have an entire political party that is built on lies. Don't believe me? Check the interest rates on the 10 year treasury notes. I guarantee you that the federal government can borrow at a lower interest rate than you. Does that look like raging inflation is right around the corner? Does that look like a government that is borrowing beyond it's means? No.
You are aware that nedit has a precompiled OS X binary up on their sourceforge web-site? Yeah sure, it runs in emulation but it's a text editor, it's not exactly resource heavy (and the fact is, a guy like you who is an OS X neophyte probably won't even be able to tell that it's running in emulation. When you start wondering what those dashes and at symbols are in top, maybe you'll learn how you can tell).
Maybe you should spend some more time with your computer before you start bashing it for not having available things it actually does.
On a side note, as someone who has used OS X since beta, I find all these clueless windows users who just recently bought a mac sort of annoying. Of course it doesn't work the way windows does, that's the point!
I know it's just a joke, but the reason behind this joke is that the WSJ is known as a financial journal. But if you've been reading the wall street journal in the last decade and actually acted on their financial advice, odds are you've lost a lot of money. This goes from failing to even acknowledge that there was a housing bubble in the 2000s, to predicting that interest rates were going to start rising last year and massive inflation. The reason for this is the Murdoch effect, where he goes, conservative ideologues follow, and the quality of the reporting in the WSJ has gotten worse, probably because of this.
The fact is, no newspaper is infallible and even with stupid things like the Miller stories I find the NYT still has more in depth and accurate reporting than the vast majority of media. PBS and NPR are too ham strung by politics and the constant Republican threat to cut their funding to report on controversial political topics, the Washington Post has become the WSJ light (i.e., politically motivated and untrustworthy) and the cable and broadcast stations only really seem to be interested in selling ads, "news" is secondary.
So, I guess I'd say that NYT is bad only when you don't start looking around at the other news media.
That the number of deaths due to nuclear power is zero is not actually true. There are deaths due to typical mining activities, but also many people died due to radiation exposure. Think about it... miners trapped down in an inclosed space breathing air full of radon and uranium for 10 hours a day. It's not a healthy way to live. Not to mention that the waste produced from the mining laced all the water downstream of them with uranium (in the article). The number of deaths due to coal is much, much higher, but nuclear power is not without it's own particular form of nastiness.
Actually, there is pretty good data on the deaths directly associated with coal mining at least. See here. This data only goes back to the 30s when most of the miners had already unionized in the U.S. That's significant because on the top of their list when striking were things like an 8 hour work day, and being paid to construct safety equipment. The status quo was that miners only got paid for tons of coal and didn't get paid to create construction equipment. All told, in excess of 100k people have died directly due to coal mining accidents.
Oh, by the way, since you went off on the "anti-nuclear hippies", I'd just like to point out an example of a conservative lifestyle choice leading to deaths: in 2007 there were 613 accidental gun deaths and ~18,000 injured, and if you keep a gun in your home, you are four times as likely to shoot yourself or your family than use it in self defense. The point is that people act irrationally sometimes, not just liberals or conservatives.
Hah! I think you just summarized every single Apple thread on slashdot. It almost makes it worth it wading through the multitude of useless "I hate apple because they don't do what I want" posts to get here...almost.
As for the ipad2, looks nice. I hate flash, after years of 64 bit flash on linux being abused and ignored by Adobe, I'm now attempting to go flash free (I still keep a copy of Chrome around just in case, which has its own flash implmentation).
In general, I used to think being able to upgrade a computing device was a good thing, but as I get older I find more and more often that I just buy the fastest one they offer at the time with enough memory and enough hard drive space and then I don't have to upgrade it down the road. See? It's like upgrading but I just do that first, when I'm buying the product. It's quite convenient. I bought two batteries for my laptop in about 2005, a couple of years later I realized it was a silly decision since here I was lugging around an extra battery all the time and only actually found myself needing it a handful of times. Now I use a macbook air, I love it. It's like a netbook that doesn't suck.
The bottom line is that Apple's products appeal to lots of people, more non-techie people, but while I'm not a "computer programmer" per se, I can script bash, code c++ and I made my own theme for e17 on linux for my home machine and I still like most of their design decisions, so they're obviously doing something right.
I'd just like to point out that in our secretary's office is a windows XP box that is constantly rebooting ever since the IT department pushed a bad update. While I don't doubt that users installing their own software is a big issue, over-zealous system administrators or software companies who don't fully test their updates are also a problem. Perhaps not a security problem, but one that costs boku money & time nonetheless.
