it took me about 3 seconds to realize that it is stupidly written
It's on the Web: http://timmurphy.org/2009/08/16/bold-and-italic-font-in-latex/... and I have no idea who is correct because I don't have LaTeX installed on this computer. You and anyone else who uses those tools for living is far more aware of the details of the markup. I do understand the intent, though, and such emphasis ("negative italics") is pretty common.
With regard to pdflatex, it was in nearly all packages of TeX that I played with. However at that time (was it indeed 10 years ago?) Acrobat Reader was not a nice thing to run, on Linux or anywhere else. (Today one has to be simply insane to touch it - Foxit Reader is much better, for the same low price of zero.)
I should also point out: LaTeX was designed to solve one problem, and solve it well: scientific author(s) wants to write a paper to be published in a journal.
I agree with that. However quite a few people try to cram that square peg into every hole that they come across, no matter its shape.
I say MS Word is the winner of this battle because it is good enough for its users. Would I use MS Word in a professional publishing house? It probably can't even do the layout as required for printing multiple pages on huge sheets of paper, on both sides. Publishers use other tools. But MS Word is pretty good when you have a PC and a printer; it gives you just enough control to run that printer, and you don't need to remember arcane \commands of TeX. Most people don't even type all that well. They just click buttons. A string of TeX commands would confuse the hell out of nearly every Word user. You may use a button to insert \foo{lorem ipsum}, but later you need to understand what that \foo does. More complex formatting, done easily in MS Word with highlighting, becomes mindboggingly hard when you program it in TeX. All the formatting commands are also a distraction:
\textit{The cake was \emph{huge} for a cup cake}
How can anyone work on that sentence? You have to read it in DVI. But WYSIWYG allows you to work on the final document directly. As opposed to scientific documents, most of MS Word output is not required to be a masterpiece. It just needs to be good enough.
Of course, there is yet another reason. Business documents vary wildly, from leaflets to brochures to memos to spreadsheets to banners. A note about a dead coworker will be printed in a different way from a note about a new baby in the family of another coworker. A "Lost Cat" ad will be different from both of them. In Word you can set up your style in just a couple of minutes because you are in control of all the elements of a style. In LaTeX you are a hostage of a few styles, all alike:-) and there is no chance for a mere user to whip up a new one on a whim.
This is very different from "physics exam papers" - those papers couldn't care less about the presentation because the content is all that matters. A business document is sometimes all about presentation. For example, three neighboring pizza outlets can compete on attractive photos and text; their product is more or less the same.
Even the most fanatical adherents of LaTeX admit that at some small level of document complexity MS Word and other WYSIWYG packages outperform LaTeX. Guess what, most business documents are under that threshold. Nobody at the office can afford to work ten years on his document and produce 100,000 pages, and 10,000 illustrations, and 50,000 bibliography references. Most documents are under twenty pages, because this gives the writer the agility in publishing his knowledge. Memos, notes, agendas, plans, schedules are often shorter than a couple of pages. This places the majority of office documents under the threshold. But if I need to generate a 1000-page datasheet for an Intel chipset... I am sure Intel already has a process in place to handle that, because they do publish those datasheets.
It isn't necessarily instant live update, but it is a far cry from paper and markers.
This still does not explain why an administrator, or a marketing worker, or an accountant, or even an engineer, should use a less convenient product if there is a more convenient one.
I understand that from the point of view of theory of computing the MS Word format is a disaster. However who in the industry could possibly care about that? The value is in ability to fire up the wordprocessor and have the final document as soon as you put the last character in. Note that Word is a default editor in Outlook, and it makes sense because Outlook defaults to HTML content because people want rich text in their email.
TeX was a major innovation in 1970's, when it was written to operate first decent printers. Today probably it's the best compiler for documents - if you want to compile yours. Most people don't do that; they instead wing them - start typing, and then improve the presentation and the content as things develop.
Programming of a typeset output is not popular for the same reason most people use calculators instead of Matlab. Programming of anything requires thinking ahead; thinking not about what you have here and now but what you will have after this or that step, and about what happens after that. It's a very different skill from calculating every intermediate value and then staring at it until you know what to do next.
