People get fed up with Apple's constant hyperbole, especially when the product in question is, in the end, a PDA with a larger than usual screen.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm fed up with the constant hyberbole against Apple here on slashdot. If it weren't for insightful comments like the GP's, I wouldn't read comments on apple stories at all any more because they too often are just filled with foaming-at-the-mouth angst. When I do read comments, often I see complaints about how Apple products aren't so great when you spec them out. Here, they improved the specs on one of their products and they're trying to make a big deal of that. Why? Because it differentiates them from their competitors. That is how to succeed in a business with hundreds of laptop or smart phone models already for sale in the market. So they came up with a silly trade name, so what? Does that somehow make the product less good?
Just to be clear, what is causing this huge increase?
The bigger picture is that for many years now, publishers have claimed that dead tree subscriptions by individuals have been dropping like a rock. It's not just NPG that's doing this, Elsevier has been doing this for a long time with the journals they can get away with. There is some truth to it, many scientists used to have paper subscriptions to their favorite journals. Nowadays though, you just navigate to your library's web-site and enter your id and password and download whatever you want straight onto your computer. You can even do it from home, or print it out if you need to have it in your hands. So the journal publishers have been massively increasing their subscription costs for the electronic version. Not so nice for the libraries.
In my opinion, if tax payer money is paying for some research, it should be publicly available or least published by a not for profit publisher, such as the American Chemical Society.
I agree. In my discipline, a nature of science paper will get you huge attention from the university administration and bureaucrats in your funding agency. However, your colleagues who research things close to you will be suspicious because one has to simplify your findings and leave important qualifying statements out in order to have the paper be understandable by a general audience. I've seen more than one Nature or Science paper whose results were a little too convenient or cute and not surprisingy were later found to be totally bogus. It's not that bogus results don't happen in other journals, that's part of the scientific process, but when it's published in science or nature, a lot of people not in your field tend to believe it.
Just because you are within your 1st amendment rights to talk about seceding if you don't get your way politically doesn't mean that I can't criticize you for it, nor talk about how I believe it's a good thing the FBI is investigating people who might kill innocents. The point of my quoting the bumper sticker was another example that the political climate is unstable in the U.S. That there is a fine line between protecting your first amendment rights and crossing it and using violence against your fellow citizens. Conservatives like yourselves like to couch your arguments in select passages of the constitution without consideration of the larger context. I believe that people like yourself are not actually patriots, you don't give a damn about the rest of society you just want your freedom to act any way you please and not have to answer for yourself and you couch that in convenient sounding platitudes and select texts of the constitution.
This country was founded on sedition.
Yes, but somehow I think that secession because the U.S. tries to give health care to poor people is not on the same caliber of "good reasons to secede" as say, taxation without representation, the quartering of troops or the right to a speedy trial. Next you'll be telling me that since Rand Paul was within his 1st amendment rights to say that businesses should be allowed to discriminate against black people, we shouldn't criticize him for it. While far from perfect, the U.S. government does much more good than harm for U.S. citizens. You should really stop and reflect on that.
On the other hand, the political climate in the U.S. is becoming unstable. Just off the top of my head, in the last couple of years we've had a security guard at the holocaust museum gunned down by a white supremicist holocaust denier, a guy flew his plane into an IRS building because he didn't want to pay his taxes and a christian militia that was allegedly planning on murdering police officers. This is to say nothing about the people screaming threats at e.g., Obama, at conservative/tea party rallies. I was just in eastern TN last weekend and saw a bumper sticker on a traffic light box that read, "Secession before socialism." I'm glad that the FBI is checking up on these things, because I have no desire to see any assassinations in this country. We heard one side of this story, until we know the whole story in the court case, I will reserve judgment.
I'm certainly not for AT&T sending C&D orders because people are e-mailing them rants, but I am tired of the minority of people in this country who think they can hold the entire country hostage to their will through threats, imaginary or real. I'm also tired of hearing of people espousing sedition.
