TechCrunch claimed that apple's claims were untrue. They did this by ignoring the little bit were the purpose of google voice is to replace your existing phone service. So while they are correct that the google voice app does not rip out and replace these features, using google voice logically supplants them. If your phone identity is not your google identity and not your provider identity then the apple apps might as well be removed.

It's a completely bogus self serving argument. It's like arguing that it's not vehicular manslaughter because you struck a pedestrian, after all they could have not been in the way, so really they just used you as an agent of suicide.

Apple's position is clearly that by letting google extend their platform to the iphone they would clearly gain converts to it, but without letting apple control that environment they lose the ability to provide distinction, and maintain their competitive advantage.

whether or not, Apple's position has any validity is not is something that can and should be legitimately argued. But it should be argued at face value, not skirted around with logical fallacies.

I wasn't explicitly talking about colonies, I was talking about things, such as single celled organisms many of which don't for colonies, that divide through division, such that neither of the resulting genetically identical resulting organisms can be distinguished as the parent. (as opposed to things that reproduce with genetically identical off spring, but a clear parent and child relationship) I guess what I am saying is that when an amoeba divides, you don't say that the amoeba died and had two off spring, you say that the amoeba divided, and as such both are still that original amoeba unless maybe one of them also underwent some genetic change. Single celled organisms are the easy example, but there are some more complicated ones.

All living things don't age. There are lots of organisms that don't have distinct progeny, and that have in effect been alive for a long long time.

He wasn't blaming slashdot for mp3/aac he was blaming them for the fact he adopted ogg. The analogous quote would be, "Any chance we can blame slashdot for adopting Betamax too?

Good thing too, cause with Germany never having been defeated, we would never have been able to get them back, and it's especially good because as we all know, the cultural history of France is THE most important cultural history in the world. You've won me over, now when asked about the best governments of all time, The Vichy government will be at the top of my list.

I wasn't so much thinking about the car industry, I believe the way that most of the safety standards for cars are setup, all new cars have to adhere to them regardless of where they are made. Additionally that Toyota may have largely been built in the US anyway.


I was thinking more things like toy manufacturing and the production of things like baby formula.

By that reasoning most certification programs should be a thing of the past.

To the best of my knowledge the rest of the world's ethnicities are represented in the USA. So "Buy American" is not racist. It's nationalist.

Personally I see nothing wrong with the ethics of "Buy American". I do see something wrong with enforcing quality standards on an industry and then forsaking that industry for foreign competitors that have not adhered to those standards. I see something ethically wrong with passing laws the effect how companies interact with their employees but then forsaking those companies to buy from others that don't provide those protections.

Dude, even the frickin Zune plays itunes AAC tracks.

Please go find me some DRM music on itunes. Apple has claimed that the entire music catalog is now all available sans DRM. This claim if true should be easy enough to back up, so I'm going to need you to provide some examples.

A post like yours, just makes you look like a zealot. Enable some serious discourse.

Cause the "Beeb" and all the big news papers are full of gems, and nothing but gems, AND are so well designed that a person can find most of what they care most about easily..... Oh wait, that's not the case at all. For many people the navigation on a lot of news sites is so frustrating and terrible that using aggregators as alternate indexes is better. As well as covering more.

Some news sites are designed to fit some people exactly, but most fail and cover a way broader selection of topics then any individual reader cares about and don't cover everything that any individual reader cares about. They are designed to be good enough to a wide audience to be the one source they chose. This model is tailored to the idea that a bundle of news costs money and that as such people only want to buy one or two bundles. This is an outdated model and needs to be scrapped. News outlets need to scrap what they are bad at, and concentrate at being really good at what they are good at. And letting people find them through the aggregators. You may not, but I know a lot of people who look at the article choices on any given topic and pick one of the top ones from a source that people like. And then for people who visit the outlet's portal, just refer them to aggregators for stuff you don't cover. This shouldn't be such a foreign concept in the sphere of news, since a lot of outlets use the AP.

He said of the operating system that has been certified as UNIX.

In honor of this guy, here's a list of super developer assumptions.

1. My user space software MUST be installed in directories that normally require system level access to add anything too.
2. No one would ever need multiple versions of my software installed at the same time so it's okay if I make them impossible to co-exist
3. People always install software locally and not in a shared directory.
4. People always just randomly spew files anywhere they want in /usr/local so that's what my installer should do
5. People always have have dedicated home directories for each machine that they might be simultaneously logged into so it's ok for my software to only allow one instance per home directory to be running at a time.
6. No one will ever try to X Forward my app.
7. My software will always be on a host by way of it's packaging system so it's okay for me to require that system to be in a good state with regard to my software's packages before running my software.
8. No one else would ever pick the same names as me for my project's library files. So I don't have to giver people ways to resolve collisions.
9. My user-space program should use a privileged network port.
10. My program can use a hard-wired network port because nothing else could ever want that port and the end-user could never have a need to run it on an alternate port
11. All connections from a given IP are going to be from the same instance of my program.
12. My program needs to have it's own user with a specific username.
13. My program needs to have it's own user with a specific UID.
14. My program's installer can add it's own user by just writing to /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow.
15. My program needs to have it's own group with a specific group name
16. My program needs to have it's own group with a specific GID.
17. My program's installer can add it's own group by just writing to /etc/group.