I tried a couple of LaTeX front ends, and they kind of worked... in a clunky, slow way. But I couldn't understand why would I need one, since I don't deal with complex equations on a daily basis. If I were, I'd definitely run away from the disaster that masquerades as Equation Editor in MS Word. (It's a pain to use.) But my needs are simple - just as 99.99% of needs out there are.
you are supposed to write things. Then you twiddle how it looks a bit at the end.
That's hardly how any business document in existence is written. Layout is considered at the same time as the content. Presentation is often more than 50% of the value of the document. It is essential to be able to make edits right in the final output. Nobody is willing to print the DVI, then mark it up with a red pen, and then to find corresponding code that programs that piece of the document, and then to change it... and once you change something on page 1, things cascade down to page 100 - pictures and tables jump onto different pages, blank areas show up where none were before... this means you need to redo the DVI and review after every change. To compare, a WYSIWYG wordprocessor gives you exactly what you are going to print for given page settings. You just go from the first page down and make your changes. That's why MS Office (and WordPerfect before that) rule the office space, not TeX. Those wordprocessors do a pretty good job on having things done your way, with background pagination and other niceties.
GM played around with automatic driving as early as the 1950s. It's not true any more. GM now intends to have full-auto driving in Cadillacs by 2016.
They have to. The population ages quickly, and old people are not as good as they once were. I will be glad to buy a self-driving car when I cannot safely drive anymore because that will give me the same mobility that I have today, with even less hassle.
That ratio was growing, as the industry and commerce required literate people to learn the trade, to maintain ledgers, to build stuff. All that was done on paper, with a pen.
Today most of that is done in computers. Complexity of the law often even makes manual calculations obsolete - software like QuickBooks is far better at calculating taxes than the accountant. The technology was getting more and more complex to the worker, but at some point automation reversed that trend. This resulted in need for 10 simple workers and 1 tech. Tomorrow there will be just 1 simple worker for 1000 machines, just to keep an eye on them and to replace worn tools with new ones.
Computers removed the need to count. Algebra and higher areas of math were never needed to a common man; only engineers were trained to use those methods. Video and TV removed the need to read (they not only removed the need, they made the story more flashy, with explosions and with sexy girls in compromising positions.) Rigid business processes (ISO 9000 work instructions) removed the need to think. A bank clerk has a machine to count paper cash, and she has a computer to access the account. There is no place to perform calculations in one's head - and I wouldn't trust them anyhow.
In math, reading and problem-solving using technology [...]
And why would a common man need those skills in modern USA? Cash registers do all the math for a worker; there is nothing to read and no particular reason to bother, with TV in every room; and the only problem that needs to be solved is how to pay all the bills.
Those skills are indeed essential - but only if you are innovating, inventing, doing new stuff. However how many US workers can proudly say that they do such things? The US economy is known to be a "service economy" - and those jobs are static, frozen in time, requiring no R&D.
But if you work for a startup in a significant role, chances are good that you are smart and inventive. You may even read books now and then.
He isn't dispensing legal advice, he's giving an opinion. Kinda like what you did.
The GP's advice is not on the front page of Slashdot. The OP's advice is. The OP stands taller and shouts his opinion out louder.
Except his makes sense and is logical
None of that is relevant. Laws on the books are not there because they make sense. If you use your mad math skillz in court you will lose. Laws do have internal logic, but often it cannot be fully defined by mathematical or physical objects. On the lowest level the law deals with humans' emotions, desires, fears, and decisions. Often the baseline reference for those is as vague as "a reasonable person," or "those that are skilled in the art," or "their peers."
A carburetor does not need to "condition" it at all, just deliver a carefully controlled dose.
A gasoline engine with a carburetor runs on air-fuel mixture, not on gas. If you pour gas down the inlet manifold, the engine stops. The carburetor "conditions" the gasoline by mixing it with air in ratio that is prescribed for the given mode (vacuum, RPM, gas pedal, etc. - as many variables as you have money for.) The later carburetors, before they got obsoleted, were quite complex.
