I find it hard to believe that anybody actually believed that the upshot of overthrowing Iraq would be cheap oil -- unless, of course, the whole invasion really was a pretext to try to grab the oil.

The oil aspect of the Iraq invasion wasn't so much about us getting the oil as it was everyone else not getting it. Saddam was talking to everyone under the sun about selling oil if only they would help him get the UN sanctions removed. Had the Iraq invasion not happened Iraq would today be a huge oil exporter and likely selling it against any currency that isn't the US dollar. This idea was practically the purpose of the PNAC of which a good portion of the Bush administration were members or original signatories.

Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh! I've had nightmares about sentences like this one. I'm going to go have a little cry now. Thanks.

It's a post from timothy, what did you expect?

Drones can currently only operate in theaters where we have complete air superiority. In a theater where the opposing ground forces had effective surface-to-air or air-to-air defenses drones wouldn't be very practical.

There is a push for the development of UCAVs that would be able to carry air-to-air weapons as well as more directly engage surface-to-air targets but there's still limitations like communication lag or communications in general. A stealthy fighter can operate as long as it has fuel and it doesn't really matter if it loses its data link for some portion of a mission. UCAVs don't yet have that ability and any major communication disruption would be a mission or drone ending problem.

That's not to say these problems can't be surmounted or that UCAVs are useless in two-way firefights but it will still be a while until they're as effective as piloted aircraft. So until UCAVs are capable of gaining total air superiority all by themselves (which is difficult but doable) some piloted craft will still be needed. Whether those craft should be F-35s is a totally separate issue.

Complaints about HTML/Web apps not feeling "native" is a canard. Hundreds of millions of people use web pages every single day, from the most technical neckbeards to the least technical AOL grandmas. Now non-technical users probably aren't spending much time on sites with bullshit user experiences but there's a mind boggling number of websites people use daily. Native apps are also rarely bastions of usability and paragons of user experience virtue. Web apps don't need to "feel native" because the appeal of "native" apps doesn't really exist in the minds of actual users. These hundreds of millions of users aren't being held back from anything because they're using web pages instead of native apps.

Users want services and content and they're happy to access them through a web browser. In fact a web browser makes it easier for them in most cases because they don't need any special software before they access said content and services. Whatever device they're using likely has a web browser accessible. If they see a URL they can pop open their laptop or pull out their phone and access it immediately.

When they're on their phone they don't want it to take forever to load when they're stuck in a slow 3G area with no WiFi. They want it to work on the iPhone they just bought as well as their Windows PC back home. If they buy a Mac for their kids they want it to work on that as well.

The major features HTML5 added were ones that help web pages not feel more like native apps but have better interaction with clients. Clients aren't as limited as they were in the past (I remember a time before the <img> tag) and a richer DOM is important for the increased amount of work (Javascript, CSS, etc) being done on the client side.

These people complaining about performance on mobiles is just jackassery. The mobile web experience had the same sort of constraints that native mobile applications have. Mobiles have tiny batteries, often have small screens, are controlled with fingertips rather than mice, and often have slow high latency internet connections. Again it goes back to graceful degradation that users are already expecting. Maybe the mobile version doesn't load the 2MB PNG background and the uncompressed 1MB Javascript from a totally different server (requiring a second set of DNS lookups) out of which you only used two functions. The mobile native app wouldn't have the 1024x1024 icons or the 50MB 1080p intro movie bundled with it either.

HTML5 doesn't need to bring a more desktop-like experience to mobiles. It also doesn't need to make apps that look native. It needs to be used to make web apps functional and do their business with the least cognitive load on users as possible. It should scale well no matter how large the screen is or how shitty the connection speed. Instead of all singing all dancing bullshit I'd much rather see a page load on my phone and then let my fucking CPU go to sleep so I don't waste my battery trying to read a tweet or a Facebook message.

Your move, Jobs.

What the fuck does this even mean? People move their Flash app to HTML5 and then the millions upon millions of iPhone and iPad users in addition to the millions upon millions of desktop users get to use it. How is this bad for anyone? Why would anyone need to "make a move"?

There's been no sales figures showing actual installed base of Android devices. There's been some recent quarters where Android devices outsold iPhones. Before that the iPhone handily outsold Android. This means that the installed base of Android phones is unlikely to be larger than that of the iPhone despite the increase in sales over the past year. Quarter over quarter market share figures don't tell you about the number of devices in people's hands.

Remember that iOS runs on iPod touches as well as iPhones. Apple sells about ten million iPods a quarter and their ASP (average sale price) has increased which means the more expensive iPod touch is a larger share of iPod sales than in the past. At the very least iPod touches add a few million iOS devices to the installed base.

