The idea that you'd rip up hundreds of miles of road between two North American cities to fit complex electrical systems under them so a few dozen trucks an hour could drive along there using electricity rather than diesel is simply laughable.
More like a hundred or more every hour during the day, and a few dozen an hour late at night. The number of trucks traveling over the highway system in Oklahoma is staggering, and having electrical systems under the highways would be well worth the money. As for ripping up the highway, they do that anyway on a regular basis to ensure maintenance and safety. If half the vehicles on the highway converted to electric it would be worth the money in the end.
I worked for Dell tech support in Oklahoma City Oklahoma about 8 years ago. They have since expanded from one facility to three facilities in the area in addition to all the other US phone support campuses throughout the USA. They also provide support centers in South America and various parts of Europe and Asia to better serve their customers.
Where I work we've transitioned network staff to programming in their 40s and cobol programmers to C# in their 50s, and not once have we had any of them fail. Age related issues can hinder learning, but that doesn't mean everyone who is over 35 is doomed to fail in IT. The capability to learn new languages and programming techniques is different from person to person, and age by itself is not going to stop anyone.
Your first statement immediately made all other statements pointless. You immediately showed that you are unable to have an intelligent conversation and thus your view following the slurs are meaningless.
I remember reading somewhere that the purpose for the Surface was originally to force developers to stop dumping out crap devices. Sort of a "Hey, we're going to release a nice piece of hardware with our next OS, and if you can't drop something better than a netbook to compete with it then I guess we don't need you." MS depends on their hardware providers to step up and compete with the iPad and iPhone, and up until the Surface none of them tried to do that effectively (not that they had a great OS for it with win7, but it was fairly good for touch). Now we see a ton of hybrids, slates, and touchbooks that all run Win8 with pretty nice features.
I don't believe they are selling poorly. They've sold around 1 million units, and they've only been out for around 1 month. It sounds great to say "less than 1 million units in a quarter!" but the truth is they haven't even been out for a quarter, not even half a quarter. But lucky for slashdot plenty of people are around to make accusations based on incomplete information and an extreme bias against a company that actually produces something (unlike most of the posters).
Keeping hatred under control, perhaps. But even then you don't see anyone else patching pirated copies of their software 'for the good of everyone', even if it is for damage control.
So you had multiple copies flagged as unlicensed or as invalidly licensed, and they gave multiple warnings that the issue existed so you could fix the problem but your employees failed to notify you, and somehow that is MS being a dick? After that they help you fix the problem by giving you new CD keys and appologizing to you, and they still aren't nice to pirates? That makes no sense at all. Also, considering you started by saying it was half a dozen machines and followed it up by saying "most of our computers" I'll bet you're a small business which means they didn't exactly apologize because they had to, they did it because it was the right thing to do.
It seems to me that they were pretty damn fair the whole time.
Microsoft provides free updates to their OS even if you're using a copy they know is pirated. I'd say that has a bit of good will to it, especially since most people just get a "you may be a victim of piracy" warning and a black desktop background. When it comes to being polite to people who pirate or infringe on your work, MS isn't exactly slashing throats.
He isn't saying at once, he's saying on multiple consoles in the same house at different times. For example, you're watching a movie in the living room so your child/sibling/mate takes the game into their room to play it. This is a common and legitimate use of the game, but would require a household to buy multiple 'licenses' to be able to use the same disc just on different consoles.
The UK is a horrible example to use as a measurement of how long it takes for an area to change from 2Mbps to 100Mbps. The parts of the UK that have shifted are relatively dense and have a high HPM (homes per mile) to warrant the massive spending required to get equipment capable of supporting this kind of change. The physical topology of the UK when compared to other areas is miniscule (USA? India? China? Australia?) and relatively trivial. On the other hand, in the USA there are not only higher upgrade costs, but incentives to NOT upgrade (i.e. local monopolies for every city) since there is little or no competition for internet. Sure, AT&T 'competes' with cable and satellite, but you don't see cable companies overbuilding eachother (and you won't thanks to franchise contracts and gentlemen's agreements) to get your money. No, your options are normally between one of two evils and the pricing is usually about the same (especially since many small-medium size MSOs actually lease their connections from AT&T to save money).
Bandwidth won't be shooting up over night, or even in the next decade for most people. The price will double long before the bandwidth does.
Really, because the people I see clustering together based on race (by choice) weren't even alive 40 years ago, and the city I live in isn't segregated that way.
