The seniors can pray all they want, wherever and whenever they want. But the organization providing the meals cannot ask them or encourage them to pray, and a lout group prayer is not acceptable either. The organization can hold a moment of silence during which everybody can pray or do whatever else they like.

Pray on your own time, not during federally funded events.

Terms don't just have dictionary definitions, they also have political, historical, and emotional significance. The term "liberal" has a specific political meaning when applied to someone nominated for the US supreme court justice.

Basically, if you insist that "fair use" is a "liberal" cause, you are hostile to fair use rights because you are trying to associate them with the left wing of the Democratic party, which doesn't have the power to defend such rights.

If you care about "fair use", then it's important to ensure that everybody understands that fair use rights are as much a conservative as a liberal cause.

So, tell me, which is it? Are you trying to kill fair use rights? Or are you such a pedant that you insist on reciting dictionary definitions even if it hurts your cause?

She is a US judge going for a political confirmation hearing. Of course, the term "liberal" has US political connotations. The word "liberal" in the US has the connotation of "libertine", and when journalists start describing people facing confirmation hearings that way, it's often an attempt to kill the confirmation.

(What "non-American speakers" think about her confirmation doesn't matter.)

Of course they are not, a number of the apps on the phone already run in the background. It's all about battery preservation and helping the user not have to manage tasks. It's about design, not technical ability.

Android is multi-tasking and there is nothing to "manage"; you switch to applications by tapping on their icons and they behave as if they are always running. Behind the scenes, the OS stops inactive tasks. And on Android, it's easy to see where the battery is going, and it is not multitasking, it's the screen and wireless. Furthermore, the iPhone doesn't get better battery life than other 3G smartphones.

In different words, Apple and Jobs are lying through their teeth.

Also, those examples are pretty fiddly

There's nothing "fiddly" about being able to sync music wirelessly to any server you want, or being able to share all your on-device files wirelessly with your laptop.

again the iPhone OS multitasking changes are about making 90%+ of desired multitasking uses possible

They're only "90%+" because iPhone users are so controlled by Apple that they don't even know what a smartphone should be able to do.

The safe harbor only applies to sites that don't actually publish anything! How could we have been so stupid not to realize that!

Hierarchical models of object recognition are decades old, as are attempts to implement them. This work doesn't yet work better than other engineering solutions, and it isn't obviously any more plausible than other approaches. So, it's a nice start, but it isn't a breakthrough.

I don't see what's "liberal" about fair use.

I think people should stop trying to shoe-horn every single issue into a liberal/conservative spectrum.

I don't get it; are you trying to be sarcastic? In any case, some Flash games are free, some cost money. But the point is that they are not iPhone-specific and don't tie developers to the iPhone platform. If Flash games become predominant, then iPhone becomes just one of many platforms, and not a very competitive one. And making it easy to port Flash would alienate many of their current developers.

The big advantage iPhone has in many people's minds is that it has many apps that other platforms don't have. That's an advantage Apple wants to preserve. And that means keeping their current developers happy and forcing developers to invest extra money if they want to support platforms other than iPhone as well.

I think the iPhone 4G is going to have 960x640, which is twice the linear resolution of the original iPhone and matches the iFrame video format. Of course, the likely reason is that many iPhone apps aren't resolution independent and Apple wants a simple way of scaling up their existing apps. In that regard, iPhone is catching up with Android (nominally, surpassing it, but whether 960x640 is better than 800x480 on a 3" screen is debatable).

No, notifications haven't changed (I have both). There are lots of other UI problems on the iPhone. But the biggest differences are architecturally: Android makes it much easier to integrate apps. Android apps have barely scratched the surface, but you already see that in things like barcode readers and Facebook uploaders that are automatically consistent between multiple apps.

Actually my main problem with Android is that it uses Dalvik as its VM and not actual Java.

Yes, that does make it slower. But it also has advantages over Apple's use of native code. The differences are going to become unnoticeable as Android gets a JIT and as hardware gets faster.

Our phones are of similar age. His phone is more responsive.

All true, but not a practically relevant difference. In one or two generations, hardware is going to be so fast that this is going to be unnoticeable.

His virtual keyboard works better than mine.

It's faster, but whether it's more usable is debatable. And for Android, you can get third party keyboards, while with iPhone, you're stuck with Apple's fast-but-substandard virtual keyboard.

His selection of apps dwarf mine,

Yes, but many of the iPhone apps are poor clones of each other. And there are entire categories of apps missing from the iPhone store because Apple doesn't approve them.

and one more cool thing about iTunes is that all of the apps he can buy are listed in US dollars,

Yeah, but there are also lots of uncool things about iTunes, like the fact that some things, you simply can't do on the phone without plugging it into iTunes, and then there are the endless "Backing up" messages.

iPhone is like the original Mac: Jobs cut a lot of corners and messed up the architecture, but made it look pretty nonetheless. This time, however, we have a real, technically superior alternative.

You're making the assumption that it actually is "close enough for practical purposes". I don't think it is. Of course, I don't think the multitasking restrictions are technical in nature anyway; Apple is likely doing this to have yet another way of excluding apps they don't like. For example, with true multitasking, I could run things like a webdav server or metadata server in the background that would give users a better way of organizing and exchanging data between applications than Apple is providing. Apple would kill such an app simply because they don't want someone else providing such functionality.

Wishful thinking? Or do you have a 4G now?

You don't have to guess at all; Apple has told us what the 4G has:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/preview-iphone-os/

And the hardware specs on the 4G are pretty clear from Apple's device. It's premium hardware, but likely at a premium price.

What matters is Android approaching the performance levels of Apple iPhone OS on similar hardware.

The reason iPhone OS is fast is because it is limited and old technology: C-based programming language, 20 year old kernel, little application integration, little componentization, limited multitasking. Android is a better, more powerful software architecture with many more features, and that naturally requires a more powerful CPU. Android is never going to be as efficient as iPhone OS because you need to make a tradeoff between features and efficiency. But the iPhone speed advantage is diminishing over time. Android today is about the same speed as a first and second generation iPhone. One more generation of hardware, and it's going to be so fast that it doesn't make a difference anymore even to picky users.

I have an Android phone, and I can't wait for Google to catch up with Apple

Apple needs to catch up with Google, not the other way around. Apple focused on efficiency and simplicity early on, but that matters less and less as hardware is getting more powerful. But software architecture and ease of development are going to matter more and more.

It's the same thing that happened with the original Mac: Apple squeezed every drop of efficiency out of the original hardware in their rush to bring an affordable GUI-based machine to market, they made it look good, but they botched the software architecture in the process. It's what Jobs does.

Believe it or not, some people don't buy a smartphone to compensate for some shortcomings

Seems to me that's exactly what iPhone buyers do.

The leaked iPhone 4G looks like Apple is just trying to catch up with the Nexus One, and not even succeeding at that. People who already have iPhones will go for it, for others, it won't make a big difference.

Same here: Nokias get excellent reception in areas where iPhone doesn't. WiFi is also weird on the iPhone and iPad.

The faulty assumption such a "peace plan" is that the "technical reasons" Apple states are the real reasons. The real reason Apple doesn't want Flash is because there are tons of excellent cross-platform games written in Flash that would kill both their lock-in and their cottage industry of iPhone games, many of which are just imitations of games already available in Flash.

Apple feels strong right now, and they want to leverage that strength as much as they can to kill competition and tie developers to their idiosyncratic platform.