The issue is not the term "peak" I believe, the issue is the definition of renewable. We think of things like wood as renewable resources, but if you overuse a renewable resource, you can indeed collapse the population. We saw with whale oil in the 19th century, its production peaked in 1845. The reason for this was that whale populations had collapsed, and to this day they have not quite recovered for many (most?) of the species that were hunted. There was also that petroleum oil thing for which they started to drill.
The point is that whether a resource is renewable or not is a relative term. It's relative to the rate at which you are consuming it and the rate at which it is replenished. Petroleum oil, on a geologic time scale, is renewable. On a human time scale it is not. Whales were being consumed much faster than they were reproducing, so the resource became non-renewable (each year there were fewer and fewer whales). Wood is the same way, you see it again and again in ancient societies, that the ability to sustain themselves is dependent on availability of wood. Once the population gets too big and consumes all the wood in easy transport distance, the civilization is finished.
Do you see any hope that the U.S. can transition itself off of petroleum oil? I have my doubts, but I have no doubt that sometime in the first half of the next century oil production will stop increasing, if it hasn't already. Here's hoping for massive wind farms, solar arrays and good batteries (and nuclear).
One thing amazes me about the present fiasco is that we don't hear of more accidents like this, how many offshore oilrigs are there round the world?
It does happen every few years or so. We just don't hear about it because they aren't usually as large as this one, nor in as deep water, which exacerbates the difficulty of any possible fixes including relief wells (but you can expect more and more deepwater wells in the future). Also, the public and the media have short attention spans, and the oil companies will cover these things up if they can and/or wait for the public outcry to die down. BP tried the same thing here, claiming that the well was only putting out 5000 barrels per day and it wasn't until oil started showing up on shorelines that anyone questioned them. Exxon never paid more than half the money they were supposed to after the Valdez, they just funded an endless stream of lawyers to move it around in court until people gave up trying to get it.
I can only imagine regulation around oil drilling will become more strict rather than less after this has all been sorted out.
You'd think that would be the case, but the oil industry lobbyists are already probably in high gear waiting for the news media to switch to some other topic so they can go back to baiting the rabid conservative segment of the population with drill, baby, drill slogans and paying off their favorite politicians and funding their reelection campaigns. On the other hand, after the Exxon Valdez the U.S. did start requiring that oil tankers docked in their ports had double hulls. But I guess that a certain political party will resist any new regulations for drilling in the current political climate.
Have you even read any of the comments in this thread? Nearly the entire discussion has revolved around how MS tablets have never worked because they chain them to the windows desktop paradigm, i.e. stylus for mouse, small cramped keyboard. Flash is the EXACT same way. It doesn't belong on a phone, it doesn't belong on a touchscreen interface. If it were there, then a lot of companies would be designing shitty flash apps instead of dedicated iphone apps and the user experience would be downright awful and the ipad/iphone/ipod touch would flop. Apple wants to succeed with the ipad, not design yet another in a long line of tablet flops.
What is sad is that you have haven't the foggiest notion of how the majority of our country actually lives. I've lived about half my life in towns less than 30,000 people and the other half in booming metropolises and I can tell you just as many people in my neighborhoods waved and smiled at me when I passed in the cities as in the rural communities. Rural people aren't special, there's nothing more or less american about them than any other type of people in this country. You are not living in the magical fairyland of "real america" that the rest of us have forgotten.
I take issue with your "most people go to church on Sunday" statement. The percentage of people who say they go to church in Texas is 49% percent, above the national average of 42%. It is not "most people", not even a majority. Sure, the rural texans probably have a higher church attendance than people in Houston or other metropolises but there's another point that's more important: about half those people who say they go to church lie about it. This site has a good run down of actual church attendance versus claimed church attendance, it's about half. So even if the majority of rural texans claim they go to church, it's a good bet that only about a quarter of them do.
