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Comment We will forget him. (Score 3, Insightful) 420

When Jobs died, he was compared to Edison and Henry Ford and to Disney

These guys became popular because they provided something GOOD AND CHEAP to the masses - light, cars, culture. They weren't elitists, not did they try to create new churches (well maybe Disney). Jobs legacy will not endure as well as Gates, for he was never one to compromise in order to touch everybody. He created his own bubble and died within it. Had he had the clout to push his excellent design antics along with a all-american bargain price, then maybe he would have changed the world in a durable fashion. He just changed computer's GUIs.

Comment Re:Remember (Score 1) 51

I've yet to adopt either platform (iPhone / Android), because both force me into a subscription model that sees me like I was a bovine to exploit. What I want is a small, open, mobile computer with enhanced wireless communication that empowers me more than it enslaves me. FirefoxOS and open WebOS would be quite welcome on that front, if they could get through the north american carrier's evil marketing departments.

Twitter

Twitter Launches Political Index 86

colinneagle writes "Twitter today launched a new tool that leverages its estimated 400 million daily Tweets to gauge public opinion on the candidates for the 2012 presidential election. Progress in political polling is long overdue, and with Twitter providing a constant, international conversation for web users to join or leave at their own will, there may not be a better time than now to make that change. However, there are some concerns. One of the interesting points made in Twitter's description of its new tool is where it claims to be 'illustrating instances when unprompted, natural conversation deviates from responses to specific survey questions.' That assumes conversation on Twitter is natural. If parody accounts, Twitter trolls, and spam bots have taught us anything (and they usually don't), it's that Twitter conversation can be manipulated just as easily as it can be used naturally. How will Twitter distinguish between positive Tweets coming from voters or news outlets and those from spam bots designed to drive the conversation surrounding a candidate one way or the other? How easy could it be for an organization with a vested interest in positive poll numbers for one candidate to craft an army of Twitter bots designed to drive Barack Obama's positive numbers down, or vice versa? How many people reading the data, which is sure to make its way to TV news as election coverage increases in the coming months, will be aware that Tweets can be manipulated?"

Comment Re:From a buffoon (Score 2) 721

Installed industrial base and public perception are the main culprits, I guess.

The production, distribution and consumption chain is geared towards gasoline, making diesel a less safe option as you can't be sure you'll be able to refill at any station.

North Americans are also used to equate V6 and V8 with power (although this is changing with the latest small turbo-4s such as EcoBoost), where the car diesel engines are most often geared for economy rather than performance (unless you look at BMW *35d series).

Comment Re:Why not both? (Score 2) 164

I guess he's saying that with NoSQL the relations are done at application level rather than database level. You still have the equivalent of schema and queries, but they are managed by the code, not the DB engine.

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