Having a consistent interface is nice.

But what good is it when it doesn't do what you need it or want it to do? If you are an app developer, a software platform vendor, or hardware manufacturer, I don't care about your business model or how you plan to put me into a corner where I have to use your product -- and then use it only in ways which you prefer. In fact, the more you disable features and interoperability with other systems in the name of usability, the more I will avoid your product. I want a device to do what I tell it to -- no more, no less. If your leveraged synergies and pretty interfaces do not give me that, I will use something ugly which gets the job done.

Hence, no iPhone for me. And this is coming from a decade-long Mac user. (I fled Windows for Mac OS X when it came out as it was unixy, did more than Windows out of the box, and didn't limit what you could do in the name of product tie-ins. If and when Apple decides to apply this App Store nonsense as the only way to get Mac applications, I'm gone.)

Give me an off-contract, unlocked, rooted, Cyanogenmodded "phone" and (though not as pretty as a new iHotness) I can do more without the constant drain on my wallet. It's not that I am cheap (I'm typing this on a 17-inch MacBook Pro with a matte screen, for $DIETY's sake). It's that I refuse to pay for crippled technology.

So I have to be careful to not install a crap knock-off app with a bad interface when I am in the Play Store. Big deal. It's better than some corporation telling me that I don't own my hardware.

And I understand that most people just want a content-consumption device that does a few other things and is simple for them to use. For them, an iPhone and its mysterious App Store may be just perfect.

Mod parent up. I was about to post something very similar.

The real breakthrough was determining why one side of the formation is often longer than the other. They determined it was because there were more birds on one side. (Really? Who didn't know this?)

Flash may suck, but it's an incorrectly sized object thing.

NT

way round

So just how round are these one time pads? Way round.

Mod parent up. In Colorado here--local news is now reporting that he purchased a ticket and did just that.

First, to the parent, considering the demographics of Colorado, yes, he probably was a right-wing nut job.

I've lived in Colorado all of my life and that is news to me. The Denver/Boulder metro area (and Aurora is a suburb of Denver) is Left-leaning. Colorado Springs and rural towns are Right-leaning. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out where most crime occurs in Colorado.

Which is not a bad thing IMHO. I've been running XQuartz since Leopard because Apple's X11 was so buggy.

Either intentionally or unintentionally, the internal font encoding of the PDF is screwed up. Here's a copy/paste-able version:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/35070303/CCIA-FairUseintheUSEconomy-2011%5Bocr%5D.pdf

You falsely assume that if we don't raise the debt ceiling that U.S. government will necessarily default.

That's a nice straw man constructed by you and GP.

I disagree with the notion that the only way out of the current U.S. debt mess is to accrue more debt.

I would use more but my flux capacitor is on the fritz.

Ditto. And that's why for the last 4 years when anyone asks me about my recommendation for a new PC, I tell them "get a Mac". Yeah, it's not completely free (as in beer, or speech), but it utilizes a lot of the open source projects we know and love, is UNIX, and lets both power users and newbies get what they want done without dealing with things they shouldn't have to (registry problems, malware, restricted multiverse repositories, and the like). Most people just want a machine to get a job done and don't really care *how* it does it, just that it does.

Windows 7 might be getting there, but I jumped ship with Windows XP and haven't looked back. Maybe someday Steve Jobs will decide to lock down Mac OS X like iOS, but if that happens, and the OS will once again becomes an obstacle to what I am trying to accomplish, I will look elsewhere.

I guess Steve Jobs has had a change of heart on one his most used phrases? (See Steve Jobs "artists steal" quote)