Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. GWB started the war with Iraq, using 9/11 as a tenuous excuse. I agree with you that we should go after those responsible, but instead we've killed tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in a war that we absolutely started.

Guantanamo was a disgrace, IMHO. Throwing away our principles and embracing those of our enemies makes me ashamed of our country.

Its not information that you cannot otherwise get just about anywhere else, is it? I'm not suggesting we restrict access to the information, but we haven't had it in the car yet, and we shouldn't. Such a device does not belong where it can be a distraction to the driver. I'm sorry, but I don't want to be killed in a head-on collision with someone tweeting on their steering wheel, "OMG. I think I'm on the wrong side of the road! LOL!"

It reminds me of the LG refrigerator with a web browser built in. Sure its possible, but why? And staring at the screen while operating the refrigerator is very, very unlikely to kill anyone (unless, I suppose, you leave the door open, the food spoils, then you serve it to your family...).

I agree with you that its a very bad idea regarding safety, but completely disagree about it being a very good idea as far as anything. Its a "neat" idea, and probably implemented in a fairly clever way, but adding new, irrelevant yet more-engaging distractions to the driver is just stupid. If you are driving, you should not be reading RSS feeds, whether on a cell phone, laptop, or the freaking dashboard. If you need to be accessing information while you are driving, get a passenger to read it to you. Or let someone else drive.

Hopefully these things are implemented in such a way that they don't function (or at least don't allow you to interact with them) while the car is moving. If not, then I think the manufacturers are being irresponsible and will probably get sued (hopefully before these systems cause too many fatal accident).

In Oregon we have a similar new law this year. It should have been a more comprehensive distracted driving law, but instead it just outlaws using a hand-held cell phone or texting while driving. Systems like these will allow people to circumvent that law, since they'll be looking at their dashboard instead of the outlawed device. Either way their eyes aren't on the road.

I always tell people, "the problem isn't that *you* can't handle talking on the phone and driving (even though you really can't). Its that all of the idiots around us can't handle it, and I don't want them running into me!"

I agree with you...

Isn't the reason movies use 24 fps (and similarly TV uses ~30fps) because of historical technical limitations? That is right about the minimum rate where your eyes and brain can smooth out the annoying flicker. 30fps isn't the upper limit that the eye can process, but rather a lower limit that makes the image sequence appear as motion without causing stutter, headaches, or otherwise detract from the visual experience. Its a compromise to allow movies to fit on reasonable sized rolls of film, and for TV to have been able to fit "good enough" video quality into the available bandwidth at the time, and to not have frequency beating artifacts due to lights running on 60Hz AC power (or 50Hz & 25fps in Europe, etc).

For an easy example that 30fps isn't enough, run iTunes, play some music and turn on the "iTunes Classic Visualizer" full screen. Hit "F" to display the frame rate, then use "T" to toggle the 30fps limit on and off. Tell me you don't see a big difference.

I'm sure there's an upper threshold where you can't distinguish a difference as frame rate increases, but its much higher than 30 or 60 fps, and as the parent said it is probably higher than we can achieve in hardware for the near future.

I was actually talking about a 2nd generation iPhone. The "3G" refers to the cellular network technology, rather than the product generation. The 3rd generation iPhone is the "3GS". But that's all beside my point.

I wasn't comparing the G1 to the iPhone and finding it lacking. I was comparing the G1 to the Android marketing and press releases at the time and finding it lacking. When I compared my iPhone to Apple marketing, it held up.

I think the way Android is being released and marketed is confusing. The Android OS will always be ahead of the devices sold by carriers, just by the nature of how the carriers work. Since Android is open source, and since Google doesn't yet have any real stake in the device market, I don't see how that can change.

Surely Apple is already working on a 4th generation of the iPhone, but they keep the unavailable features under wraps until they're ready for market (or at least pretty close). iPhone marketing matches the iPhone reality right up until the announcement of the new version, and then there's only disparity for a brief time until the device ships.