The conclusion is that the good old-fashioned red-blooded church-going "real" america that people like you (and Sarah Palin) go on about is a lie, it doesn't exist. Similar arguments can be made for the rest of your statement, but I'll leave that to what the others who have responded to your comment have said.
And the real question here is that why is it that 51% of people in Texas are allowing the minority of people who go to church to dictate their educational curriculum?
You know, you really aren't accomplishing much by misquoting me. This is what I said:
There's was a big fucking Apple logo on the back, I think it's safe to say it was Apple's phone since no phone like that was supposed to exist.
See that second half of the sentence there, the part after the comma? That's what you refer to as a qualifying statement, it means that my intent is NOT that all things with the apple logo on the back belong to apple. Are you really so dense to believe that the guy who "found" it and the guys who bought it didn't know what it was they had? Really?! You know, if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you that I just happened to find. It's in some pretty prime real estate, Brooklyn, and you'll be able to make money on tolls for years.
Before you can call it stolen property you need to confirm that it is actually something that was owned by the person claiming it was stolen.
There's was a big fucking Apple logo on the back, I think it's safe to say it was Apple's phone since no phone like that was supposed to exist. Second, there's a world of difference between proving that the phone belongs to Apple and what Gizmodo was asking for, which was a public announcement that the phone is theirs. That of course, would have done more financial damage to apple by raising the profile of this case even further.
Martinson [the roommate] turned Hogan in, because Hogan had plugged the phone into her laptop in an attempt to get it working again after Apple remotely disabled it. She was convinced that Apple would be able to trace her Internet IP address as a result. "Therefore she contacted Apple in order to absolve herself of criminal responsibility," according to the detective who wrote the affidavit.
Seems to me that her roommates are the ones acting in bad faith here by using her computer while dealing with something that is obviously of shady legal ground.
Thanks for the suggestion, my Dad's birthday is coming up maybe I'll get him the cheaper one.:) I'm going to have to go through this soon myself though, right now I drive an 1987 4Runner with 191k miles on it and I don't really need the codes (passes emissions each year with no problems). It's starting to become unreliable so I have to buy a new car which means I'll be needing to learn about the codes.
After I wrote that I found this web-site that explains how to use the device and what's going on. I still think that the dealer has some codes that are not OBDII certified that they use though. Incidentally, according to that web-site I linked to, the code machine is $200, but in this thread the person says the dealer is charging them $100 just to read the codes. Wow, expensive.
Precisely. This is the most important thing that could come out of this work. Currently, it's the law that some of the diagnostic codes that are necessary to identify problems with a vehicle are publicly known. However, automobile manufacturers have more precise codes that you can only learn from the dealer's machine. Bringing it to the dealer of course means you pay out the nose. My Dad just went through this, the check engine light came on on his wife's car, so he days trying to figure out what the problem was (even taking it to the Trak Auto where they scanned the publicly available codes for free for him). Eventually though, he had to take it to the dealer to identify the problem.
It's a bum deal, the automobile manufacturers don't want the owners of the vehicles working on their cars any more. I'm not sure if it's because they realized that they could make more money for the dealers if they made it difficult, or if it's just that making the car easy to work on is not a priority any more. Regardless, hacking the car will be a good thing if we can make those codes publicly available.
He says he wants an editor before he can release. From the followup post, he says he's going to use ABC notation to actually post scores but leave designing the front end to someone else. Just out of curiosity, I looked at what he's using now, here is the notation to generate the score for the first demo. The first part is just drawing the bars:
No, I searched for "Obama says criticism is racist" because if he HAD said something like that, it would have shown up in the search. Since the only hits were of Obama saying that racism is not an issue, we can safely conclude that Obama is NOT calling his critics racist. This was in response to Brett Buck claiming that I was "funny" for saying that the administration never called their critics racist, which they haven't, but I interpreted his comment as disbelief.