Gasoline is not very toxic. It could be compared to a distilled alcoholic beverage. It is easier to ignite with a match; however water does not make it burn hotter; the products of burning are not particularly poisonous; there is no danger of electrocution and secondary electric fires all over the car. A gas tank can be had for under $100, whereas a Li-Ion battery will cost you $30K. For that money you can buy two or three disposable gas cars.
It may well be that a battery fire is safer on occupants than the gasoline fire. The real question here is in rate of those fires. 99.9999% of cars on the road are gasoline cars. The probability of having a Tesla on fire should be vanishingly small. Still, the event has happened. Is it just because of a chance occurrence, or is it because Tesla is more prone to fire in the same situation that a gasoline car will not ignite? Admit it, a typical frontal collision is not likely to cause fire in a car. The fuel wouldn't be pumped out of the tank - and it doesn't flow on its own, as opposed to electric current...
It's evidence; it won't be destroyed until after the trial. The LEOs will probably convert BTC to USD to capture the value. With SR dead, there goes the first and the last real reason to own BTC, so BTC exchange rate may drop quite a lot.
The same OS??? You mean no service packs, no hotfixes, no nothing? That would be a radical departure from Microsoft's practice of releasing a Beta onto the customer and then gradually fixing the most glaring bugs online.
The OS never stays the same. You actually would be better off with an old Blackberry devices - it is guaranteed to remain the same:-) It's so easy to update software that those updates occur on weekly basis - sometimes just for marketing purposes.
The same OS on a different hardware is just as bad as a different OS on the same hardware. Things change; but not every change is beneficial. Since tablets are heavily consumer devices, nobody cares about a weird 10K batch that some airline wanted to buy. This is what they move per week. Apple sold 750K iPads per day in one specific case. Do they care about a 10K order that comes with a mile of strings attached? What retailer needs that headache?
This is why professional hardware costs as much as it costs. Not only servers, but laptops and everything else. It takes real money to have a product available for ten years, even if the demand for the product is small. An example: Panasonic Toughbook. It costs like a luxury item, but it's not all that pleasant to use.
Since changes in software can easily render the product unusable (see the long history of bad patches from MS,) the certification will be definitely invalidated if you update the OS. Nobody is going to do that. And as a pilot you don't want to find yourself above clouds, having nothing but a GPS location but no faintest idea where you are, and what airspace is around, and what is the landing approach (this one is also interesting.) Try to land there without knowing the route:-)
Delta is probably confused. The name "Surface 2" does not mean that the tablet will be still in production 2 years down the road.
As matter of fact, it'd be mightily insane to expect any given tablet to remain in production for two years. Whole chipsets get invented, sold and obsoleted in this time frame. Even if MS has the best intentions in the world (which they rarely do,) they may not be physically able to buy the parts.
Besides, once the device is approved, it will stay in use for a few years before the next one is approved and deployed. During all this time the tablets need to be serviced. In case of glued-shut devices this means "replacements." Those replacements must be available, say, seven years from now - in the year 2020. You cannot do a lifetime buy of tablets with Li-Ion batteries inside. So how is that supposed to work? A batch of 10K devices is not that large on the tablet market.
I guess you live pretty far from San Francisco airport. The latest crash there, just a month ago, illustrated pretty well why it is worth knowing stuff about the place where you are about to land.
If MS satisfies only 2% of the requests, it means that the requestor has to send them, on average, 50 copies of the same request. MS then rejects the first 49 copies and approves the last one.
But, as other posters already said, what is MS doing by deciding which requests to satisfy? MS is not part of the justice system in the USA. They should only respond to proper, court-authorized orders, and reject all others. I cannot imagine that 98% of all requests come from rent-a-cops from the mall. So who is it that sends toothless requests, and on what authority they do it?