Maybe when Google has their own device things will be different. Maybe we'll be able to update it to run beta versions of Android or even install builds from the latest source code. But as long as the marketing tracks with the latest OS developments that cannot be used on any available devices, the devices will always seem to be lacking. I'll always feel like I'm choosing between "last year's Android" and the "latest and greatest iPhone".

The actual text of the religions is not the problem. In fact Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are more than 95% the same, but some of the characters have different names. The problem isn't the religion itself, but that the people in power exploit religion to manipulate the poor and the gullible into doing strange things.

When I was in college, one of my friends was hard-core Christian, and he was really worried that if the rest of us didn't accept Christ, we'd be going to Hell. That's absurd. When we die, all of our corpses will rot in the ground just the same, but his priests (or whatever) gave him the idea that he needed to go out and "save" people, so he'd brainwash kids at summer camps, and try to convert his non-believer friends.

Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses go door to door harassing people who follow the wrong religion. And don't tell me they don't think its wrong; if they thought all religions were equal, they'd leave people alone.

The Republican party exploited religion to get George Bush elected president in 2004 (in 2000 they exploited religion to almost elect him, and used other bogus methods to eventually get him declared President).

I was brought up Jewish and told by my parents that I could only date Jewish girls (it didn't work, but I'm not a mindless idiot).

These aren't examples of violence, but they do demonstrate the same sort of misappropriation of religion as used to train suicide bombers. The radical Islamists just have a more easily manipulated base to pull from, since their standard of living is way worse than ours. Poor people in America are way better off than the massive poverty in other countries. Go to a group of starving middle-eastern kids. Show them a bunch of ignorant rednecks who think all Muslims are terrorists, and tell them "this is America". Its easy to get them to hate us, and probably only slightly harder to get some of them to give up their miserable lives to "punish the infidels" ("burn the witches", anyone?), since they'll go to heaven, or have 72 virgins in the afterlife, or whatever the religion teaches.

You're arguing semantics. Thinking that someone is going to hell for $BEHAVIOR and not associating with them on that principle is not the same as tolerance. Its religious superiority. You don't need to be violent to them in this life, because they'll be gone in the next one. Few religions don't seem to place a higher value on the afterlife than they do on actual life.

So you're saying the ignorance and incompetence demonstrated by the American government is the better option? I don't think our misguided, knee-jerk responses to every attack come across as anything but weak. We're sacrificing our freedom for nothing. How is that a show of strength?

A few high ranking individuals in our government used 9/11 as an excuse to attack Iraq. A small group of radicals pulled of a significant attack and tricked us into an almost decade long war (and at the rate Obama is calling troops home, we'll be lucky if it only lasts a decade). The militant Christians who were running our country at the time are responsible for orders of magnitudes more deaths than have been caused by terrorists. Our unprovoked attack on Iraq emboldens terrorists by demonstrating that we're assholes.

The only reason the suicide bomber failed to take down that plane on Christmas was because his bomb didn't work. He got it through security, through multiple airports, and made it as far as setting himself on fire in his seat before he was finally "thwarted" by another passenger. All of the "security" measures failed, and the passengers are only alive because the bomber was himself incompetent. If the bomb had worked, the hero would have been too late. (But still, good on him for taking the guy out!)

I don't have an answer, but its hard to say that the European governments, by trying to act as good examples of diplomacy, are doing any worse a job of improving the situation than we are. I'd say all the money (and lives) we're wasting on this war, while our whole economy fell apart doesn't give us a whole lot to boast about.

I'll preface this by saying I haven't used a Droid, or other 2nd-gen Android Phone. I did use a G1 for a little while, and from my experience no amount of marketing would have put it up with the iPhone. The interface was clunky and inconsistent. In particular there were 2 separate email apps built-in, one for Gmail and one for everything else, and they behaved differently. Battery life was abysmal at best. While the G1 has some advantages over the iPhone, it was not a usable smart phone unless you were tethered to a power supply. It reminded me very much of the Sidekick (which was developed by many of the same people as Android, and I owned 3 different versions of the sidekick), which notoriously over-promised and under-delivered every step of the way.