It's right here, all I did was take the top hit from google for Obama for the search "obama says criticism is racist". Here's the precise quote for you:
US President Barack Obama does not think racism is "the overriding issue" in the fierce debate surrounding health care, but that tempers are rising over government roles in daily life, according to interviews to be broadcast Sunday."Are there people out there who don't like me because of race? I'm sure there are. That's not the overriding issue here," Obama insisted in an excerpt of an interview to be broadcast on the CNN show "State of the Union."
What is it with this administration that everyone who disagrees is a racist?
The GP was a troll, crafting a fake "liberal" outrage in order to evoke precisely your emotional response. Congratulations, you and the person who modded you insightful bought it hook, line and sinker. You need to stop watching Fox News because this administration has not once called anyone who disagrees with it a racist. Some people have actually said a lot of the criticism of the adminstration is racist in origin, but I can't see how you seem to think it's fair to criticize the adminstration for something other people said. The only person I can recall that called anybody a racist is Glenn Beck.
Or view material from pulitizer prize winning journalists.
Ummm.. hey dude, safari works just fine on the ipod/iphone/ipad and you can use it to read any prize winning journalist that you have legal (and even illegal) access to. E.g., just navigate to here, find the author you want and look it up on google. It's really not that hard.
In any case, you don't need flash and you only need one app. Adobe can suck it, flash sucks on anything but windows and I for one, am sick and tired of not having flash apps load properly and/or slow my system to a crawl. Ever since it was invented, people on slashdot have been complaining about sites that rely on flash to show their content, but now that Apple has banned it all according to you, being forced into using Adobe products to view the web is "being allowed to use your device anyway you want"? Are you nuts? You are being played by Adobe and they're waging their PR campaign not for your freedom like they say, but to preserve their profit and control of the world wide web.
Yeah, I myself have become addicted to this thing. I didn't think I'd like it, but Apple seems to have managed to shorten the keystroke length substantially relative to other keyboards, making it effortless to type on, but still gives you a good strong tactile feedback when the key is fully pressed (i.e. the key comes to a full, abrupt stop when it's at the length of its travel). Getting the function/media keys working properly in linux requires some editing of keyboard map though -- I just run a script at startup that assigns values to the media keys that X11 doesn't know about. I never thought I would like it when I got one with a new computer, but then typing anything else became a chore after a few weeks on it.
You insensitive clod, don't you know that corporations are citizens too? The SCOTUS told us so. There's a little-known 28th amendment(*), that upon reaching a critical mass, a corporate-citizen becomes too big to fail and they then are awarded a right to make a profit at the expense of ordinary non-multibillion dollar citizens. The GP and the person who modded you troll were just standing up for the constitution and the rights of the poor ISPs to separate you from your hard earned cash in the most mercenary and efficient way possible. Won't somebody please think of the corporations!?!
* Okay, maybe there isn't a 28th amendment, but there might as well be with the mickey mouse protection act and the current SCOTUS ruling on political donations and the ruling on the FCC not being able to regulate the internet. Sad days...
I looked on youtube. The second hit seems to be missing for me, my browser is reporting the swf as not found. The third one in Saudi Arabia appears to be the lightning moving along the power lines. I suspect that these guys in TFA could be right, but that the term ball lightning is ambiguous, referring to several different phenomena.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm fed up with the constant hyberbole against Apple here on slashdot. If it weren't for insightful comments like the GP's, I wouldn't read comments on apple stories at all any more because they too often are just filled with foaming-at-the-mouth angst. When I do read comments, often I see complaints about how Apple products aren't so great when you spec them out. Here, they improved the specs on one of their products and they're trying to make a big deal of that. Why? Because it differentiates them from their competitors. That is how to succeed in a business with hundreds of laptop or smart phone models already for sale in the market. So they came up with a silly trade name, so what? Does that somehow make the product less good?