I understand that believers don't need proof. But I do. Therefore,
It is your choice what to believe
My choice is to believe nothing. You can call it agnosticism, or nihilism. Once the facts are in, I will gladly change my understanding of the world. As it stands, though, it is most logical (per Occam) to presume that God does not exist. At least in those terms that the Bible uses. Since we do not know what process created the Universe, it may just as well be called God. However that God would be totally unaware of our daily life and sins, just as an elephant is unaware of sins of viruses and bacteria in the soil under his feet.
Your statement would be proper if you refer to militant atheists; those reject existence of God no matter what facts may exist in favor of the hypothesis. In other words, God may appear before them and make miracles, and the atheist would keep saying "nice hallucination you got there, man."
In practice, existence or nonexistence of God is irrelevant to our daily lives. Sinners are not punished out of this worldly existence; true belivers and followers are not rewarded either. (Just a small miracle, like life for 200 years, would be a great proof that following God's instructions is good for you.) If one day the city of San Francisco is smitten by fire and rocks from the sky, that would give some serious credence to certain stories from the Bible. Until then, those are just stories, collectively written centuries after the alleged fact by unknown monks for unknown, but hopefully educational, purposes.
A reasoning atheist is acknowledging that by all reliable, firsthand evidence there is no man in the sky who peers down from the clouds and watches us intently. We also understand that it would be foolish, on part of God, to do that. We do not make robots and then punish them for their mistakes. If they err, it's the programmer's mistake. Many criminals are born stupid, or raised stupid by stupid parents. God could eliminate crime by just adding a genetic revulsion to harming others. A merciless machine of evolution, on the other hand, would intentionally make us aggressive because it's a good survival trait. Even this small test is not in favor of God.
So what's the purpose of religion today? Just to give you a sweet lie that you will not really die after your body dies? If that were true, how could a kind, loving God judge the future endless existence of a soul just based on its few first milliseconds after birth? We do not cast newborns away, into a sea of fire, if they soil their diapers in their first day on this Earth. Why then God would do the same to a soul? It all doesn't make sense; however it makes plenty of sense if religion was invented as a way to explain the world, and then morphed into the way to control the population. The power of the Church was unrivaled in Middle Ages; Popes were kingmakers, and they sent armies into Crusades. Many bad things occurred just because people "chose to believe." Choosing to believe in most religions equals choosing to be led by the nose. Why would a sane, independently thinking person accept that fate?
All fairy tales are painted on the background of reality. Of course most of those cities existed; and even some people probably were known from old papers. (It's not like the Bible was written by illiterates.) Toronto certainly exists; however the old TV show "Forever Knight" does not prove that vampires are real.
The real question is somewhat different. Were there any supernatural events really occurring in the Biblical setting? What is the evidence of those events, other than someone saying that they did occur? Modern literature is full of tales that are written more convincingly. They could easily become someone's Holy Books, if only anyone wanted them for the purpose.
If the God wanted to give us proof of his existence, he could easily put some clues into the Bible; for example, the following set {1, 3, 11, 19, 37, 55, 87} the humanity wouldn't be able to understand until much later. He could use any other law of math or physics that would be easy to encode and hard to calculate, like the Pi. It would instantly confirm that someone knowledgeable took part in writing the book. But, as it is, the Bible appears to be written entirely by ancient people, for ancient people. A God wouldn't need to depend on scribes to record His message: it would be forever engraved into a solid diamond crystal five meters tall, just as an example, protected by a force field or by a thin layer of different time. But there is no such evidence, even though we have Pyramids that are older than the Bible.
Slashdot Mirror
it took me about 3 seconds to realize that it is stupidly written
It's on the Web: http://timmurphy.org/2009/08/16/bold-and-italic-font-in-latex/ ... and I have no idea who is correct because I don't have LaTeX installed on this computer. You and anyone else who uses those tools for living is far more aware of the details of the markup. I do understand the intent, though, and such emphasis ("negative italics") is pretty common.
With regard to pdflatex, it was in nearly all packages of TeX that I played with. However at that time (was it indeed 10 years ago?) Acrobat Reader was not a nice thing to run, on Linux or anywhere else. (Today one has to be simply insane to touch it - Foxit Reader is much better, for the same low price of zero.)