The first few releases of Android followed similar patterns. When I bought my iPhone 3G it did (almost) everything they advertised, and there wasn't hype about the next version until 6 months later. My brand new iPhone was the best iPhone one could get. When I got my G1, I was disappointed that it didn't have all of the cool features I had already been reading about in Android press releases and articles. Android marketing seems more about the "next" version, which makes the actual product seem dated before its even for sale.

I hope the new versions of Android devices are better, but those experiences have left me skeptical. I'll give them a look when my iPhone contract is up (next summer), but I'm not falling for the hype this time. If the product for sale doesn't have the features I want, I won't get it. I can't buy it hoping that they'll eventually deliver. I've been burned by that too many times.

I've been really happy with my iPhone 3G. When I got it, I knew I was giving up important features that I had on Windows Mobile, like the ability to shoot crappy video and an open development platform, but the iPhone mostly worked as promised (with a notable exception of Push Notifications, which did not show up until a year or so later with the 3rd generation of the OS). With the limitations of the iPhone (one app at a time is the most troubling), I'm certainly going to shop around before my next purchase, rather than automatically buy next summer's iPhone, but it will take more than slick marketing for Android to win my business (but I am pulling for them!).

Don't forget that he is equating downloading and listening to a U2 album with child pornography. One is a horrible abuse that I wouldn't wish on any child, and the other is child pornography. (sorry. poor taste). Bono is despicable, greedy douchebag for invoking child porn in order to fatten his wallet.

If its unary, isn't the token used irrelevant?

If you base your development decisions on how many people won't buy your app, then you're doing it wrong.

Also a "lost sale" is actually more of a missed opportunity than any actual loss. When a pirate installs software, that doesn't take any money out of your pocket, it just doesn't put any in. That is not a loss.

If your application is tied to a backend, then you will incur more traffic to that site than you have paid users. However, if a 10-25% increase in traffic is eating all of your profits, then you're doing that wrong, too. You should probably rethink your business model. Maybe it should be charging some sort of in-app service fee to cover those recurring costs. I would guess those payments would be more difficult to pirate than the initial software install.

No one thinks pirates should get away without paying. Not even the pirates (ok, maybe some of them do, but most of them know exactly what they are doing). Pirates know they are taking risks when they board ships to steal cargo. They know that there's a chance the occupants of the ship could fight back, but they are willing to take the risk to get the booty. The problem on the iPhone as yet is that there is no actual risk involved, only upside. "Piracy" on the iPhone is apparently just too easy.

Well you were the one who originally called it a "newspaper", instead of an "escort service flier". Perhaps its not a disguise, but rather just a misrepresentation. A newspaper is more about the content, than the physical medium, though it is their adherence to the physical medium that is leading them to inevitable failure.

In Portland, and several other cities, a new publication has popped up recently called "Busted". Its printed on news-stock, and is simply page after page of mugshots along with the person's name and the offense they were arrested for. I've bought it a couple of times for $1 an issue, which is more than I've spent on actual newspapers in the last decade. Its entertaining, trying to guess the crime based on the picture, or seeing common facial traits of people arrested for possession of meth, or picking out which DUIs were still totally wasted when their picture was taken, etc.

I wouldn't call "Busted" a newspaper, but its certainly a niche publication that can survive on printed media, or at least long enough to make a quick buck before the novelty wears off. As more newspapers fail, I suspect more of these sorts of publications (Busted, Dutch escort fliers, etc) to pop up. A newspaper could offset its losses from reduced circulation by printing these small-batch publications in their off-hours. "Busted" is maybe 10 sheets, and sells for about double the price of the local Portland newspaper, which has several sections each day. The small publications are making way more money per issue, using far fewer resources, than the long-standing, "respected" publications. Newspapers, much like the horse-and-buggy and compact discs, have a limited future. By repurposing their brick-and-morter to fulfill niche markets, a small number of them can "hang on". Even vinyl records survive today; in the hands of a skilled DJ (and for douchebag "audiophiles" ;) there is no substitute.