The bigger picture is that for many years now, publishers have claimed that dead tree subscriptions by individuals have been dropping like a rock. It's not just NPG that's doing this, Elsevier has been doing this for a long time with the journals they can get away with. There is some truth to it, many scientists used to have paper subscriptions to their favorite journals. Nowadays though, you just navigate to your library's web-site and enter your id and password and download whatever you want straight onto your computer. You can even do it from home, or print it out if you need to have it in your hands. So the journal publishers have been massively increasing their subscription costs for the electronic version. Not so nice for the libraries.
In my opinion, if tax payer money is paying for some research, it should be publicly available or least published by a not for profit publisher, such as the American Chemical Society.
I agree. In my discipline, a nature of science paper will get you huge attention from the university administration and bureaucrats in your funding agency. However, your colleagues who research things close to you will be suspicious because one has to simplify your findings and leave important qualifying statements out in order to have the paper be understandable by a general audience. I've seen more than one Nature or Science paper whose results were a little too convenient or cute and not surprisingy were later found to be totally bogus. It's not that bogus results don't happen in other journals, that's part of the scientific process, but when it's published in science or nature, a lot of people not in your field tend to believe it.
Yes, but somehow I think that secession because the U.S. tries to give health care to poor people is not on the same caliber of "good reasons to secede" as say, taxation without representation, the quartering of troops or the right to a speedy trial. Next you'll be telling me that since Rand Paul was within his 1st amendment rights to say that businesses should be allowed to discriminate against black people, we shouldn't criticize him for it. While far from perfect, the U.S. government does much more good than harm for U.S. citizens. You should really stop and reflect on that.
Right here.
On the other hand, the political climate in the U.S. is becoming unstable. Just off the top of my head, in the last couple of years we've had a security guard at the holocaust museum gunned down by a white supremicist holocaust denier, a guy flew his plane into an IRS building because he didn't want to pay his taxes and a christian militia that was allegedly planning on murdering police officers. This is to say nothing about the people screaming threats at e.g., Obama, at conservative/tea party rallies. I was just in eastern TN last weekend and saw a bumper sticker on a traffic light box that read, "Secession before socialism." I'm glad that the FBI is checking up on these things, because I have no desire to see any assassinations in this country. We heard one side of this story, until we know the whole story in the court case, I will reserve judgment.
I'm certainly not for AT&T sending C&D orders because people are e-mailing them rants, but I am tired of the minority of people in this country who think they can hold the entire country hostage to their will through threats, imaginary or real. I'm also tired of hearing of people espousing sedition.
The issue is not the term "peak" I believe, the issue is the definition of renewable. We think of things like wood as renewable resources, but if you overuse a renewable resource, you can indeed collapse the population. We saw with whale oil in the 19th century, its production peaked in 1845. The reason for this was that whale populations had collapsed, and to this day they have not quite recovered for many (most?) of the species that were hunted. There was also that petroleum oil thing for which they started to drill.
The point is that whether a resource is renewable or not is a relative term. It's relative to the rate at which you are consuming it and the rate at which it is replenished. Petroleum oil, on a geologic time scale, is renewable. On a human time scale it is not. Whales were being consumed much faster than they were reproducing, so the resource became non-renewable (each year there were fewer and fewer whales). Wood is the same way, you see it again and again in ancient societies, that the ability to sustain themselves is dependent on availability of wood. Once the population gets too big and consumes all the wood in easy transport distance, the civilization is finished.
Do you see any hope that the U.S. can transition itself off of petroleum oil? I have my doubts, but I have no doubt that sometime in the first half of the next century oil production will stop increasing, if it hasn't already. Here's hoping for massive wind farms, solar arrays and good batteries (and nuclear).
It does happen every few years or so. We just don't hear about it because they aren't usually as large as this one, nor in as deep water, which exacerbates the difficulty of any possible fixes including relief wells (but you can expect more and more deepwater wells in the future). Also, the public and the media have short attention spans, and the oil companies will cover these things up if they can and/or wait for the public outcry to die down. BP tried the same thing here, claiming that the well was only putting out 5000 barrels per day and it wasn't until oil started showing up on shorelines that anyone questioned them. Exxon never paid more than half the money they were supposed to after the Valdez, they just funded an endless stream of lawyers to move it around in court until people gave up trying to get it.
