I really don't understand the slow uptake to 7.
Cost? I won't buy "upgrade only" discs, and it costs $130 for an OEM pro disc. If I could have unlimited personal-use-only installs for my household, that would be great.
Electric car technology is not competitive, period. Unless you artificially tax gasoline
Full stop. If you're going to discuss economic feasibility due to artificial taxes, you should first discuss how the artificially LOW state at which the gas tax currently resides acts as a detriment to such investment.
Lesson learned: If you want a full-baked true Android experience, always look for the word "Nexus".
Agreed, that is the lesson I've learned.
I don't like Touchwiz either, but you can install a replacement launcher from the market. Apex Launcher is based on the stock android launcher. Works fine for me.
Touchwiz is not solely the launcher; it's the ROM. It's the Samsung experience.
Say what you will about Apple & the iPhone, but I appreciate the tight integration of OS & hardware and their desire to provide a consistent & reliable user experience. I own and use a (Sprint) Samsung Galaxy S2 Epic 4G Touch, and it was a series of broken promises on ever getting ICS. When finally rolled out, it wasn't the true android experience, but some half-baked Samsung-proprietary interface aka "Touchwiz." Great, that wasn't what I was sold when I purchased the device. I want android, not Samsung's half-baked, bug-filled, garbage-software-filled version of it.
Eventually, I rooted and installed JB, because Samsung sure as heck wasn't going to do that. And then, as you venture deeper into the rooting environment, you find out a bunch of hardware/software issues directly caused by Samsung, including but not limited the EMMC super-brick bug. These security issues in TFA are just more of the same. For me, their handling of their android phones and my experience with them has tarnished their image across their entire product fleet. Will I buy a Samsung brand washer/dryer? There's a lot of digital tech in even washing/drying machines nowadays. Before this, their name wasn't an issue. Now, maybe I consider some other brand.
well instead of developing the green tech to compete we must artificially increase the cost of the dirty fuel! we cant use plain old light bulbs anymore, that use more power (and give off heat, thus meaning one could in theory keep their heater lower) and now we are stuck with CFLs that are worse for the environment than the old bulbs!
You should have stopped before this sentence.
Insofar as "cheap" "dirty" vs "expensive" "clean" environmentalism is concerned, the problem is that it is difficult to capture (i.e., within a product's price) the cost of all the externalities ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality ). Therefore, we have "cheap" "dirty" fuels, which are actually more expensive than the clean fuels, but the costs of all of their negative externalities have not been included, and therefore only perceived as cheap by the average individual. For example, super-fine particulate matter (i.e., 2.5 microns in diameter), most commonly generated as a fuel combustion byproduct, is a serious contributor to adverse health effects and mortality rates; these health & life effects do translate into costs, though they aren't currently well-reflected in the prices of the products and/or energy choices you can select.
Therefore, we raise the cost of these "dirty" energy sources through artificial means in an attempt to better account for the non-artificial (but hard to encapsulate) externalities.
= LibreOffice doesn't read or write the constantly mutating, rubbish file formats of MS Office the way only MS Office can.
While I recognize it's perhaps not a fair judge of LibreOffice, life isn't fair. I use LibreOffice and like it, and can handle the quirks when using non-native documents. But when even faced with "it's free vs. it costs you money", even ridiculously frugal people like my father WILL NOT SWITCH. His primary concern is his clients are able to read & use the documents he provides--and that conversely, he's able to read & use the documents his clients provide--without any hassle whatsoever. Let's face it, perfect interoperability with zero hassle is a big seller these days; look at Apple.
Only some people will comprise on price vs functionality. But nearly EVERYONE will switch to Libreoffice when they can save big on price without any compromise on functionality.
The market is saturated now.
No, this is wrong. There was a very good story on NPR just 1-2 days ago about Apple the bind it's in re: emerging middle class in China. The numbers were staggering, on the order of 200 MILLION people expected to get a smartphone in the next 1-2 years (and because Apple sells a premium, very-expensive product out of the price range of 99% of those 200 million, is likely to miss out huge unless they radically diverge from their current sales & marketing plan... but I digress).
If Blackberry can rebound and sell an inexpensive, desirable smartphone in China, they could totally recover.
So there's a copyrighted look, a trademarked name, and a patented design. Players demand real brand-name stuff in their games, so developers deliver by licensing real brand-name stuff in their games. To do this legally means getting a license.
What's so shady about that?
So, read the actual article.
The article's arguments, for the "TLDR" crowd, amount to this:
1. Like the candy cigarettes before them, the depiction of realistic guns--especially with the real names attached--amounts to advertisement towards a target population of young individuals, to influence them to purchase the real thing. They provide some anecdotal evidence that it works. As a personal anecdote, I know that it's worked on me (I own a BB gun that's a model of the USP
2. The "shady" part is that the game companies would, seemingly universally, prefer not to talk publicly about any of this (i.e., that there's any ongoing collaboration, licensing, or even two-way discussion between them and gun manufacturers). This is likely a socially-perceived "negative" topic, and therefore discussing it would likely negatively impact sales by casting their companies in a negative light.
Like candy cigarettes, any advertising of an inherently dangerous/deadly product towards an adolescent target audience probably should be carefully scrutinized, regulated, or eliminated.
Rule #4 of the Applicant Rules for your prize reads:
In all cases, the Applicant will be required to perform a Preliminary Test in a location where a properly authorized representative of the JREF can attend. This Preliminary Test is intended to determine if the Applicant is likely to perform as promised during the Formal Test, using the agreed-upon protocol. To date, no applicant has passed the Preliminary Test, and therefore no Formal Test has yet been conducted. At any time prior to the Formal Test, the JREF reserves the right to re-negotiate the protocol if issues are discovered that would prevent a fair and unbiased test. After an agreement is reached on the protocol, no part of the testing procedure may be changed in any way without an amended agreement, signed by all parties concerned.
Couldn't this be construed as an attempt to prevent any potentially legitimate applicants from being considered for the prize?
Is there any way you can prove that your organization is not falsely debunking claims during the "Preliminary Tests," in order to prevent the prize from being claimed?
And as a corollary, how to you justify that a "supernatural" phenomena--should it exist--be expected to follow natural laws and therefore suitable for reproduction? It would seem that, by definition, it is going to be unexplainable by natural law and may be, by extension, "supernaturally" unsuitable for reproduction.
Stellar rays prove fibbing never pays. Embezzlement is another matter.