I should also point out: LaTeX was designed to solve one problem, and solve it well: scientific author(s) wants to write a paper to be published in a journal.
I agree with that. However quite a few people try to cram that square peg into every hole that they come across, no matter its shape.
I say MS Word is the winner of this battle because it is good enough for its users. Would I use MS Word in a professional publishing house? It probably can't even do the layout as required for printing multiple pages on huge sheets of paper, on both sides. Publishers use other tools. But MS Word is pretty good when you have a PC and a printer; it gives you just enough control to run that printer, and you don't need to remember arcane \commands of TeX. Most people don't even type all that well. They just click buttons. A string of TeX commands would confuse the hell out of nearly every Word user. You may use a button to insert \foo{lorem ipsum}, but later you need to understand what that \foo does. More complex formatting, done easily in MS Word with highlighting, becomes mindboggingly hard when you program it in TeX. All the formatting commands are also a distraction:
\textit{The cake was \emph{huge} for a cup cake}
How can anyone work on that sentence? You have to read it in DVI. But WYSIWYG allows you to work on the final document directly. As opposed to scientific documents, most of MS Word output is not required to be a masterpiece. It just needs to be good enough.
Of course, there is yet another reason. Business documents vary wildly, from leaflets to brochures to memos to spreadsheets to banners. A note about a dead coworker will be printed in a different way from a note about a new baby in the family of another coworker. A "Lost Cat" ad will be different from both of them. In Word you can set up your style in just a couple of minutes because you are in control of all the elements of a style. In LaTeX you are a hostage of a few styles, all alike :-) and there is no chance for a mere user to whip up a new one on a whim.
This is very different from "physics exam papers" - those papers couldn't care less about the presentation because the content is all that matters. A business document is sometimes all about presentation. For example, three neighboring pizza outlets can compete on attractive photos and text; their product is more or less the same.
Even the most fanatical adherents of LaTeX admit that at some small level of document complexity MS Word and other WYSIWYG packages outperform LaTeX. Guess what, most business documents are under that threshold. Nobody at the office can afford to work ten years on his document and produce 100,000 pages, and 10,000 illustrations, and 50,000 bibliography references. Most documents are under twenty pages, because this gives the writer the agility in publishing his knowledge. Memos, notes, agendas, plans, schedules are often shorter than a couple of pages. This places the majority of office documents under the threshold. But if I need to generate a 1000-page datasheet for an Intel chipset ... I am sure Intel already has a process in place to handle that, because they do publish those datasheets.
It isn't necessarily instant live update, but it is a far cry from paper and markers.
This still does not explain why an administrator, or a marketing worker, or an accountant, or even an engineer, should use a less convenient product if there is a more convenient one.
I understand that from the point of view of theory of computing the MS Word format is a disaster. However who in the industry could possibly care about that? The value is in ability to fire up the wordprocessor and have the final document as soon as you put the last character in. Note that Word is a default editor in Outlook, and it makes sense because Outlook defaults to HTML content because people want rich text in their email.
TeX was a major innovation in 1970's, when it was written to operate first decent printers. Today probably it's the best compiler for documents - if you want to compile yours. Most people don't do that; they instead wing them - start typing, and then improve the presentation and the content as things develop.
Programming of a typeset output is not popular for the same reason most people use calculators instead of Matlab. Programming of anything requires thinking ahead; thinking not about what you have here and now but what you will have after this or that step, and about what happens after that. It's a very different skill from calculating every intermediate value and then staring at it until you know what to do next.
I tried a couple of LaTeX front ends, and they kind of worked... in a clunky, slow way. But I couldn't understand why would I need one, since I don't deal with complex equations on a daily basis. If I were, I'd definitely run away from the disaster that masquerades as Equation Editor in MS Word. (It's a pain to use.) But my needs are simple - just as 99.99% of needs out there are.
you are supposed to write things. Then you twiddle how it looks a bit at the end.