If you think that something that has been certified as UNIX isn't UNIX in all the important ways, those important ways are probably your assumptions, which may have even been on my list. And many of those assumptions might work in the case of a single machine with only one user who is also it's administrator, but will eventually break down. I suggest that if you find OS X, not to be UNIX in the right ways that you take some time, and consider how you opperate and ways to make it more robust.

As the International Authority on which self declared authority is actually valid, I regret to tell the whole slashdot community that the IAU didn't have the authority to reclassify pluto anyway. /joke

The authority of academia is a joke. Almost all academic pedigrees can be traced back to either a self declaration of authority-ship, a grant by a monarch, or a grant from a religious institution. And of course because they were such good academics back in the day they didn't come up with jargon in place of common words and then when they decide the need to tweak their jargon, rather then recognizing that it is perhaps time for their jargon and the common language to part, they try to redefine parts of the language.

I hate to say this but we need to recognize the silliness and fence it in. We need to give experts a place to do what they need to do without upsetting people and we need to keep academics from getting in the way of the changes in our communication that are happening because of globalization, and when someone says something as an expert we need to have a scope for what they are an expert on and if it's something that is debatable allow room for differing schools of thought to grow and prosper. And for some of the scopes central authorities should be established so that when people in one scope want to change or influence something in another there is a way to do that.

Have you ever used mac Hardware? Their laptops have been amazing for ever. Apple has long been a major innovator on the laptop front. And many of the things you expect in a laptop were made a standard feature first on the Mac. Things like target mode, gig ethernet, auto-crossover, built-in wifi, built-in bluetooth, Ac adapter standardization, integrated mic, integrated camera, external battery indicator, backlit keys (or any way to view the keys in the dark), DVD burners, and there are probably more that I just can't think of. Macs have great hardware.

Yes, they may not have every possible feature, but they have lots of good ones and really versatile. Computer snobs who turn up their noses at macs remind me of car snobs, except that a lot of the cars those people like aren't that useful, and break down a lot. I don't get that mentality and I probably never will.

Um no. The members of the federal legislation have always had a long leash relative to their constituency, with the exception that they had to do enough to get re-elected. The leash that changed with the civil war, if any, was the leash that the Federal Government had as a whole with regard to the states. It's a subtle distinction but an important one. And there is a long history of legislators voting counter to the will of their constituency going back to before the civil war.

Also the civil war was not about states' rights. Saying that the civil war was about states rights is to say that the result of the civil war was that states were stripped of rights. The civil war was about the nature of the union, and the whether the federal government should be a government of the people or of the states, which had been a matter of contention in even forming the initial federal government, and as the population disparity grew it came to an eventual tipping point, which led to the war.

You're right, Texas really does need to get with the times :-)

Seriously, as a response that is logical nonsense. roughly I said "we should enable legislators to carry out their congressional duties from within their constituency" to which you replied roughly "originally legislators had non-congressional responsibilities, often in their constituency, that impacted the amount of congressional duties they could engage in.", which inherently has nothing to do with what you are using it to respond to. there are lots of ways you could try to connect the two maybe you think that telecommuting would be great because it would enable us to return to our roots and make our legislators do something else for a living rather then just be professionally legislators, or you might think that the early legislators by having external responsibilities that might take them back to their constituency did effectively the same thing as letting them telecommute would, so that maybe that's not actually that novel of an idea, or maybe you were thinking something else completely.

I think that as long as there is lobbying you have to have some form of corporate lobbying. Otherwise there would be a completely unbalanced system. Corporations aren't just evil they are important to our economy, and if something that is outdated is getting in the way of business then we need to fix it. The problems with corporate lobbying can largely be broken down into two other problems. Problem 1, the lobbying system in general, and Problem 2, Our system for publicly owned corporations, has caused our corporations to grow massively dysfunctional. With reasonable lobbying systems and functional corporations we shouldn't have the problems we do with corporate lobbying

When you talked about making things an act of treason, you kind of went off the deep end. Realistically though, perhaps it is time to to rethink our federal government, When we formed our federal government, distance and travel time were big obstacles, And led to the congress having a very long leash with regard to the will of the people and the will of the states, and maybe it's time to reign in that leash. Of course we should avoid taking drastic steps with our government, because any change is an experiment. Perhaps we could start by setting up the infrastructure for congressional telecommuting, followed by measures to encourage the members of congress to stay within their constituencies.