After all, it's your right to vote. You should be proud of who you voted for. All voters should be posted on a map including who they last voted for. Free speech, right?

Really? Apple phones have a lot of plastic as well. My 3GS certainly does.

I also had a smartphone back in 2002 or 2003 that had a full color usable touchscreen, no physical keypad, and it actually worked damn well. Samsung I300, replaced it with a Samsung I500 Palm-based flip phone later. Lots of folks I know had Windows CE-based phones (Windows Mobile) as well.

You know what? They were sturdy. And worked quite well. And I found the physical keypad on the Samsung I500 a lot less frustrating than touch dialing. My I300 even still works. Could you watch youtube videos? No. But that's only because CPU, NOT SMARTPHONE technology has advanced since then. Modern embedded GPU's are nicer too. But again, this had NOTHING to do with Apple or Steve Jobs.

You know something else? They cost less than the iPhone did on launch day. Apple just succeeded in making teenagers, cashiers and janitors feel they HAD to get one or get left behind. They didn't advance squat but their stock value.

Personally I find both the iOS and Android UI's to be clumsy pieces of crap that are tough to use effectively for real work. I could do more on an old WinMo phone. Just slower due to the age of the hardware. But I couldn't watch youtube. Or play Angry Birds. Or have a special Facebook app.

And this is coming from a *RABID* OSX user and someone who carries an iPhone mainly because it sucks less than Android to use daily.

Just because a small child can fumble through it doesn't make it an attractive platform for getting real work done.

Neither, both will kill you just as dead. Especially if they are bigger than you.

They survived because:

A.) The knife wasn't big enough.

B.) He aimed for nothing truly vital. Sorry, a messy knife wound to the heart or lungs is pretty much a death sentence.

A knife will kill you just as dead as a gun with just as much if not more pain. In fact, you can bleed out quicker from a well-delivered knife wound.

It's not like explosives are rocket science there guy.... materials for some pretty nasty ones are pretty common. Want to ban questionable books too?

I do ask myself once in a while.... and nope.... still think my outlook is right. It is not a privilege. It is a right.

All of them.

You're free to go ahead and not bear arms or go live in the UK or other such country where they feel citizens don't have the right to defend themselves with equal force. I respect your decision not to have firearms. But it is a basic right that I choose to exercise and I really don't care if you agree with it.

If you think society here is f**ked up now wait until your "free speech zones" start shrinking as the populace is bullied by heavily armed "peace officers" stamping out unarmed "terrorists, criminals and instigators" throwing rocks and molotov cocktails. No, I'm keeping my guns and you can go away. No debate necessary, the 2nd amendment is a done deal that was well thought out and insightful.

Um.... there's not even a gun registration system in my state. And you know what? I like it that way. Nobody, including the government, has a right to know what weapons I possess and where they are kept.

Illicit channels you speak of consist of the local want ads in the newspaper here. Welcome to America. Guns are legal here. For everyone who isn't a convicted felon. If you find that disturbing, go live in the UK and enjoy the knife crime.

We have a right to bear arms, we've always had a right to bear arms and always WILL have a right to bear arms. It's not a privilege. Period.

You generally don't need a standing army unless you are engaging in wars of aggression. A well-equipped militia is adequate for national defense.

I'm actually with you. Was a BSD (FreeBSD and NetBSD/mac68k) user most of the 90's. I had a mac around as well but the FreeBSD box was my daily driver.

When OSX came out, I couldn't afford a recent enough mac to run it but I was always impressed by NeXTstep. I didn't get an OSX capable machine until around 2005 or so.

My primary reasons for being a rabid OSX user on the desktop vs. FreeBSD are:

- Native productivity apps that don't suck or are artificially limited due to patent concerns (i.e. Scribus)
- A kickass windowing system that isn't X11. Xquartz works well for X11 apps I just gotta have.
- Once configured and destupified, a UI layer that is second to none.

It takes some tweaking to get OSX tolerable.... The OSX UI is actually quite configurable if you bother digging. You just can't change the window or toolkit decorations.

There's nothing wrong with commercial *NIX OS's. Nor is there anything wrong with FreeBSD. My job required software that wasn't available natively for BSD and I'm not going to try to struggle with a VM or WINE for software I need daily. OSX had all the UNIXy goodness under the hood that's real easy to get at. OSS software through Fink or Macports. It also has a great library of familiar off-the-shelf commercial software.

Yes, OSX is different in a lot of ways.... things like changing your login shell or adding users from the command line might require a google query.... people get over it or go back to canned Linux distros they don't understand either.

Server-side I still prefer FreeBSD.

They'd also get ATI out of the deal wouldn't they?

Could be Apple's chance to bastardize the hell out of x86 and the PASemi guys could probably help out a bit on the power efficiency side of things. Apple also has oodles of cash in the bank.

Abstaining is far worse than "wasting your vote" on the Libertarians. Five percent of the popular vote and they get to play in the big leagues for a change with federal funding and equal ballot access.

Your vote DOES count. And it can help to gradually end the two party tyranny. Beats staying home and whining later that they keep stomping on your face.

I can honestly say that I didn't vote for them. Nor did I stay home like a defeatist b!+ch.

And Apple is free not to license those patents and come up with a new and unique way of doing it. Had they not paraded around like assholes claiming they basically invented the smartphone (hint.... they didn't) and using frivolous BS patents in abusive ways MotoGoogle might be willing to license them for less. They are Google's patents, they can charge whatever they want to whoever they want for them. Don't like it? Go burn down the USPTO.

Apple decided to play conqueror and they're about to get a taste of what happens when you go up against an evenly matched enemy who's tired of your shit.

I like Apple products (OSX is awesome) but I find myself hating the company itself quite a bit over the last couple years. Halting progress with asinine lawsuits to assure market dominance is wrong. That's what got us years of crappy Win32 OS's on everybody's desk.

So..... we're at war with Pakistan?

Any field is a field of combat when you drop a Hellfire in it.