That's hardly how any business document in existence is written. Layout is considered at the same time as the content. Presentation is often more than 50% of the value of the document. It is essential to be able to make edits right in the final output. Nobody is willing to print the DVI, then mark it up with a red pen, and then to find corresponding code that programs that piece of the document, and then to change it ... and once you change something on page 1, things cascade down to page 100 - pictures and tables jump onto different pages, blank areas show up where none were before... this means you need to redo the DVI and review after every change. To compare, a WYSIWYG wordprocessor gives you exactly what you are going to print for given page settings. You just go from the first page down and make your changes. That's why MS Office (and WordPerfect before that) rule the office space, not TeX. Those wordprocessors do a pretty good job on having things done your way, with background pagination and other niceties.
GM played around with automatic driving as early as the 1950s. It's not true any more. GM now intends to have full-auto driving in Cadillacs by 2016.
They have to. The population ages quickly, and old people are not as good as they once were. I will be glad to buy a self-driving car when I cannot safely drive anymore because that will give me the same mobility that I have today, with even less hassle.
That ratio was growing, as the industry and commerce required literate people to learn the trade, to maintain ledgers, to build stuff. All that was done on paper, with a pen.
Today most of that is done in computers. Complexity of the law often even makes manual calculations obsolete - software like QuickBooks is far better at calculating taxes than the accountant. The technology was getting more and more complex to the worker, but at some point automation reversed that trend. This resulted in need for 10 simple workers and 1 tech. Tomorrow there will be just 1 simple worker for 1000 machines, just to keep an eye on them and to replace worn tools with new ones.
Computers removed the need to count. Algebra and higher areas of math were never needed to a common man; only engineers were trained to use those methods. Video and TV removed the need to read (they not only removed the need, they made the story more flashy, with explosions and with sexy girls in compromising positions.) Rigid business processes (ISO 9000 work instructions) removed the need to think. A bank clerk has a machine to count paper cash, and she has a computer to access the account. There is no place to perform calculations in one's head - and I wouldn't trust them anyhow.
In math, reading and problem-solving using technology [...]
And why would a common man need those skills in modern USA? Cash registers do all the math for a worker; there is nothing to read and no particular reason to bother, with TV in every room; and the only problem that needs to be solved is how to pay all the bills.
Those skills are indeed essential - but only if you are innovating, inventing, doing new stuff. However how many US workers can proudly say that they do such things? The US economy is known to be a "service economy" - and those jobs are static, frozen in time, requiring no R&D.
But if you work for a startup in a significant role, chances are good that you are smart and inventive. You may even read books now and then.
He isn't dispensing legal advice, he's giving an opinion. Kinda like what you did.
The GP's advice is not on the front page of Slashdot. The OP's advice is. The OP stands taller and shouts his opinion out louder.
Except his makes sense and is logical
None of that is relevant. Laws on the books are not there because they make sense. If you use your mad math skillz in court you will lose. Laws do have internal logic, but often it cannot be fully defined by mathematical or physical objects. On the lowest level the law deals with humans' emotions, desires, fears, and decisions. Often the baseline reference for those is as vague as "a reasonable person," or "those that are skilled in the art," or "their peers."
Don't we have enough of confirmation bias already?
"newly discovered" != "new". Those streams may have been there for millions of years. They certainly were there when the continent was free of ice.
I never felt the need for fine-grained permissions. Here is the configuration that I use:
permissions {
deny all;
}
If you need something that doesn't pass through that filter, come and see me.
So why is one Tesla on fire such a hot item?
Because there are very few Teslas around, and because they showed up on the market just about a year ago.
A carburetor does not need to "condition" it at all, just deliver a carefully controlled dose.
A gasoline engine with a carburetor runs on air-fuel mixture, not on gas. If you pour gas down the inlet manifold, the engine stops. The carburetor "conditions" the gasoline by mixing it with air in ratio that is prescribed for the given mode (vacuum, RPM, gas pedal, etc. - as many variables as you have money for.) The later carburetors, before they got obsoleted, were quite complex.
