Winckel

"A New Jersey police officer and his employer, the township of Hanover, are facing a million-dollar civil rights lawsuit after the officer allegedly tackled a 15-year-old boy in retaliation for his use of a video camera to document the encounter. In March 2012, Austin DeCaro and two friends cut through Black Brook Park on the way to the home of one of the boys in the group. Because the park is closed at night, they were stopped by Joseph Quinn, a plainclothes officer in an unmarked car. The boys sat on the curb on Quinn's orders. DeCaro, who says he carries a camcorder with him everywhere he goes, decided to document the encounter. "Turn that video camera off right now, or it's going to be mine forever," said a voice on the videotape that DeCaro says belongs to Quinn. When DeCaro asked "why," there was a scuffle as Quinn allegedly tackled the 100-pound teenager. "Now you're under arrest," the police officer said in the video. "You get off of me," DeCaro replied. The video appears to show the camera being thrown. DeCaro says it was damaged as a result. "They were going to charge him with obstruction, vandalism, and being in the park after dark," DeCaro's father told a local television reporter. But when the video of the encounter was shown to the police chief, the department "dropped all charges except for being in the park." In May, the family filed a lawsuit against Quinn and the city, charging the officer with using excessive force and violating their son's constitutional rights. Now Quinn is getting some unwanted publicity thanks to a story on the local television news. The police department declined to comment for that story, citing the pending lawsuit." - Winckel

I think cops the world over routinely act thuggishly and corruptly - in the US as in the UK they seem to feel they can act with impunity, often racistly, and abuse people simply because they think they can. This kid was brave and sensible. - Winckel

"U.S. retailer Urban Outfitters told analysts that was equipping all of its stores with iPad and iPod touch-based payment systems, and never buying another cash register again. According to a report by Business Insider, the retail chain's chief information officer Calvin Hollinger said that equipping stores would iPad sales systems would save both space and money, and allow for more customer interaction. Hollinger said an iPad cost a fifth as much as a conventional cash register, and can be installed to swivel around to face the customer, who can view the order, add their personal information, and perform tasks such as creating a gift registry. When not in use, an iPad can be quickly detached, freeing counter space for inventory use or merchandise packing. In addition to setting up iPads at checkout, Urban Outfitters will also be equipping sales people with smaller iPod touch systems, similar to those used by Apple's retail stores and an increasing number of other retailers. The Philadelphia-based Urban Outfitters operates more than 400 stores under the brands Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Free People, Terrain and BHLDN." - Winckel