So while your "newspaper targetting 25-35 year old males" might be thriving, it is probably not thriving on the news. News delivery is much better served by other sources.

Having said that, F News Corp. I usually turn to online editions of British news outlets for real stories. American "journalism" has gone severely downhill, particularly as the Internet has taken over. While a newspaper is no longer relevant for time-sensitive stories, the ability to disseminate information instantaneously over the Internet has greatly reduced the quality of information. In the salad days of print media, when you broke a story, your article beat the competition by at least a day. Scoop enough stories, and your paper would get a reputation for getting the news first, and circulation would increase.

If you "scoop" a story on the Internet, you might beat your competition by a matter of seconds, or maybe minutes. The old metric of getting the news first is not as important as it used to be. Quality should be more important, but the news outlets do not seem to have made that shift. By adhering to the old metrics of being first, news outlets are in a constant state of urgency, publishing rushed articles as quickly a possible. CNN, Fox, Yahoo, MSNBC, local newspaper websites, etc, all post the same AP, Reuters, and celebrity publicist news feeds verbatim as soon as they hit the wire. Instead of journalists researching information, checking facts and writing responsible articles, we simply have reporters and automated systems relaying the raw information as quickly as they possibly can without any regard for quality, accuracy or truth.

We end up with situations like the "Balloon Boy", where 15 minutes of fact checking could have saved the whole world from weeks of annoyance over what ended up as nothing. Instead we had all of the media outlets trying to get the first interviews with the family, and filling days of airtime with the same meaningless video loops, on the off chance that something might eventually happen so they could report it first. However every news outlet had reporters standing by at the same location, insuring that none of them would actually break the story first by more than milliseconds. The "news" outlets get hijacked trying to provide "better" coverage of whatever events their competition is covering, without any thought to whether or not it is worth covering. They were wasting time busy waiting for new facts instead of reporting on other things that were actually happening. When everyone is first, first doesn't matter.

A newspaper, and in fact a responsible journalist, cannot afford to waste resources like that. They absolutely cannot survive without a high signal-to-noise ratio. When nothing is happening on a story, there is nothing to report. They cannot fill an issue with endless repetition of the same 5 facts while they wait for the outcome. They need to follow the important stories, find out as much as they can about them, resolve the conflicting information, and write compelling articles before the next printing deadline. If there's nothing new on one story, they write about something else. We end up with a broad selection of high quality information that appeals to a wide audience. Unfortunately for them by the time the paper hits the newsstands or your doorstep, you've already read about it on the Internet or seen it on TV. Unfortunately for us, the Internet and TV news outlets don't have the same sort of journalistic integrity.

I think the good journalists should still be able to make it on the Internet. I appreciate their responsible research and well-developed articles much more than sensationalism and reactionary reporting. Their product is compelling. Printed newspapers are not.

There's not much difference between a generic 42" LCD TV vs a Samsung 42" LCD TV in the game. Now if it was "Samsungs Eco-friendly*, Advanced LCD TV Technology, delivering stunning picture quality, with the Touch of Color Design", it would be an entirely different matter.

I don't mind subtle and tasteful. I don't like billboards for the sake of billboards.

And I hate all those stupid stickers all over cameras detailing every "cool" feature. If video games get plastered like that with in-game ads, it will suck.

Bingo! Realism isn't always best for gaming.

I think ads detract from the real world. Ads in a game might suck in a realistic way, but they still suck.

Not to mention that he was probably only using Notes for email, which you claim is the reason for "the main criticism and bad reputation" of Notes. He probably missed out on all the cool stuff, and just bitched about the one sucky feature. He wanted the same crappy experience he got with Outlook. He was used to all of its "quirks." He was resistant to change (like when I tried to switch from reading email in vm in emacs to using mutt... ugh... don't get me started!).

20 years is a long time. I missed out on the Notes bus, but I'm pretty excited about Google Waves.