I mostly use my Galaxy Note II for
Listening to music
Games
Read my gmail account at work and on the go
Text (sms and Google chat)
on-demand Maps + GPS
the FT.com app
Browsing the web

And somewhere below all that, there's the 'phone' aspect, at 1-2 calls a week or so.

Sure I do, but are you telling me that changed the iPhone experience? How many of my gripes above are addressed in the latest one?

Uncle Steve might as well be a mythical figure for all the difference it makes, my issue is with the 'my way or the highway' attitude of Apple products, giving me an arbitrarily crippled experience.

Tried it, hated it, never again. I mostly use my phone as a music player, and here are all issues that it had, all of which were really annoying to me in daily use
- Every time I connect to charge, my on-the-go playlist is reset
- No custom EQ
- No browse-by-folder
- Only exchange files with one machine, and can't treat it as just a hard drive that happens to have music
- Stupid 'features' enabled by default, such as shake-to-randomize-song-order, I had some 'what the fuck?' moments there before I learned to turn them off.

Now a happy Galaxy Note II user, it's not exactly cheap but none of the above issues, bigger screen, and if I don't like the player that came with it I could always change it. I also think it looks better but that's of course subjective. I'm hardly a tinkerer these days, am hardly exposed to ads (don't watch TV for example, and walk to work so don't see ads in public transport much), and price is pretty much irrelevant for me when choosing phones.

The iPhone is great if you happen to like it just the way Uncle Steve wants it, but I have a hard time understanding how anybody who actually has own opinions of their own could do that.

> Do you really think drug use is on par with what type of car you drive?
Yes. Personal choice mainly affecting the user, with some effect on those around them (depending on the specific drug, minimal in the case of marijuana)

> The main consequence is that it determines what type of society you live in: does it have standards and values, or not?
If 'standards and values' means your prohibiting me things because you disapprove of them, even though they don't directly harm you, then please keep them to yourself.

> The point of a free society is that you're not compelled to do things against your values. That doesn't mean there are no rules or standards.
Rules preventing people from actively harming other people (rape, robbery, etc) are one thing. But you seem to think much wider rules than that are desirable, right? You value your right to 'live in a society where X is not normal', is that what you mean by standards? To me, that's naked, unjustifiable desire to control what other people do even when it's none of your fucking business, just because you say so.

If that's an essential part of your definition of a free society, sounds like you're the one who's confused.

'My eight eyes'?

> The result of a Capitalistic Society that practices Capitalism would be Open and Free Markets, right?

Wrong. Left to themselves, these tend to degenerate into monopolies as the incumbents use their profits to keep competitors out. Open and free markets must be maintained by forces outside of the market mechanism, such as regulations.

Capitalism doesn't produce free markets, it requires them (most definitions of it do anyway), so wrong causality direction.

This. Imposing somebody's views of what constitutes 'proper' behavior on others should always be hard and expensive, so that it's reserved for the important stuff like murder and fraud. You think I should be fined because I crossed the street at a red light with no car in sight? Well, fuck you. My ideas of propriety happen to be different from yours, and I think it the height of arrogance to impose on other people one's ideas of good behavior (except in grave cases like murder), and yes that includes my own.

There's kids standing outside of my house usually on summer weekends, they're OK but when they get drunk they get very noisy (and litter, of course) and if it's late someone calls the police eventually, and they come by and ask the kids to go away. Yes it's a nuisance, but they're on public property and have a right to be there; tolerating this is part of living in a free society, I'd much rather live like this than have everybody's behavior continuously monitored to match someone's norms.

Are you one of those people I ran across while living in the US who thinks it's a public duty for a houseowner to mow their lawn (I could never actually understand why, but there was even a law I think)? If so, please move in a neighborhood of people who share your views, you can all monitor and censor each other, and leave the rest of us in peace.

I'm mostly with you, but expiration on death is a really bad idea as it give would-be users an incentive to kill the authors. I'd much rather go with a fixed, short protection period, and then public domain.

Yes, I also think I have the right to use the image in such a context. I also believe there should be no copyright protection for non-commercial use of anything by individual persons (as opposed to organizations), as it happens, of which this is a special case.

Firstly, it's perfectly possible to buy -6 shares, it's called selling. It's even possible to buy -6 shares if you don't have any, that's called short selling and is more complicated but still possible (though illegal for some shares such as, currently, Spanish ones I believe).

Here they were talking of futures contracts not shares, you can buy or sell as many as you want, it's totally symmetrical. And that $69T was just referring to the notional, which misleading since you don't pay the notional when you enter a futures contract - you just post margin which is a tiny fraction of that. The margin on that kind of amount would still be monstrous, but not measured in the trillions.

No, politicians at Obama's level are being scrutinized constantly and intensively, and are squeaky clean certainly where the small stuff is concerned becaused simple cost-benefit analysis says it's the strategic thing to do. 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant' at work.

Do I hear a condescending tone there? Me, I'm with the GGP in that I like my games to be beautiful, engaging, easy interactive movies. My competitive spirit is getting all the workout it needs at work, and whatever energy I got left after that, my 1yo daughter has first claim on.

So when I grab an hour or two to play a game, I want beautiful and fun, and yes I want guaranteed progress, as I simply have no time or energy to try over and over again.

Not saying my way is better than yours, to each his own - it's just that people with my kind of priorities, regarded as a group, probably have a total budget for purchasing games that is at least comparable to that of people who have the time and inclination for really hard gaming challenges; thus, a lot of games lately accomodate my priorities, and I think that's a good thing.

The usages of my Samsung Note 2 are:

Play music: 70%
Play video games while in the bus, train etc: 10%
Record videos of my little daughter to share with relatives: 5%
Google chat and SMS: 5%
Read personal mail at work: 5%
Phone calls are somewhere in the remaining 5%

Oh, and while on holidays it's invaluable to have a GPS navigation device that allows you to click right through to the website of the hotel you found on the overlaid map and yes, call them to reserve a room for the night.

And the GPS + satellite photo maps have saved me from getting badly lost in a forest at least once, and kept me from being late while taking a picturesque route to a rendez-vous another time. Maps-on-demand that include your location are a god-given when you're traveling, hiking, etc.

  Try any that with a brick phone.

Are you working for Google or something? I work in a large corp, and the hiring procedures are insane, especially on the IT side. There is one process for getting budget to pay people (which is fair enough), then you have to get permission at damn near board level to actually start looking for an actual person to hire, and once all the people in that would-be hire's command chain have signed off on hiring them, it can still take HR weeks to months to get an actual written offer out. And then there are yearly hiring freezes that strike about every September, last till next year, and supersede any approvals you might have achieved by then. These, again, can be bypassed by pushing hard enough - overall, none of this makes hiring impossible, but an incredible time sink, not to mention causing us to lose candidates because the competitors were faster on the draw.

Once you're in the system, it's actually a pretty good place to work (and getting a bit better every year IMO, as the number of bright people around me grows), but the hiring procedures are just damn crazy.

The trick is to throw them edgewise onto concrete and give them enough spin that it lands on a corner and bounces back upright.

Did that experiment when I discovered its music player had no folder browsing, no custom EQ, and reset the on-the-go playlist everytime I connected to charge. Now a happy Note 2 user.