"Google's Motorola Mobility subsidiary went looking for an address that didn't actually exist in an effort to artificially portray Apple's new iOS 6 Maps as deficient. In a marketing ploy not unlike Nokia's faked camera shots to promote features of its new Windows Phone 8 models, an ad promoting Motorola's Droid RAZR M is portrayed being able to locate an address that iOS 6 Maps directs to a wrong road name in what appears to be the wrong city. "Looking for 315 E 15th in Manhattan?" Motorola Mobility posed on its Google+ site. "Google Maps on DROID RAZR M will get you there & not #iLost in Brooklyn." Droid, aren't these the ones you are looking for? The problem, as noted by reader AMD Pettitte, is that 315 E 15th Street is not an actual address in Manhattan. A public park sits on that side of the street, making none of the block's odd numbers a valid address. The number will never be a valid address in Manhattan. This is indicated by looking closely at the picture, but none of the thousands of people sharing the false address lookup ad seemed to notice this. So why would anyone actually be "looking for 315 E 15th" in New York? The only reasonable reason would be to locate an actual address that does exist in Brooklyn (which is also part of New York City), in an area where a series of numbered streets between East 11th and E 16th now have assigned names. What was apparently once the 300 block of East 15th Street is now named Marlborough Road. Five blocks away, Marlborough Road turns into E 15th Street, where numbers begin on the 800 block. So Apple's Maps returning a location on Marlborough Road when searching for East 15th Street isn't nearly as absurd as Google's ad portrays. If you're looking for an actual address in Manhattan, say 318 E 15th, the apartment building across from Google's fictitious address in the park, Apple's Maps can correctly locate it (below). If you're not sure of the address, but you do know that it is in Manhattan, you'd naturally enter the correct borough rather than searching all of New York City, especially if you were being returned an actual valid address in Brooklyn instead. If you insist upon finding an address that can't really exist in Manhattan, Apple will locate it for you, with or without satellite images (below). And if you enter an address that actually could exist in multiple places in New York, iOS 6 Maps will offer you a choice of potential targets (below). But if you're searching for an phony address that doesn't actually exist, you're already lost. You can't blame Apple, and neither should Google. Why is Google looking for problems that don't actually exist? Apple's new Maps service certainly isn't without flaw, making the fake address goose-chase that Google invented to create its Droid "iLost" advertising even more surprising. Why not just point out a real address that Apple's Maps can't actually locate? It's easy to come up with an address that isn't correct enough to locate. In testing "whats wrong" in iOS 6 Maps, I tried looking up a hotel in my contacts located in Sapporo, Japan, which the new Maps failed to locate it. However, I can't read Kanji. It turns out, as a reader "Success" commented, the address was formatted wrong. The Japanese address had been generated for me by Google Maps, after I first looked up the address in English. When entered correctly in Kanji, iOS 6 Maps could locate the hotel (below), although it could not find it when searching in English, an actual problem for tourists. Apple does need to keep improving Maps's general search savvy. But I also experienced experienced problems with Google Maps in correctly locating Japanese businesses via English queries. Google frequently returned irrelevant, paid placement advertising spots in response to real queries for hotels or landmarks, without providing useful results. Looking for problems that do actually exist I looked up a series of local and international addresses in my Contacts (a mix of private homes, hotels, music venues and businesses) from Copenhagen to Berlin to Bern to Barcelona to Madrid to Milan to Lisbon to Prague to Seville to Tel Aviv to Vienna. Across the dozens of real international addresses I checked, Apple's new map service only failed to locate one of them in Copenhagen. Even when I manually located the spot, dropped a pin and copied the reported address into the search field, iOS 6 Maps refused to locate it for some reason. In locating a friend's house about a hour south of Vienna in rural Austria, I noticed that when zooming down to the detailed street level with sattelite photos on, the aerial images shifted from color to black and white, but they were still detailed enough to clearly identify houses. Comparing iOS 5 Maps, the same address had no satellite images at all below city detail. I could actually zoom through five levels of "no images" titles supplied by Google. So in some areas, Apple's satellite coverage is actually much better than Google's, just as Apple's Flyover is superior to Google Earth and Apple's directions are in some cases legal and safe while Google's are not. The only U.S. addresses that I found to stump iOS 6 Maps (I tried dozens, from tiny rural towns to large cities and newly constructed suburban areas) were local ones here in San Francisco where I'd just entered cross streets: "8th and Folsom" didn't return any results in the new maps. When the search was changed to "8th & Folsom" iOS 6 Maps correctly pinpointed the intersection. However, "and" addresses that just supply cross street are also a problem for Google Maps. Searching for "8th and Folsom" in the Google-powered Maps running on iOS 5 jumped me to "8 Folsom, PA," a two day journey of 2880 miles away from San Francisco, where the map was centered. That's not a phony address invented to make Maps "iLost." it's a real address that Google offers to find directions for me in obviously the wrong place. Of course, I didn't start driving for two days. I simply corrected the query to "8th & Folsom" and iOS 5 Maps correctly found it via Google's maps servers, just like the new version of Maps powered by Apple's servers. Which is exactly what users in New York would do when searching for an incorrect, ambiguous street address that returned something other than the expected result." - Winckel

Stay classy Google. I think it says alot that the biggest and most widely used map provider fakes result to knock a brand new rival #ios6 - Winckel