You'd think that would be the case, but the oil industry lobbyists are already probably in high gear waiting for the news media to switch to some other topic so they can go back to baiting the rabid conservative segment of the population with drill, baby, drill slogans and paying off their favorite politicians and funding their reelection campaigns. On the other hand, after the Exxon Valdez the U.S. did start requiring that oil tankers docked in their ports had double hulls. But I guess that a certain political party will resist any new regulations for drilling in the current political climate.
Have you even read any of the comments in this thread? Nearly the entire discussion has revolved around how MS tablets have never worked because they chain them to the windows desktop paradigm, i.e. stylus for mouse, small cramped keyboard. Flash is the EXACT same way. It doesn't belong on a phone, it doesn't belong on a touchscreen interface. If it were there, then a lot of companies would be designing shitty flash apps instead of dedicated iphone apps and the user experience would be downright awful and the ipad/iphone/ipod touch would flop. Apple wants to succeed with the ipad, not design yet another in a long line of tablet flops.
What is sad is that you have haven't the foggiest notion of how the majority of our country actually lives. I've lived about half my life in towns less than 30,000 people and the other half in booming metropolises and I can tell you just as many people in my neighborhoods waved and smiled at me when I passed in the cities as in the rural communities. Rural people aren't special, there's nothing more or less american about them than any other type of people in this country. You are not living in the magical fairyland of "real america" that the rest of us have forgotten.
I take issue with your "most people go to church on Sunday" statement. The percentage of people who say they go to church in Texas is 49% percent, above the national average of 42%. It is not "most people", not even a majority. Sure, the rural texans probably have a higher church attendance than people in Houston or other metropolises but there's another point that's more important: about half those people who say they go to church lie about it. This site has a good run down of actual church attendance versus claimed church attendance, it's about half. So even if the majority of rural texans claim they go to church, it's a good bet that only about a quarter of them do.
The conclusion is that the good old-fashioned red-blooded church-going "real" america that people like you (and Sarah Palin) go on about is a lie, it doesn't exist. Similar arguments can be made for the rest of your statement, but I'll leave that to what the others who have responded to your comment have said.
And the real question here is that why is it that 51% of people in Texas are allowing the minority of people who go to church to dictate their educational curriculum?
See that second half of the sentence there, the part after the comma? That's what you refer to as a qualifying statement, it means that my intent is NOT that all things with the apple logo on the back belong to apple. Are you really so dense to believe that the guy who "found" it and the guys who bought it didn't know what it was they had? Really?! You know, if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you that I just happened to find. It's in some pretty prime real estate, Brooklyn, and you'll be able to make money on tolls for years.
There's was a big fucking Apple logo on the back, I think it's safe to say it was Apple's phone since no phone like that was supposed to exist. Second, there's a world of difference between proving that the phone belongs to Apple and what Gizmodo was asking for, which was a public announcement that the phone is theirs. That of course, would have done more financial damage to apple by raising the profile of this case even further.
Seems to me that her roommates are the ones acting in bad faith here by using her computer while dealing with something that is obviously of shady legal ground.
Thanks for the suggestion, my Dad's birthday is coming up maybe I'll get him the cheaper one. :) I'm going to have to go through this soon myself though, right now I drive an 1987 4Runner with 191k miles on it and I don't really need the codes (passes emissions each year with no problems). It's starting to become unreliable so I have to buy a new car which means I'll be needing to learn about the codes.
After I wrote that I found this web-site that explains how to use the device and what's going on. I still think that the dealer has some codes that are not OBDII certified that they use though. Incidentally, according to that web-site I linked to, the code machine is $200, but in this thread the person says the dealer is charging them $100 just to read the codes. Wow, expensive.