See for yourself: http://www.evnut.com/docs/gasoline_msds.pdf
Gasoline is not very toxic. It could be compared to a distilled alcoholic beverage. It is easier to ignite with a match; however water does not make it burn hotter; the products of burning are not particularly poisonous; there is no danger of electrocution and secondary electric fires all over the car. A gas tank can be had for under $100, whereas a Li-Ion battery will cost you $30K. For that money you can buy two or three disposable gas cars.
It may well be that a battery fire is safer on occupants than the gasoline fire. The real question here is in rate of those fires. 99.9999% of cars on the road are gasoline cars. The probability of having a Tesla on fire should be vanishingly small. Still, the event has happened. Is it just because of a chance occurrence, or is it because Tesla is more prone to fire in the same situation that a gasoline car will not ignite? Admit it, a typical frontal collision is not likely to cause fire in a car. The fuel wouldn't be pumped out of the tank - and it doesn't flow on its own, as opposed to electric current...
When they size 20kg of cocaine "with a street value of $3.6m"[1], they don't sell it, or at least they are not supposed to. They destroy it.
- Officer Smith, please take this pile of drugs and make it disappear!
- Sure, boss. You won't see this particular pile of drugs ever again.
The illegal criminal property will be destroyed
It's evidence; it won't be destroyed until after the trial. The LEOs will probably convert BTC to USD to capture the value. With SR dead, there goes the first and the last real reason to own BTC, so BTC exchange rate may drop quite a lot.
Give the same OS,
The same OS??? You mean no service packs, no hotfixes, no nothing? That would be a radical departure from Microsoft's practice of releasing a Beta onto the customer and then gradually fixing the most glaring bugs online.
The OS never stays the same. You actually would be better off with an old Blackberry devices - it is guaranteed to remain the same :-) It's so easy to update software that those updates occur on weekly basis - sometimes just for marketing purposes.
The same OS on a different hardware is just as bad as a different OS on the same hardware. Things change; but not every change is beneficial. Since tablets are heavily consumer devices, nobody cares about a weird 10K batch that some airline wanted to buy. This is what they move per week. Apple sold 750K iPads per day in one specific case. Do they care about a 10K order that comes with a mile of strings attached? What retailer needs that headache?
This is why professional hardware costs as much as it costs. Not only servers, but laptops and everything else. It takes real money to have a product available for ten years, even if the demand for the product is small. An example: Panasonic Toughbook. It costs like a luxury item, but it's not all that pleasant to use.
Since changes in software can easily render the product unusable (see the long history of bad patches from MS,) the certification will be definitely invalidated if you update the OS. Nobody is going to do that. And as a pilot you don't want to find yourself above clouds, having nothing but a GPS location but no faintest idea where you are, and what airspace is around, and what is the landing approach (this one is also interesting.) Try to land there without knowing the route :-)
Delta is probably confused. The name "Surface 2" does not mean that the tablet will be still in production 2 years down the road.
As matter of fact, it'd be mightily insane to expect any given tablet to remain in production for two years. Whole chipsets get invented, sold and obsoleted in this time frame. Even if MS has the best intentions in the world (which they rarely do,) they may not be physically able to buy the parts.
Besides, once the device is approved, it will stay in use for a few years before the next one is approved and deployed. During all this time the tablets need to be serviced. In case of glued-shut devices this means "replacements." Those replacements must be available, say, seven years from now - in the year 2020. You cannot do a lifetime buy of tablets with Li-Ion batteries inside. So how is that supposed to work? A batch of 10K devices is not that large on the tablet market.
Not what flight critical means...
I guess you live pretty far from San Francisco airport. The latest crash there, just a month ago, illustrated pretty well why it is worth knowing stuff about the place where you are about to land.
(c) Student build, ship [an] inspecting Robot - so some students construct and send away a robot that can do (unspecified) inspections.
(d) Students build ship [while] inspecting [a] Robot - so some students construct a ship while looking at an unspecified robot from various angles.