"Fars News Agency, a semi-official mouth piece of the Iranian regime, earnestly published a word-for-word duplicate of an article from the Onion, a spoof news organisation based in Chicago. The satirical article cited a fake Gallup poll which found that 77 per cent of white, rural voters would rather go to a baseball game or have a beer with Mr Ahmadinejad than with the US president. It went on to cite a made-up West Virginian named Dale Swiderski, who said that he preferred the Iranian to Mr Obama because: "He takes national defense seriously, and he'd never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does." Fars, which loyally prints the anti-Western and anti-Israeli tirades of senior Iranian officials, copied the entire Onion article without giving any indication of its source. It printed the short bulletin in English but did not appear to have translated it into Farsi." - Winckel

I get all my news from the Onion. - Winckel

What do they mean "satirical"? - Son of Groucho

Not sure it makes all that much sense - Dirac's booklet if you haven't acquired the maths isn't elegant awesomeness, it's dry gibberish :) - Iphigenie

@iphigenie care to expand? ;) - A. T.

are you sure? I have a masters in theoretical physics. Have forgotten much but still, could go on for a bit - Iphigenie

all right, kidding aside. The beauty of dirac's thinking is partly the formalism. Now the way he represented it originally wasn't the final one we use today but it's still all there. But it is more beautiful after you've got the maths and have struggled with some of the other way - then it is one of these refreshing moments where you realise you can make abstraction of a lot of the mechanics of the math and get to the underlying structure by a clever choice of representation. Feels like genius - especially when you see where it allowed him to go, once all the chaff was out of the way. BUT if you tried to read this at school, before you've walked some of the path, then you'd hate it. It'd be obscure and cryptic and something you learn by heart and don't get. I know. I hated physics at school... - Iphigenie

I find it's been working really well in London, Guy, my benchmark is Google Maps but I prefer Maps UI :-) - Winckel

I think that would look rather more convincing from someone who hasn't been using Windows - apparently without any great emotional trauma - for the longest time. Difficult to imagine such sensibilities in the area of mapping software. Not least since as far as I know, Goggle has a website which does mapping too. I think I'm seeing rather less proportionality and rather more schadenfreude than I'm used to. - Winckel

işte diyor islam içindeki yahudi yobaz kardeşlerimizin resmi bu!! - Dana Del Rey

:)) - omid

I saw that press conference :-) - Winckel

He's a fuckin retard - Danny

babasının resmini çizmiş.. - Dana Del Rey

attributed to margaret thatcher - Winckel

:-) - Winckel

yes. - kendrak

Apple's iPhone 5 fulfills the true potential of everything a smartphone should be able to do. The iPhone no longer feels like a device with compromises. In the past, the iPhone was great for everything but making phone calls. It is now good for making phone calls. It was a good camera, but struggled in low-light situations. It's now good in low-light situations. It was great for checking the web, but it took forever to get the web to connect on 3G. With LTE, that's not an issue. After using the iPhone 5 for five days, I feel like it is pretty much a perfect smartphone. I upgraded to a Verizon iPhone 5 from an AT&T iPhone 4 and the difference is almost night and day. - Winckel