Precisely. This is the most important thing that could come out of this work. Currently, it's the law that some of the diagnostic codes that are necessary to identify problems with a vehicle are publicly known. However, automobile manufacturers have more precise codes that you can only learn from the dealer's machine. Bringing it to the dealer of course means you pay out the nose. My Dad just went through this, the check engine light came on on his wife's car, so he days trying to figure out what the problem was (even taking it to the Trak Auto where they scanned the publicly available codes for free for him). Eventually though, he had to take it to the dealer to identify the problem.
It's a bum deal, the automobile manufacturers don't want the owners of the vehicles working on their cars any more. I'm not sure if it's because they realized that they could make more money for the dealers if they made it difficult, or if it's just that making the car easy to work on is not a priority any more. Regardless, hacking the car will be a good thing if we can make those codes publicly available.
Here's where he adds the notes and their duration:
No, I searched for "Obama says criticism is racist" because if he HAD said something like that, it would have shown up in the search. Since the only hits were of Obama saying that racism is not an issue, we can safely conclude that Obama is NOT calling his critics racist. This was in response to Brett Buck claiming that I was "funny" for saying that the administration never called their critics racist, which they haven't, but I interpreted his comment as disbelief.
The GP was a troll, crafting a fake "liberal" outrage in order to evoke precisely your emotional response. Congratulations, you and the person who modded you insightful bought it hook, line and sinker. You need to stop watching Fox News because this administration has not once called anyone who disagrees with it a racist. Some people have actually said a lot of the criticism of the adminstration is racist in origin, but I can't see how you seem to think it's fair to criticize the adminstration for something other people said. The only person I can recall that called anybody a racist is Glenn Beck.
Ummm.. hey dude, safari works just fine on the ipod/iphone/ipad and you can use it to read any prize winning journalist that you have legal (and even illegal) access to. E.g., just navigate to here, find the author you want and look it up on google. It's really not that hard.
In any case, you don't need flash and you only need one app. Adobe can suck it, flash sucks on anything but windows and I for one, am sick and tired of not having flash apps load properly and/or slow my system to a crawl. Ever since it was invented, people on slashdot have been complaining about sites that rely on flash to show their content, but now that Apple has banned it all according to you, being forced into using Adobe products to view the web is "being allowed to use your device anyway you want"? Are you nuts? You are being played by Adobe and they're waging their PR campaign not for your freedom like they say, but to preserve their profit and control of the world wide web.
Yeah, I myself have become addicted to this thing. I didn't think I'd like it, but Apple seems to have managed to shorten the keystroke length substantially relative to other keyboards, making it effortless to type on, but still gives you a good strong tactile feedback when the key is fully pressed (i.e. the key comes to a full, abrupt stop when it's at the length of its travel). Getting the function/media keys working properly in linux requires some editing of keyboard map though -- I just run a script at startup that assigns values to the media keys that X11 doesn't know about. I never thought I would like it when I got one with a new computer, but then typing anything else became a chore after a few weeks on it.
You insensitive clod, don't you know that corporations are citizens too? The SCOTUS told us so. There's a little-known 28th amendment(*), that upon reaching a critical mass, a corporate-citizen becomes too big to fail and they then are awarded a right to make a profit at the expense of ordinary non-multibillion dollar citizens. The GP and the person who modded you troll were just standing up for the constitution and the rights of the poor ISPs to separate you from your hard earned cash in the most mercenary and efficient way possible. Won't somebody please think of the corporations!?!
* Okay, maybe there isn't a 28th amendment, but there might as well be with the mickey mouse protection act and the current SCOTUS ruling on political donations and the ruling on the FCC not being able to regulate the internet. Sad days...
I looked on youtube. The second hit seems to be missing for me, my browser is reporting the swf as not found. The third one in Saudi Arabia appears to be the lightning moving along the power lines. I suspect that these guys in TFA could be right, but that the term ball lightning is ambiguous, referring to several different phenomena.