SAY WHAT?!? Rarely first at anything? Wait for a market to be at a tipping point? What are you smoking??? While I'll give you that yes there were mp3 players, "smart" cell phones, laptops and tablets before Apple got into those markets, saying Apple isn't an innovator is a lot like saying that there were wheeled vehicles before the automobile so the internal combustion engine wasn't really innovative. You're completely batshit loony if you think that apple didn't innovate in those markets. You can discount UI design as saying that's not innovative, fine, let's not argue about that (but dollars to donuts that Win7 wouldn't be nearly as good without OS X showing up XP and Vista)... but show me another laptop that put automatic backlit keyboards on their laptops before Apple, an easy to navigate and logically organized mp3 player, a single piece chassis and case laptop, a magnetically attached power cord, or a laptop 19 mm thick (macbook air).
I swear, I don't know why I even read comments on slashdot any more... the FUD, ignorance and stupidity about technology on this tech site never ceases to astound.
This is complete and total bullshit. Apple has promoted open standards FOR YEARS. Webkit? Apple's (yes I know it was built off of khtml). CUPS? Apple owns and maintains it. HTML5 vs. flash? Apple supports the open standard. Firewire? Apple was one of the few major players to support it. USB? Apple helped drive the wide-spread adoption of USB by forcing its use with the imacs.
The bottom line is that if you think Apple doesn't support open standards, you're either a troll or badly misinformed. It could be you're thinking of another major industry player who likes to buy off standards committees.
I suspect the real reason for his upping his ante of crazy in his shows is that his ratings are in freefall. When your entire product is based off of irrational fear, scape-goating and paranoia, one way to maintain that fear and paranoia once it starts to fade through constant exposure is to make more fear and paranoia. I guess the George Soros smear didn't stick and he's looking for a new target and Google probably seemed like a good one to take on.
If making gasoline from coal was so great, why didn't the Germans keep doing it after WWII? Surely energy independence is a great idea and should be done. The coal industry has said that it could compete if oil stays above $50/barrel. It's been above $50/barrel for years now, where is all this great gasoline that's going to solve our problems?
Brazil, the largest world producer of etahnol from sugar cane, only exports 4% of the ethanol it produces from it. Good luck trying to get enough to produce for the rest of the world!
Petroleum from shale WILL NEVER BE economically viable. Even if it were, nobody has enough water rights to produce any significant quantity from the Green river formation, which is the largest oil shale formation. Given the choice between water and gas, what do you think people would pick?
But sure, stick your head back in the sand, I'm sure the magical energy fairy will make all our problems go away.
It's just come out from some wikileaks cables that Saudi Arabia has been overstating its reserves for years and can no longer elevate production to keep prices in check. More than that, we're likely sitting at peak oil, the odds that conventional oil production will never again climb up are getting better and better. While something might replace that, what that something is is not known. Running mass transit off the grid will always be more energy efficient than using cars, even electric ones. The smart and intelligent thing to do us utilize known technology to take up the slack.
Obama is doing the right thing here. The airlines that run those airplanes that the GP thinks are so great were hovering on the edge bankruptcy when gas prices were high. If gas goes up to $4/gallon again this summer, watch what happens to their bottom line, it won't be pretty. Someone else in this thread commented that we should go to Mars, but what good will having a man on mars do us if we can't get to work because gas is too expensive?
On the software side, Kinect Adventures is selling quite well, but it's only slightly above Wii Sports which has been out for 218 weeks. Moreover, if you plot the total sales of Kinect Adventures, you see that sales have collapsed. Part of this is due to the holiday season being ended, but there's a very likely chance that your "most innovative product" is a fad. In contrast, Wii Sports is picking up in its sales, yet again. Granted, the Kinect could pick up and make a splash, but so far, it looks like only people who already bought an xbox 360 really want it.
I'd like to point this out from a report on Microsoft's quarterly earnings:
I hate to say it, but if the Kinect is the most innovative MS can get after spending $7 billion, they're screwed.
Lastly, as anecdotal evidence, I visited my sister and her gamer husband over the holidays. They did have a kinect, but we spent the time playing guitar band instead. They didn't even mention it as a "must see".
Not just on a holiday, Apple releases their quarterly earnings statement tomorrow. Obviously they know it will be a big quarter which will further cushion the impact. As I said earlier in the thread, I suspect Jobs returning to his job after his liver transplant was just to appease wall street and the media, and that he hasn't been doing his full work week for some time.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Cook has been pretty much running the show for quite some time. Jobs likes to work, he wouldn't be taking a medical leave unless it was interfering with his job. Things like this don't just crop up, he's probably been dealing with these new complications for some time and hasn't been putting in his full work week and handing off a lot of power to Cook.
