Am I missing something, or have they missed the Great Basin? It seems they depict the Columbia River watershed abutting the Colorado River watershed and they both appear to go all the way to the base of the Sierras.

their hands in the cookie jar.

Who is John Galt?

You built a new PC, you installed Firefox, you entered username/password for the mailserver, you logged into GMail.

I built a new PC, I installed Outlook, I entered a username/password for the SSL IMAP mailserver.

Just kidding, I didn't even have to enter username/password as I could migrate my Windows account profile with a couple of clicks.

I guess you don't know the difference between "first man into space" and "first man on the moon". You fracking mormon ;)

Bullsh. He's talking about basic text formatting options that are buggy or in some cases, broken. He's dead right about that. Issues abound in Gmail, too... like how signature text and body text are treated differently when composing an email, and often that can bug out and leave you unable to edit the body text because GMail things it's all one big signature. Dumb.

Mind you, similar criticism can be applied to Word, too, it's less buggy than GDocs, but still has problems. Adding a page break then wondering why your new Heading 1 line is also changing the spacing on the previous page... or why you can't seem to move beyond the end of a table at the end of your document to start a new line. Stuff like that.

GDocs has some way to go in terms of usability, even for basic corporate documentation.

If I buy a PC preloaded with Ubuntu, am I now tinkering?

Buying a shrink-wrapped product and using it without modification is never tinkering, period. This isn't being broken out to placate me personally. It is simply the proper uses of the words.

I think you're abusing the tinkering label to make your point, and I think you've gone so far with it as to strain logic.

The inherent philosophy behind the iPhone is, and has always been, 'the iPhone user experience'. Aka 'my way or the highway'. This specifically precludes using anything other than the stuff shipping out of Cupertino. If the new iPhone switches to TCP over Carrier Pigeon, you have no choice but to accept it, should you wish to stay on that platform. With Android, this cannot be - and this is intrinsic in the very concept.

This changes everything.

What we need is a bytecode-based platform like Java or .NET

The second all browsers support that, the web as we know it will cease to exist.
Imagine each web page being like a flash applet. Great for the designers, but don't try to copy even a snippet of text, since they will have disabled it.

Studies have shown that talking on a mobile/cell phone has a similar effect on driving skills to being drunk. Other studies have shown that people tend to rate their driving skill as above average.

And those 'studies' are likely commissioned by groups with no vested interest in pushing for more legislation, right?

Shifting the subject against the rebuttal is bad form.

OP said:

The implicit is that without these it is not a 'great phone', and THAT would be the 'how' this is a problem. Yeah?

Perseus was born inside a bronze prison, cast into the sea (inside a wooden chest) and subsequently raised by a fisherman. To answer a challenge from his mother's suitor, he vowed to return with the head of the only mortal Gorgon. He outsmarted three oracles and received magical gifts to use on his quest. He somehow managed to sneak up on the lair of the Gorgons and chop off Medusa's head without looking at it while he did it, and without challenge from the other (non-mortal) Gorgons living there. Where did he get the training necessary to resist looking at Medusa? How did he know how to sever her head? Did the fisherman teach him those skills?

Samson once defeated an entire army with nothing but a jawbone from a donkey. It boggles the mind how one person would even be able to do this with modern weaponry, let alone an improvised piece of bone.

Bilbo went from being a hobbit with zero adventuring skill to a renown hero, with absolutely no reason for his survival, let alone success. By all logical accounts, Gandalf sent him to his doom, but he winds up saving the day several times over.

Are you beginning to see the problem here? It isn't exactly the movies, but suspension of disbelief in general, that seems to be eluding you.

Okay, sure, but as movies go, it isn't all that stellar. The acting is campy, the plot direction is jarring, and the overall production values are pretty poor. Now, some of that is due to the era from whence it came, but on the face of it these things really can make it comparable to an 'average' modern movie. District 9, perhaps?

When your older, cheaper hardware is better and more able than your new offering, you need to fire some designers.

Or the lawyers who force the design incompitbilities to attain lock-in. :-(