yeah, using a Shuffle as an audio source for your home stereo is kind of lame... but it sure beats having to run back across campus to grab your laptop so that you can hook it up to your buddies stereo and play some of your music.

Also, the whole thing about not being able to hook up your shuffle to the car stereo kinda sux too.

huh? The Wii certainly has cut into PS3 and Xbox360 sales.

But to your larger point, I pretty much agree. I think the iPhone competes with the DS a little bit, but only on the fringes for buyers like me - older buyers who maybe would have bought a DS for long trips, but are fine with free iPhones casual games to kill some time now and then.

shit, i just modded you offtopic by mistake... meant to hit 'interesting.' So that means I have to reply in here just so it will undo my mod.

anyway, totally agree about the mini-display port.

If you never read the articles on Slashdot, read this one. Best line:

but the larger point still stands. The original poster is just plain wrong when he claims that Germans 'outperform' other countries - they simply do not. They are about average.

As I said in my first post 'Germans have made great contributions to science and technology.' Perhaps you didn't read that part because you felt the need to come up with a list of more German 'greats,' - which was one of the more pathetic things I have seen someone post on slashdot. You didn't even come up with a good list, and some of them are pretty debatable.

We could sit here all day and site this or that scientist/innovator from this or that country, but I guarantee you that if we did just that, even the most ardent German nationalist would ultimately be forced to admit that Germany is about average.

Ask yourself if you really want to join in with this German delusion of superiority. The facts just don't bare out the argument, and historically, the results have been tragic - perhaps for Germany more than anyone else (holocaust victims excluded).

And what of the original post that started this all off. Do you support that as well? Why single out Africans? How about native Americans, Mongolians, Kurds, etc etc? Different parts of the world developed at different rates. Civilizations, and their associated technological and scientific innovations have come and gone. Northern Europe (including Germany) was once a land of barbarians. When people from all parts of the world are given a chance to get a higher education and participate in the scientific process of discovery (such as in America, and to a lesser extent in Europe today), then we find that we are all about the same. Differences have more to do with the kind of institutional racism (and sexism) that original poster espouses.

Your list of German achievements is not really that impressive in the scope of history. Lets break it down:

The first car. I think a frenchman was actually the first, but the real innovation was Henry Ford's mass production assembly line, not the automobile itself.

Calculus. Leibniz and Newton are not co-inventors - not really anyway. Basically they both built on work done by others including al-Haythem and other decidedly non-German mathematicians. The difference is that Newton did something truly amazing (and innovative) with it.

Quantum physics. As you say 'developed part of the foundation.' Quantum theory developed gradually, with contributions of a lot of people from a lot of places. It was not like Einstein's theory of relativity, which was a real breakthrough (although it too relied on the field equations of Maxwell (an Englishman) and other past theories. Einstein was from Austria by the way.

So all your examples are sort of 'me too' or 'i helped out' innovations. You would be better off to look at the French (Curie, Pasteur, or even Descartes). Or the English (Darwin, Newton). Or the Italians (Galileo, Marconi, etc.). And I am just picking a few of the bigs from Europe (since I am not readily familiar with the history of science outside the western world - my bad).

And lets not forget the Americans. There is no ethnic identity associated with being American, but one could argue that is their strength - the mixing together of scientists who hail from all parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds and ways of thinking about life the universe and everything.

So to bring it down to your level, what have the Germans really innovated, uniquely and on their own? How to start (and loose) two world wars? How to best gas Jewish people?

But seriously, the Germans have made great contributions to science and technology. That can not be ignored. But not more than many other nations. They are about par for the course.

'nough said.

Step 1: Print out all 100 thousand docs and draw different little smiley faces on each of them. Step 2: scan all your docs back in as jpegs. Step 3: import all those jpegs into iPhoto and use "Faces" to magically organize them - just like on the television commercial.

OK. that is funny. Someone decided to mod me funny for saying that the parent should be modded funny. But just to clarify, it was the "weevil" which I found funny... and he is the only one in this thread that has not been modded funny. So now I suppose I am going to get modded offtopic... sorry.

mod ^ funny, very funny

If this guy is to be believed, according to Rick Fox, spokesperson for AT&T there is an 'early upgrade discount':

or just 'Hydraulic' - but i was to busy debating someone about the new iPhone vs Pre to do it right the first time, or the second ;)

Its not exactly like every other carrier on the planet. AT&T has an exclusive on the iPhone. They are milking that for what its worth (and I don't really blame them). With other phones, you can switch to a new carrier to get the latest greatest shiny new phone at a huge discount. Of course that huge discount won't be so huge if you factor in the cancellation fee on your original contract... but its better than nothing.

fair enough