Also, how do we know that Jobs coming back after his liver transplant isn't just to appease the stock market and that Cook has been running the whole show since the first time Jobs left? From their perspective, it would make sense. Jobs hasn't been such a big voice lately, ever since his medical problems started in fact.
I watched that video you linked to. You're comparing something that is real which is linked to in the summary to something that is just necessary to look good on camera. The link in the summary shows functional, wearable technology, whereas who knows what the helmet in the video is good for. By your logic, none of us should ever want do anything interesting at all, because odds are someone has done that much more seamlessly in a movie previously with the aid of a camera crew and multiple takes. In any case, neither of them is hardly the first time someone has worn a television or monitor on their head.
Frankly, I don't see what the problem with this helmet is, I think it was pretty cool. A nice mix of styles which gave a retro. feel from the 80s but enhanced by new tech. I thought it was very artistic. But since slashdotters wouldn't know art from a hole in the ground, let me put it more clearly: It's no different from any other case mod where the original functionality of the PC is lost (e.g. a case turned into an aquarium).
You mean the relationship between a large corporation and one of their largest clients? (If not THE largest client?) Speaking as someone caught in the middle of that relationship, I see nothing especially out of the ordinary, certainly not what you are insinuating.
Personally, I think you and the GP are off: Google has every reason to collect our data because they sell that data to advertising clients. MS is probably collecting data for just the same reason google is.
Yup, tanstaafl. It's still true. On the other hand, I'm guessing there are only a small number of people who would like an iphone but don't want to deal with AT&T. A better option for Verizon might be to offer unlimited data for a limited time or something as a loss leader to get people to switch over from AT&T, or get people who are on the fence about an iphone to take the plunge. I'm in that last category myself: I'm toying with the idea of getting a new phone and having played with other people's Androids and iphones, I think one of these will be fun to have. That said, I'm not big on the $70/mo. for unlimited that AT&T, $55/mo. is a little more reasonable for what I anticipate my usage habits to be, but I'll wait to see how the Verizon thingy shakes out before I make a decision one way or the other.
As a user, this made me crack up (Also I borked a moderated comment so I'm posting to undo it). I've just recently moved to a situation where I needed exchange, and I do like some of its features. What alternatives would you recommend? What I really like is that my iCal (OS X) will sync wherever I am. I guess some other webmail clients do that, like Zimbra? Is that what you mean?
Excuse me, but have worked at a small ISP? How do you know that the FBI didn't ask ahead time to obtain the info. and only when the ISP refused to cooperate did they didn't start confiscating things?
Actually, in this case the servers are evidence, and the FBI has every right to confiscate it. This happens all the time in hacking cases. Think about what would happen if the FBI didn't confiscate evidence -- it would be trivially easy to conduct illegal behavior because your provider would not give up the evidence necessary to convict you.
It sucks, but that's what you get for having a society that actually investigates crimes against members of society. You can move to Somalia if you want a more laissez-faire style society.
Oh so now we need "good deregulation" instead of just deregulation? No true Scotsman, indeed! Why is it that, when faced with yet another failure of their favored policies, the response of conservatives invariably is, "you just didn't do it right." It seems to me that the correct policy is the one that works in the real world and doesn't require ideal conditions. Face it, regulation is a necessary fact of life to keep markets functioning the way they should. Deregulation simply isn't a panacea for economic issues.
Ummm, I hate to break it to you, but it WASN'T in the 90s that the U.S. debt soared. Since WWII, there are have been precisely two periods where the ratio of U.S debt to GDP rose in a sustained way. The first was under Reagan/Bush, when under Reagan especially, the (democratic) congress consistently approved a budget that was lower than what the president recommended. The second was under Bush Jr./Obama. Regarding the latter, Obama isn't spending at any greater rate than Bush Jr. did, but at least he has the excuse that deficit spending is the only thing that has kept the economy from going into a full blown depression.
The bottom line however, isn't that this is the end of the world, the U.S. just needs to ensure that the deficit spending is being spent on things that will improve the economy in the long-term. However, tax cuts are absolutely the worst way to improve the GDP in the long-term. It would be better to spend the money on replacing aging infrastructure and building new infrastructure, or other things that have a direct and unambiguous effect on the economy.