So scenario A It's true and we're all fucked and can't do anything about it. Thus we're arguing over..nothing.
Science: If we can't change it, well, fuck it.
Fox New: If it hurts big coal and oil, try to convince everybody it doesn't exist.
If Google was, say, a public utility then I'd back you up. But they're not. Filtering or selectively promoting things is entirely within their scope. Their rights don't change because they're popular.
However, if they're publicly viewed as abusing those rights, they very well may become much less popular.
So it's OK to abuse monopolies in any way you want just as long as you don't use them to extort money from people? If there was real competition on the search market, if there were 5-10 different search providers that all more or less equally divided the market between them I'd be perfectly inclined to agree with you because then you could choose a provider that wasn't run by a bunch of reactionary morons. The whole problem is precisely that Google is a private company that has acquired the same position as a and role as public utility by virtue of their monopoly on internet searches. They have a stranglehold on what has become the primary communications platform of the 21st century and thus there are severe limitations on the political filters they are allowed to apply to their search result. We are bloody lucky Google is run by a couple of intellectuals who have for the most part not abused their position and made the concious choice not to push their political agenda with the same unrelenting and ruthless political partisanship as Fox News does. Both conservatives and liberals have benefited from that. Would you rather have the gatekeeper of internet search controlled and run by the likes of Rupert Murdoch or the Koch brothers?
What good is the first amendment if private entities providing essential information services to the public can effective bypass the right for people to be heard?
I fail to see the relevance. No wait - I do. If they're enforcing free speech, that means they can't regulate what a person (or corporation) can say. Or selectively not say of their own volition. Does Freedom of Speech imply that we force people/corporations to say things that they choose not to? Regardless of their motivations? If I run a web-site and there's an article somewhere that says, "China censors nothing!", do I have to provide a link to it despite the fact that I personally think it's biased?
I suspect that it depends on what your market share is, i.e. whether you are a "gatekeeper" or not. If you are just some two bit website that's one of a thousand others then the answer is that you can present whatever point of view you want and ignore others. If, however, you are Google, you handle 95% of all internet searches and you don't agree with, say the US Republican party's point of view so you start purging all links from your search results that represent a Republican point of view that you don't agree with then the game situations is a bit different and should be forced to be more neutral than you would like to be for the public good. I generally can't stand radical Republicans but I'll fight for their right to be heard, I don't have much use for communism either but I also think Commies have a right to be heard. This judge would seem to disagree with that which is IMHO quite amazing.
Not really, because Apple still takes a 30% cut if you buy the subscription as an in-app purchase. This is more about getting a constant stream of money ($10/month) rather than a one-time (or every two or three years) payment of $50 or whatever.
Let's just take a look at this deal. I just bought a 356 subscription and according to the in-app purchasing wizard in the Office 365 suite on my iPad the subscription is $156 per annum. For that you are getting:
Which sounds like a pretty OK deal to me considering the volume of product I'm getting. As far as I can tell there are no temporal usage restrictions on the PC/Mac licenses in this this sub, according to the office 365 community forums multiple users can log into the same account and edit the same document. If that is true than this subscription will cover my office needs, my parents's, my sister's and her husband's and we can split the costs. As for corporate profits.... If Apple is taking 30% then Microsoft is getting $109,8 / 12 = $9,15 per month and they still have to deduct costs and taxes. Mind you, being a corporation, MS, like Apple, Google, IBM and the rest of that ilk probably enjoy considerably lower tax rates than what Joe Six-pack has to contend with. However, MS does have to pay developers, maintain their cloud service data-centers and pay the system administrators of their cloud service department out of that and pay for marketing and other such crap. I'm sure MS makes tons of money off of this stuff but it's not like the profit meter at Microsoft HQ goes Chi-chinggggg! and increments by $9,15 every time they sell an office subscription to an iPad followed by a spontaneous chorus of manic laughter from every MS manager in the known universe over how they are ripping off their customers.
I don't know what model you drove, but my Fusion Hybrid does not behave that way. The only time it'll do regenerative braking without the brake pedal down is if its coasting downhill and would otherwise be gaining quite a bit of speed, and frankly in that situation I don't mind it applying a tiny bit of brake for me since I'd end up having to do it myself anyway.
Allot of negative comments here. I see how this can go bad too. Oculus seemed hellbent on providing great consumer level VR. That is what they do, and it's the *only* thing they do.
They do? They've done nothing but release development kits.
If you're doing professional document editing in a browser, you're insane.
The portability, sharing and collaboration of Gdocs is light years ahead of the others. Nobody I know gives a rats ass about "professional" editing.
