joshuapants

An easy and plausible interpretation of my post is that I was concerned for the psyche of my fellow human being, and for the people he might be around. In the future please respond more civilly and substantively instead of dismissively.

Abortion doctors might not be innocent from the fundamentalist Christian's point of view.

> Well, if I had to choose between having my child die and letting a rich person keep their $5k bag, I might do the same.

Where on earth did you pull this dichotomy from?

> I don't know why the poor just don't kill the rich, to be honest

> I'd probably tear up the person with the bag

"I would literally murder a random innocent" is a bit different from what you suggest.

Not advocating the murder of innocents is burying my head in the sand? Fascinating.

Absolutely, I didn't mean to compare the relative merits, simply the costs.

They did that. And then those companies never updated the apps.

> the battery life is definitely comparable to the bigger brands

Sure, but the budget phone also isn't pushing a quad HD screen and a beefy processor. The runtime may be similar, but that doesn't mean the capacity is.

I did a quick straw poll by looking at some budget Android phones against some flagships and it seems like the budget batteries are about 1000mAh less than the flagships. In a bigger case. So, bulky and low capacity.

I'm surprised Google hasn't made a bigger push with Go on Android. It seems like there's some rudimentary support, so maybe it's on the way.

Because the price the store charges you is not the price the manufacturer charges the store.

> This might be a huge opportunity for Microsoft and WP

On the contrary, they've been trying to penetrate the developing market for some time. In fact, the low-end Lumias are almost uniformly better than Android devices in the same price range.

Apps are an issue, but that brings us to the chicken-egg problem of customers and apps.

Probably not even new old-stock iPhones, but actually used ones.

I wonder if e-cycling old high-end devices by refurbishing them and selling them to low-income markets isn't a better choice than ramping up manufacturing on necessarily crappy phones.

For $2.10, the battery certainly won't be state of the art. Probably bulky and low capacity.

Margins in consumer electronics are typically razor thin, particularly when the device in question is a commodity (mid-tier Android phones, for example).

1.2c is obviously unsustainable, as you mention. I wonder if they got blindsided by a price increase on some part.

Sure, but the article says "turn the music down," not "turn the music off." I think it's entirely possible for certain types of music at certain volumes to be conducive to concentration, and vice-versa.

If I were referring to a scammer, a con-artist, or a black-hat hacker would I be calling names or merely describing their professions?

Evidence-based politics is even less popular than evidence-based medicine.

> Failure to use the metric system everywhere cost NASA a $125 million Mars orbiter

No, bureaucratic failure to address the concerns of people who spotted the error well in advance of the launch cost NASA $125M. The investigation report makes that clear, especially when it goes on to make recommendations for avoiding future mishap; nobody recommended that the engineers needed to brush up on their units.

And yet here you are, insisting that the issue was that we didn't switch over to the metric system, and throwing in some unsupported claims to justify the position.

Windows XP? Curious to know if there's a hackery reason behind that or just personal preference.

> 1. it does have the benefit that it's cross-cultural, you can actually talk to people outside your cultural bubble

We already do that.

> 2. it's got the advantage that you're using the same measurements as all your trade partners so people don't need two production lines anymore

Two production lines? For what?

> 3. it's got the advantage that people going into science and engineering don't need to build a whole new set of unit references because they've got the one which already works

Yup, failure to use the metric system in everyday life is why the US has the worst scientists and produces the least scientific output. Oh, wait.

> 4. the "huge expense" is pretty much made out of whole cloth for the purpose of saying you can't switch, the UK's metrication cost basically nothing except for road sign replacements which is why those are still imperial

I agree with this one. It probably wouldn't be terribly expensive to implement, though I would question the priorities of anyone who is really hung up about it (like the grandparent post who started this whole discussion).

> The Smog Free Tower is not only a final solution, but a sensory experience of a clean future.

That's... interesting wording.

> I read a bunch of articles from John Douillard

> John Douillard DC is an Ayurvedic Practitioner

Maybe I'm weird, but I like my authoritative positions on human evolution to come from evolutionary biologists, not woo-peddlers.

At any rate, humans can eat a very diverse range of foods. Inuits eat a primarily animal-derived diet, supplemented with a meager amount of gathered plants during a small portion of the year. Then the spectrum moves all the way over to peoples that eat mostly plant-matter with few animal products. Humans adapt wonderfully, that's why we're so prolific. There is no magic diet that happens to be "right."

Final Cut Pro costs $299.99. Logic costs $199.99. We've all read that Spolsky article, I get it, but that doesn't mean it is wise or inevitable for Apple to make all their software free. Offering limited versions of FCP and Logic for free gives users software that compliments their hardware, but also gives Apple another user in the ecosystem who might step up to the real thing because they're already comfortable with the workflow.

Maybe more likely than you think. They are, as you say, making more things free (or, rather, "included"). I could see that moving toward giving you a free home version of Final Cut Pro, for example, and then offering a paid upgrade to the real deal with extra features and so on.

I'm playing with the El Capitan beta right now on a ~4 year old MBP and I will say that it seems very snappy and I haven't needed to reboot except for updates, and I haven't had any wifi issues (had a lot on Mavericks). That said, it's a clean install and I've been pretty gentle with it. I'm cautiously optimistic that they're improving these matters.

Windows 10 is not free. The cost is built-in to the hardware you buy. They threw their users a bone to get some goodwill and hopefully entice some of them off old OSes, but the OS is not free, and this canard needs to stop.

Linux is free. Do you mean to imply that Linux is nothing more than an advertising/tracking platform? I pay for cable TV, so I guess I'm not the product there right? Oh wait, even though I pay the real money comes from being able to direct my eyeballs at ads. The world is not that simple, and I keep seeing people parrot this exact line at everything. It is applicable in some cases and not in others, so don't whip it to death.

In comparison to OSX and Windows running on the same hardware, Ubuntu is worse in every meaningful way. Power management is terrible, window management is terrible, the Ubuntu software center is slow as hell and has no selection (amount of useful software is a huge concern, actually). It lacks polish in general, things that people have come to take for granted in their OSs are missing or badly implemented.

I'm sure the argument will come that most home users only need a web browser, so the software selection isn't a problem, but at that point you might as well just use Chrome OS and get something that actually works.

I say the following as a Linux enthusiast: Ubuntu is absolutely not "ready for the prime time," as you put it.

It's not ready for home users, it's not ready for most businesses, it's not ready for anyone except a small number of users.

I know Superfish was not included on Thinkpads. I am not sure about this latest breach. But that's not terribly important; the company showed that it can't be trusted. If they're so eager to sell out some of their customers, what's to stop them from going a step further in the future?

Much as I love Thinkpads, the only reasonable stance from here on out is to presume that every Lenovo computer is compromised by default.

> Leonovo is working REALLY REALLY hard to lose loyal technical customers.

They already lost me after Superfish, but now with this instead of passively not buying I'm going to actively recommend that others not. It's absolutely unacceptable.