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Comment Re:This can't be true (Score 1) 180

I think in retrospect the emergency landing was the right call and the inflatable slides were not. You don't fool around with fire in a plane, but asking passengers to deplane via slide is also not to be taken lightly. And I think you're probably right that the previous incidents led them to over-react on the evacuation. But in the end it was the pilot's call and I'd rather have a pro-active pilot than one afraid to do what they think is right.

Comment Re:so? apple is still selling less product (Score 3, Informative) 298

Stocks go up on profit. And profit does not grow only with revenue. You can also deduct spendings. That's how big businesses work. They spend enormously for marketing, branding, hire unnecessary amount of people, to build a brand.

Not sure if you're talking about Apple or competition. Apple spends way less on marketing, offers no incentives, than, say, Samsung, which has has virtually bought their market share dollar-for-sale. http://www.asymco.com/2012/12/05/the-mystery-of-samsung-electronics-sga/

Comment Re:Unless it's it writing elsewhere.... (Score 1) 118

Unless they explicitly sign it over, everyone has copyright over any creative work they contribute (and coding is creative). However, most employers (in the US) require employees to sign a contract stipulating that the employer gets the copyright assigned to them automatically. If this developer ALSO signed over the copyright to the open source project, then he signed it away twice and it's up to the courts to decide which contract takes precedence.

So VMWare probably has a reasonable legal claim to the copyright of any source written while under their employ, and can thus change the licensing terms at any time, and even claim that the previous license was never valid. Of course that's trying to close the barn door a little late, so as others have said as a practical matter it makes little sense for VMWare to go nuclear here. But calling people dense for making valid points is unhelpful.

Comment Re:Life on Earth-like planet (Score 1) 104

"Maybe there's no land life, but perhaps very clever dolphins," Livio joked.

Except dolphins are descended from land life. Fish are thick as quite thick shit. Most likely due to the lack of sufficient oxygen to run big brains. I hadn't actually considered that before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence

Comment Re:Astroturfing (Score 1) 218

During the quarter, Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones - a significant rise from the previous quarter, which featured sales of 2.9 million Lumia devices

So they got a 50% improvement going from a non-Holiday quarter to a Holiday quarter, and have sold 14 million total since the Lumia line was released. While Symbian year-over-year sales figures went from 28.3M/quarter two years ago to 19M/quarter last year to 2.2M this past quarter.

Regardless about whether you consider a minor bump for the biggest shopping season of the year "significant" or "selling well", it's clear that Lumia is not carrying the volume it needs to to make up for the death of Symbian.

It's possible Nokia could pull out of a sales dive like this, although no phone company to date ever has.

http://www.asymco.com/2013/01/10/getting-to-know-the-meaning-of-sisu/

Comment Re:How do they even do that? (Score 1) 264

Show me where you can edit the list of trusted SSL certificates and I'll concede and call it a user's phone.

Your idealisms are unfortunately blocked by fact, and that knowledge was reflected in my post.

Show me a way to allow this without creating a huge potential security hole and I'll concede this should be something that's easy to do.

Comment Re:Display, not tablet (Score 1) 142

We've had nice paper thin displays for years now. But a thin display doesn't mean a thin tablet. Until we have thin CPUs and thin RAM sticks, and thin flash memory and thin connectors, we aren't going to have a paper thin tablet.

When you get all the components you need for a tablet you end up with something just as thick as what we've got on shelves today. By no means thick, but not paper-thin.

Yup. If you've ever looked inside an iPad you know it's basically a huge battery with a couple of circuits and display tacked on.

Comment Re:Read the PDF (Score 1) 412

Well it kind of is perjury. The badges do indeed "work" off campus, in that if pinged by and RFID scanner they respond with their unique ID code.

A stalker or someone who wanted to do harm to a specific student doesn't need access to their full records, they just need to determine that ID code and use it to track them.

It is incorrect information. In order for it to be "perjury" it has to be shown to be material to the outcome of the case, which is possible but less clear.

Comment Re:I don't understand (Score 4, Insightful) 349

The console-killer always has been the good old PC. A reasonably specced-out PC with a mid-range graphics card is far, far better than any console. But nobody listens to me. Nobody loves me.

The console killer was the iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad, etc. Apple sells as many iDevices each year than all the consoles that have ever been made, and has more games available in the App Store for its platform than for all consoles that have ever existed combined. They just announced their 40 billionth unique (non-upgrade, non-redownload) app sale, most of them games. Consoles and PC game rigs are both niches now.

Comment Re:Hey, whatever happened (Score 2, Insightful) 66

To the "tablets are a fad" crowd?

  They were a lot louder 2 years ago.

Tablet makers addressed the issue by including HID support, so that keyboards / mice could be used. Some even include a standard size USB port, supporting thumb-drives in addition to input devices. This lets people use a tablet as a laptop when / if needed, and leave the excess baggage behind when it's not.

Except that the iPad has had Bluetooth keyboard support from the moment it was released, and there were Bluetooth cases with built-in keyboards shortly thereafter. Most opt never to buy one. It doesn't seem to have been the thing holding back any significant segment of the market.

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