You have evidently never done a Bachelor's or Master's Thesis. If you had you'd be familiar with a group of people that places much importance on "professional" editing. Granted, scientists use TEX rather than an office suite but the 'professional' editing of scientific reports, thesis and papers is almost considered as important as the content and there are some very good and obvious reasons for that.
The iPhone UI was rather good, and was Apple's last showing of what it did really well.
A fact that is only emphasised by the fact that Google redesigned their phones and the Android UI from aping BlackBerry to aping the iPhone and it's OS. I'm not sure the iPhone and it's UI is the last time Apple will demonstrate how it does UI and design very well but it is the latest.
What's the difference between a hunter with a drone and a factory fishing vessel with spotter planes? Is it scale? money? Both models are using airborne technology to assist in the gathering of food. If we are going to ban aerial observation, than it should be for all applications and uses of it regardless of how monied the operator is.
Actually using spotter planes for fishing (tuna for example) is forbidden in many places.
This pervasive mentality (shooting wolves from a helicopter) and now this new drone thing is what gives hunters a bad name.
Damn right. Even a high powered rifle with no other technology is a ridiculously one sided advantage when hunting. There are several perfectly practical reasons to go hunting that have nothing to do with entertainment. (food, pests, protection, environment) They even have the gall to call hunting a "sport" and euphemise their bloodlust by calling their kills "harvesting" as if it was no different than planting corn. I'm not quite sure how it is a "sport" if the other team doesn't know they are playing.
I don't have a problem with allowing hunting for practical reasons but most hunters I know (and I know lots of them) are pretty disingenuous about their motives for killing harmless animals. 99% of the time it is for no purpose other then their own amusement. I find that sort of mentality rather disturbing.
Sorry, your biased opinion of hunting aside, it is called harvesting because left to their own devices, and with no other predators available, many hunted species would populate to the point of being unable to feed and then slowly dying of starvation killing off most, if not all, of entire herds. Hunting seasons are used to cull these herds of excess population and provide food and "sport" to humans.
Here's a thought. How about re-introducing natural predators like say
Well said!
There is a big difference between holding a phone vertically at eye hight (=most probably taking a picture) and the diagonal position used to crush candy or communicate via text or do other stuff.
I think it is a sign on the wall that 99% of the criticism is about taking pictures and only 1% about things like distraction and so forth. It is all about consent and not knowing if someone is (not) taking a picture. And even if the wearer is not actively engaged in taking pictures, remote access tools might be able to take over. There is a reason I got the webcam taped off on my laptop...
I just simply fail to see why a webcam strapped to a face is a nice idea.
It's not only about taking pictures and video without consent, it is about the device doing it being connected to the immense data collection machine that is Google, with capabilities to aggregate and correlate, track and face-recognize.
So in a couple of years when the technology is embedded in lapel pins or other subtle wearables, and they are "always on", what do we do, ban jewelry and clothing accessories? This is like horse owners complaining about them new fangled motorized carriages because they are loud, dangerous and the money all goes to Detroit. Its just humans being humans.
Yeah, yeah yeah, cast everybody who wants some privacy as an ignorant Luddite
Few adults can hear sounds above 18kHz. I remember making tone generators in Pascal as a kid, beeping out audible 22kHz notes that my older brother and my dad couldn't hear. Later on, I'd try similar programs on my mobile phone, but the damn device couldn't generate tones above 16.5kHz. Poor hardware, I thought, until I tried it on my 16 years old nephew.
Grasshoppers aren't nearly that high pitched.
I am kind of surprised to see that the majority of posts are railing against this phone, mostly over the display resolution being so high. I'm thinking most people never made it past the summary. On top of what the summary lists, it has 3 gigabytes of ram, 32 gigabytes of internal storage, micro SD that can handle 128 gigabyte cards, 5 megapixel front facing camera, 50 (sorta) megapixel rear camera, 3000mAh removable battery. Rapid charging technology - going from 0 to 75% charge on a 3000mAh battery is pretty sweet.
At a $599 retail price point? That's pretty remarkable. The only thing the article does not discuss in the graphics chip set but I'm willing to bet it's nothing to sneeze at.
There were no pictures of the thing in the TFA and no easily visible links so in case anybody wants to know what the thing looks like:
http://en.oppo.com/products/fi...
It's a nice minimalistic design. Dunno why I'd want a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution in a phone that size but I'd still consider buying one too.
If you can't control the spam like the original and former Slashdot could, then do the right thing and drop this crap (that NOBODY who visits this site wants).
Seriously, give us what we ASK for and not what you THINK we need. Don't think. We'll do that for you.
If you can't get it right, I for one will go somewhere else for my news and
"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra
