Yeah, thanks.

The difference being that I'd legally lock the shitbags up and let them die in prison. I'd not go out and kill someone *else* to make my point.

Dude, I grew up with the those cowardly shitbags killing innocent bystanders. Don't give me any rhetoric about them fighting any fucking revolutionary war. They lose all rights to be treated as human when, as an organisation, they intentionally set out to kill people as PR "for the cause".

It was well known at the time, and confirmed by Sinn Fein afterwards though never officially "proven", that a huge amount of money was sent from the USA to fund the IRA, it was called Noraid, and it funded them to the tune of millions of pounds. That was American *people* exercising their rights and freedoms to fund an organisation that murdered men, women and children indiscriminately.

The IRA are vermin, scumbags, the leprous weeping sores deep up the arsehole of humanity, and those who made their actions possible by funding them are no better. Just ask the parents of the murdered children how they feel...

Simon.

Sadly (for me, as a Brit), it seems it's the other way around. GCHQ has been giving lessons to foreign counterparts in how to get around that nations laws and cooperate for their common "good".

All men are potential child rapists
All women are potential serial murderers

Using the word potential in a statement reduces the effectiveness of that statement to near zero.

Let's wait and see what *actually* develops. God knows it can't be worse than what the US has, even Cuba trounces the US.

Show me where Apple have crossed the ethical lines ? You may disagree with their case, but I don't recall anyone claiming their lawyers were unethical in prosecuting that case ...

As for Samsung, they're just scumbags who don't respect the law of any land...

(Taken from Fortune ...)

• July 7, 2004: Jury advised of adverse interference when Samsung allowed emails to be automatically deleted even after it was told to retain relevant emails. After Samsung's appeal, Judge William Martini found "Samsung's actions go far beyond mere negligence, demonstrating knowing and intentional conduct."
• October 17, 2005: The U.S. Department of Justice fined Samsung nearly $300M for memory price fixing within the U.S.
• Feb. 7, 2007: U.S. government fined Samsung for $90M for memory chip price fixing for violations in 2006.
• Jan.15, 2008: Samsung's offices in Korea were raided after evidence showed that a slush fund was used to bribe government officials and other business leaders.
• July 16 2008, Samsung chairman, Lee Kun-He was found guilty in Seoul of financial wrongdoing and tax evasion. Despite prosecutor request of seven years in prison, sentence was reduced to three years followed by a pardon by the South Korean Government in 2009 to allow him to help with its successful bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics. He is now a member of the International Olympic Committee and this 'pardoned criminal' returned as Samsung's Chairman in March 2010.
• May 19, 2010: The EU Commission fined Samsung for being part of a cartel that shared confidential information and fixed memory chip prices (along with eight other firms).
• Nov. 1, 2011: The Korean Fair Trade Commission fined Samsung for being part of a cartel that fixed prices and reduced output for TFT-LCD screens between 2001 and 2006.
• March 15, 2012: The Korean Fair Trade Commission fined Samsung for a mobile phone price fixing scheme and consumer fraud whereby consumers would be paying more than what the discounted prices advertised.
• July 25, 2012: Magistrate Grewal informs the jury that they could take into account that "spoliation" of evidence occurred when Samsung destroyed evidence that could have been used in the Apple lawsuit; Samsung had a policy of automatically deleting emails that were two weeks old and should have suspended that policy between August 2010 (when Apple informed Samsung of patent infringement) and April 2011 (when Apple initiated the lawsuit).
• August 24, 2012 a jury returned a verdict finding Samsung had willfully infringed on Apple's design and utility patents and had also diluted Apple's trade dresses related to the iPhone. But Samsung continues to fight the ruling, and continues in their copying behavior.
• Dec 2012: EU issued a Statement of Objections (SO) against Samsung for abusing its Standard-Essential Patents in not providing FRAND rates. Samsung withdrew all SEP-based injunction requests against Apple in Europe days before the SO was issued, but to no avail.
• April. 2013, Samsung is accused of and admits hiring people in several countries to falsify reports of HTC phones "constantly crashing" and posting fake benchmark reviews.
• October 2013 Samsung in confirmed reports from independent and objective testing, found to be intentionally falsifying performance benchmarks of its flagship products: the Galaxy S4 and Note 3.

If Apple tried to pull that shit, all hell would break loose. And rightfully so. For me personally, it's enough that I don't buy anything with a Samsung brand on the outside any more. They're the only company for which that's the case.

Simon.

There is a file containing a list of all the common benchmarking apps, and everything in the list is a benchmarking app - nothing else. When one of those packages is run, the phone locks the frequency of all cores to fMax and also seems to fiddle with the GPU.

The result is a battery-nightmare, but a boost of 20% to *only* benchmark apps. This is despicable - plain and simple.

See http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/galaxy-note-3s-benchmarking-adjustments-inflate-scores-by-up-to-20/

Simon.

That's fair comment on the original post, but let's narrow it down a bit...

"If someone is surprised that a manufacturer with a track-record of fudging benchmarks is willing to cheat, rip off, etc to get ahead... well you haven't really been paying attention"

Not all humans are morally and ethically bankrupt. Samsung (as a corporate entity) is though.

Simon

Citation required, because all I can find is: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/06/25/apple_denies_fiddling_g5_xeon/ ... which seems to be refuting the claim...

Simon.

Just saying. Every one of those things you listed, my mother thinks is an advantage, not a drawback.

proprietary interface - she knows that to get something that really works, she just goes to the Apple store. There's never any "driver" or compatibility issues. She gets a straight answer from someone she trusts.

designed to sync through itunes only. Yep. She loves that. Nice and simple, and again, one easy path to getting what she wants.

she doesn't use Outlook or Google apps (whe wouldn't know a google app if it came up and introduced itself). She doesn't want complexity layered on top of her nice simple interface just to make someone else's life easier.

excessive control over apps - well "excessive" is a judgemental term, but she's happy there's next-to-no malicious apps for the iPhone compared to other vendors offerings. She knows she's not that technical, and she likes that the people who do know techy stuff are helping her against these malicious apps.

clumsy UI - well, simple anyway. Simple is good. Simple is easy to understand, and she likes easy to understand.

I'd be willing to bet there are more people in this world who are on a technical level with my mother, than with you or I; which is why Apple have maintained these "drawbacks" - because they're advantages.

Simon.

*chortle*. Good one.

I had an Atari ST at college. It booted (to a graphical, no less) desktop pretty much instantly, say a few seconds if you had a slew of SCSI peripherals (especially a CDROM drive), but otherwise it was about half a second.

It was ready to go, too. None of this crap of *showing* the desktop and then spinning the busy cursor for another 30 secs...

Simon.

Indeed.

My position is that the qualification is meaningless. I can think of no job which does not have a specific skill-set requirement, from cleaning windows to CPU design. Different skills, for sure, but skills nonetheless.

My comment was therefore aimed at the age-related aspect of the conversation.

Just started a new job in Apple R&D. I'm 44.

No company will hire you if you don't have the skills they want, but I'm hardly the oldest person in my (fairly small) group; likewise in general on the floor around me. That's not to say there aren't younger people around - of course there are, it's just that age doesn't appear to be any sort of criteria.

I live in CA. 4 years ago I installed a $70k ($50k after rebates) 8kW solar system on my roof and my garage's roof.

Prior to solar, my original electricity bill peaked at ~$1100/month, more commonly about $600. This is due mainly to my own choices, no doubt, but still that's what we are dealing with - in Summer, the AC is on quite a bit (it's been 106F this last week) and the pool pump needs to run 8 hours a day for good cleaning. There's also the 2 pond pumps which run 24/7 and the reef tank pumps which also run 24/7. Add in a baby (so lots of washing-machine and dryer activity) and it adds up...

After the solar installation, my bill peaks at ~$100, more commonly about $50. This gives me an average saving of ~$8500 per year, and if you divide $55k by $8.5k you get 5.88 years to pay for itself. By some definitions that's 5 years...

In terms of cost, certainly the main issue is that I consume a lot of electricity. I'm happier now that most of that comes gratis from the sun, but also partly it's California's (or at least PG&E's) electricity pricing which ranges in tiers (the below taken from www.pge.com)

$0.1323 ... baseline
$0.1504 ... 101% -> 130% of baseline
$0.3111 ... 131% -> 200% of baseline
$0.3511 ... 200% -> 300% of baseline
$0.3514 ... 301%+

My baseline is set at 7.5 kWh per day (or ~225 kWh/month) , and I consume about 40kWh per day on a "good" (no AC, pool closed) day (pumping water is energy-intensive...). For me at least, the maths works out. When you're looking at individual cases, using average numbers is not such a great idea...

Simon