Then there's the millions of iPads being sold every quarter. Over 11 million for 2011 as of the last quarterly report. So iOS devices not only outnumber Android devices in quarterly sales but in installed base.

Installed base is the important number for developers and accessory manufacturers. The only numbers we've seen about Android sales have been quarterly market share numbers. Even these numbers have only been slightly higher than iPhone sales. Android phones haven't been leading iPhones long enough to have a larger installed base. Worse for Android is a lot of unit sales aren't really practical to count for the platform since they're single use devices like eBook readers so only phones really expand developers' potential markets.

His point was clearly stated, he made the claim the iPad can't play movies with Handbrake or connect to a TV via HDMI. Both of these are simply ridiculous things to say. Shit, Handbrake has an output preset named iPad.

As for the buying accessories, there's definitely a valid use case for a built-in HDMI port. However with the adapter I bought for my iPad I got a free HDMI output upgrade for my iPhone. There's downsides to adapters but there's also iodized to device ecosystems. The single adapter I bought increased the utility of multiple devices and gives me an extra feature checkbox next time I upgrade one of those devices.

None of the movies I've ripped with Handbrake work on my iPad? Shit I guess the HDMI adapter I just bought doesn't work either! Why didn't you tell me I couldn't do those things before I bought it?

Wait, you're full of shit and I can do all that with my iPad. Does the iPad also take 20 minutes to copy a 17MB file?

Your fantasy user is just about as likely to jump on Amazon's service as they are Apple's. You're describing a trope that doesn't bother upgrading to any new service or really buy any new devices. Why bother spending a whole bunch of money targeting them with there's millions of other users happily spending money on new things?

Granted XP is ancient and not very supported, but its still heavily used.

Supporting older OSes is not free. If iCloud's was Apple's only product this might be a problem but it's a follow on product. People with Windows XP can still spend money on iPods, iPhones, and the iTunes Store. Their iOS devices will get to use iCloud services and when they decide to upgrade their computer (to a PC or Mac) they'll get to use iCloud on there as well.

I'm no fan of Twitter in general as there's an enormous signal to noise ratio but for people that use it it's a convenient service. These astronomers could have set up a network of RSS feeds where events get posted and diligently check them. They could have posted to Usenet and hoped the message propagated fast enough to be useful.

Instead they had Twitter accounts set up so they could send a message by whatever cell phone they had in their pocket at the time and all their followers could pick up on it. They could also just post a message with a hash tag which is a home-grown taxonomy for tweets. Joe Amateurastronomer could have used the #newsupernovas hash tag which professional astronomers might follow. They then turn their nice high powered telescopes and get a spectrum of the event. Astronomers on mountain top observatories with cellular signals but not necessarily reliable internet connections can still receive and send Twitter messages.

The downside to setting up a network of RSS feeds is it's a top-down organization. Astronomers are only going to check the feeds in the "official" list as there's no way Joe Amateurastronomer will get a professional astronomer to look at their feed. With Usenet messages propagate slowly anymore, likely too slow to be useful in this particular situation. That of course assumes astronomers bother to read and post to Usenet groups as so many have been overrun with spam and general crap postings. Few people are willing to run their own network of Usenet servers, they might as well just use more readily (and freely) available web-based systems.

Wolfenstein 3-D used ray casting which is a bit different than ray tracing.

So they are cutting off all international calling as well?
They are shooting down satellites?
Checking all travelers at borders for any device which might contain data?
You could get a lot of tweets on a microsd card.

You're asserting in your original comment that Syria somehow hasn't blocked off access to the outside world because they haven't shot down Inmarsat satellites or that you could shove a MicroSD card up your ass and pretend it's the internet.

Syria can effectively but their population off from the outside world but closing down internet and long distance telephone lines. For the tiny fraction of the population that have satellite transceivers available there's still a link to the outside but for a majority of the population they're entirely cut off. It's also fairly easy for them to clamp down on internal communications as they only need to send a few soldiers with rifles to the handful of television and radio stations that exist in any city. Shutting down phone lines also isn't terribly difficult since they can do the same thing with PSTN switches and endpoints. They exist in buildings and buildings can have their power shut off or their operators arrested.

Just because the Syrian government can't shoot down communication satellites or search everyone's rectum for MicroSD cards doesn't mean that they haven't effectively isolated their population from the rest of the world. I'm not sure what you're trying to suggest, shoving microchips up your ass isn't an effective means of communication. Besides, having people memorize the messages is more effective because memories don't show up on an x-ray.