If MS satisfies only 2% of the requests, it means that the requestor has to send them, on average, 50 copies of the same request. MS then rejects the first 49 copies and approves the last one.
But, as other posters already said, what is MS doing by deciding which requests to satisfy? MS is not part of the justice system in the USA. They should only respond to proper, court-authorized orders, and reject all others. I cannot imagine that 98% of all requests come from rent-a-cops from the mall. So who is it that sends toothless requests, and on what authority they do it?
I understand that believers don't need proof. But I do. Therefore,
It is your choice what to believe
My choice is to believe nothing. You can call it agnosticism, or nihilism. Once the facts are in, I will gladly change my understanding of the world. As it stands, though, it is most logical (per Occam) to presume that God does not exist. At least in those terms that the Bible uses. Since we do not know what process created the Universe, it may just as well be called God. However that God would be totally unaware of our daily life and sins, just as an elephant is unaware of sins of viruses and bacteria in the soil under his feet.
Your statement would be proper if you refer to militant atheists; those reject existence of God no matter what facts may exist in favor of the hypothesis. In other words, God may appear before them and make miracles, and the atheist would keep saying "nice hallucination you got there, man."
In practice, existence or nonexistence of God is irrelevant to our daily lives. Sinners are not punished out of this worldly existence; true belivers and followers are not rewarded either. (Just a small miracle, like life for 200 years, would be a great proof that following God's instructions is good for you.) If one day the city of San Francisco is smitten by fire and rocks from the sky, that would give some serious credence to certain stories from the Bible. Until then, those are just stories, collectively written centuries after the alleged fact by unknown monks for unknown, but hopefully educational, purposes.
A reasoning atheist is acknowledging that by all reliable, firsthand evidence there is no man in the sky who peers down from the clouds and watches us intently. We also understand that it would be foolish, on part of God, to do that. We do not make robots and then punish them for their mistakes. If they err, it's the programmer's mistake. Many criminals are born stupid, or raised stupid by stupid parents. God could eliminate crime by just adding a genetic revulsion to harming others. A merciless machine of evolution, on the other hand, would intentionally make us aggressive because it's a good survival trait. Even this small test is not in favor of God.
So what's the purpose of religion today? Just to give you a sweet lie that you will not really die after your body dies? If that were true, how could a kind, loving God judge the future endless existence of a soul just based on its few first milliseconds after birth? We do not cast newborns away, into a sea of fire, if they soil their diapers in their first day on this Earth. Why then God would do the same to a soul? It all doesn't make sense; however it makes plenty of sense if religion was invented as a way to explain the world, and then morphed into the way to control the population. The power of the Church was unrivaled in Middle Ages; Popes were kingmakers, and they sent armies into Crusades. Many bad things occurred just because people "chose to believe." Choosing to believe in most religions equals choosing to be led by the nose. Why would a sane, independently thinking person accept that fate?
All fairy tales are painted on the background of reality. Of course most of those cities existed; and even some people probably were known from old papers. (It's not like the Bible was written by illiterates.) Toronto certainly exists; however the old TV show "Forever Knight" does not prove that vampires are real.
The real question is somewhat different. Were there any supernatural events really occurring in the Biblical setting? What is the evidence of those events, other than someone saying that they did occur? Modern literature is full of tales that are written more convincingly. They could easily become someone's Holy Books, if only anyone wanted them for the purpose.
If the God wanted to give us proof of his existence, he could easily put some clues into the Bible; for example, the following set {1, 3, 11, 19, 37, 55, 87} the humanity wouldn't be able to understand until much later. He could use any other law of math or physics that would be easy to encode and hard to calculate, like the Pi. It would instantly confirm that someone knowledgeable took part in writing the book. But, as it is, the Bible appears to be written entirely by ancient people, for ancient people. A God wouldn't need to depend on scribes to record His message: it would be forever engraved into a solid diamond crystal five meters tall, just as an example, protected by a force field or by a thin layer of different time. But there is no such evidence, even though we have Pyramids that are older than the Bible.