http://mashable.com/2012... - محمد لی

Expectations were sky-high ahead of Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone 5 launch last week, and the company’s stock took a hit when opening-weekend sales failed to reach some industry watchers’ expectations. Analysts told clients to expect iPhone 5 sales to reach as high as 10 million units during its first three days of availability, but Apple announced on Monday that its new flagship smartphone sold 5 million units during its first weekend of availability. But even though Apple’s stock has dropped more than $35 since hitting a record high of $705.07 ahead of the iPhone 5′s release, one analyst still says Apple’s new iPhone launch was still “epic.” “Don’t be fooled by 3-day iPhone 5 tally, this is an epic launch,” wrote Topeka Capital Markets analyst Brian White in a recent note to investors. “We thought it would be helpful to put this launch into perspective versus the iPhone 4S on a few other metrics,” White said. “We believe indicators such as 24-hour pre-orders for the iPhone 5 vs. the 4S, along with pre-order sell out time, post pre-order shipping time and time to sell out at retail stores are more indicative of the strength of the iPhone 5 cycle than yesterday’s three-day sales number that we believe was held back by supply constraints.” White pointed to a number of factors in substantiating his claim that the new iPhone’s debut was epic: First-day iPhone 5 preorders doubled iPhone 4S preorders during the first 24 hours of availability. This represents 100% year-over-year growth while iPhone 4S preorders improved 67% over iPhone 4 preorders over the same period. Launch-day iPhone 5 preorder inventory sold out at Apple.com in less than one hour, far faster than iPhone 4S inventory, which was still available through much of the day after being made available at midnight. iPhone 5 shipping delays reached 3-4 weeks one day after preorders were made available (Update: It looks like White was a bit off here. Shipping quotes slipped to 3-4 weeks within seven days, not one). iPhone 4S shipping delays only reached 1-2 weeks. Most Apple stores sold out of launch-day iPhone 5 inventory according to White, whose survey of Apple stores indicated that 80%-85% of stores were sold out of new iPhones by Sunday evening. The analyst says this wasn’t the case last year when the iPhone 4S was released. White reiterated his Buy rating on shares of Apple stock and he maintains his 12-month price target of $1,111. Tags: Apple, iPhone 5 - Winckel

yes. - Winckel

Good to hear :-) The corsair always amazed me at how small it was. and I love the gull wings. - Winckel

http://www.youtube.com/watch... - boltz

:-) #ios6 - Winckel

Siri is one next week - Winckel

:-) - Winckel

"In defiance of the national outrage over the paddling of two high school girls by a male vice principal, a Texas school district voted last night to allow corporal punishment by members of the opposite sex. Rather than apologising for the actions of the male teacher who spanked two high school girls, the board members of Springtown Independent School District voted to change their policy, which now requires a female member of staff to be present if a male school official physically disciplines a girl. The vote followed a heated debate over the district's policy which began after Taylor Santos, 15 and Jada Watts, 16, were both struck with a paddle on their buttocks by assistant principal Kirt Shaw for disciplinary reasons." - Winckel

Eh? Schools can still physically discipline kids? I thought all that ended ages ago. - rønin

iOS6 48.6% after a week #ios6 - Winckel

"A recent analysis of Apple's Lightning USB cable shows that the pins on the plug aren't arranged symmetrically, suggesting that the Lightning port can dynamically reassign signals to each pin on the fly. "Dynamic assignment of the pins is the only way for the USB data to be routed" over the cable, according to boutique cable maker Double Helix Cables. While the standard USB power is routed symmetrically, so that it always aligns with the same pin on the Lightning connector, the data pins are not. "Take top pin 2 for example," Double Helix's Peter Bradstock told AppleInsider. "It is contiguous, electrically, with bottom pin 2. So, as the plug is inserted into the iPhone, if you have the cable in one way, pin 2 would go into the left side of the jack, flip it the other way and the same pair of pins is going to match up with the other side of the jack (as the electrical contacts in the iPhone's jacks are along the bottom)." As Apple noted during the iPhone 5 introduction, the Lightning port was designed as a purely digital interface that could adapt to various output needs now and in the future. So the dynamic pin assignment design makes sense—it's the only way Lightning could work with USB 2.0, HDMI, VGA, or even possibly USB 3.0—though it does seem somewhat overkill for the needs of USB 2.0. Perhaps the varied pin routing discovered by Double Helix lets the iPhone 5 recognize the type of cable plugged in." - Winckel

It delivers half the power, don't see that as viable - Winckel

zagreb is a wonderful place - Winckel

Does look nice. - Son of Groucho

:-) - Winckel