The tone you're setting is wrong, because it implies that all white people are racist and somehow dedicate every waking moment to ruining and isolating non-white people. In reality most of the wide array of cultures and ethnic groups in America tend to bulk together out of comfort and stability by choice, not because they are rounded up and placed in isolation camps. People want to spend time typically with other people that are like them which includes taste in art, skill set, and (tada) ethnic origin. You see this all over the world and it establishes unique and interesting subcultures.
On the note of racism though which is always applied to white people oddly, I'd like to point out that non-whites are equally racist and (unlike white people) are often more willing to admit it because there is no focus on shaming them for it. One example is the shooting in Florida where the man is half hispanic and half white. The man claims himself to be hispanic as his primary race, but the minute people started saying he was racist they started calling him white or "half white". They completely stripped him of his willfully claimed ethnicity, mostly because saying a white man hates black people will sell better than a hispanic hates black people.
You can't control if peanuts are or are not in a school at this level of allergy. I eat peanuts every morning at breakfast. If I had a child go to school with peanut residue on his hands and face (even a small amount) then the ban becomes effectively useless. In cases like these (and we're talking what, 1 in 100,000 schools at a generous estimate?) the kid shouldn't be in a public school. I'll put it this way: 150 people (adult and child alike) die in America annually from food related allergies, meaning you're more likely to die from a bee sting or a lightning strike. To put it in further perspective, 2,000 children drown every year: but we still have public pools.
I guess the kid can't go to a gas station, grocery store, or any other store for that matter as well since most places these days have bagged peanuts in the checkout isle. In which case, the kid probably shouldn't be in a public school and instead be homeschooled since they have an allergy that will mean they die just about everywhere they go. Since, as you said, they don't have to be removed from the bag for the peanut to kill the person.
The CDC uses a flawed method of measuring "obese" honestly.
Body mass index (BMI) was calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared, rounded to one decimal place. Obesity in adults was defined as BMI greater than or equal to 30.
This method of calculating BMI puts many people into the obese category that aren't actually at an unhealthy weight. Not only are normal people you see regularly at a 30BMI based on this type of scale, but this includes all people who do any form of highly competitive sport, body building, or other activity that would increase muscle mass or require you to store extra weight (including long distance swimmers). Based on BMI height/weight measurements, just about every single navy seal is fat.
I'd be fine with that actually, since I don't agree with mandatory health care. Affordable yes, but that is a hard thing to define and not something that can be guaranteed since the current system has a profit motive which also goes against the idea of affordable (since everyone MUST have it, why make it affordable?)
Actually when you go to rob someone taking a gun (since they can't legally own one) is the best move to both passify the home owner and / or murder them if needed. In these instances there won't be anyone to see you do it. The only person who did see you is now dead on the floor (or people if you murder a whole family). Criminals don't think "what is the minimal amount of defense I can take into this robbery", no they think "What can I do to make sure I get away without being caught". A gun pretty much ensures that when you tell the home owner to bury his face in the pillow while you tie him up, he does it.
This is why Americans don't want to give up weapons. We know the "kind criminal" is a myth, and we don't intend to be a victim while we hope that someone shows up to save us.
No actually, it doesn't make anything your business other than the fact that you're being over charged for insurance based on a faulty and quite honestly questionable business practice. If they needed to raise the cost of insurance, it wouldn't be such a profitable industry. Instead it is extremely profitable because people like yourself get confused and blame other customers.
The weight of the people around you is:: drum roll:: none of your business! Yes, if someone works to earn a paycheck, they get to spend it in any way that they want. If a 450lb man wants to buy a 600oz mega-ultra-gulp I guess he's going to die of diabetes, but the transaction is between him and the seller. Similarly if you don't want to be around fat people then don't be around fat people. Leave, walk somewhere else. It isn't like 8 of 10 people standing on the sidewalk are giant tubs of lard. You notice fat people because they aren't the norm and are not nearly as common as people think. If they were, you wouldn't call them "fat", you'd call them "normal".
If you don't like what people spend money on then change careers and become a financial advisor so that the people who care to listen can receive your sage-like advice. Otherwise you need to realize that how people spend their money is between them and the people they spend it with. If you don't like it, well tough shit. Life is hard, get a helmet.
Microsoft won't purchase the Lumia line because it would immediately create a conflicting interest to their main product (the OS) being used on other devices. I know that if I made smart phones I wouldn't want to use someone else's OS when they are already competing with me in the market (also I think MS agreed to not actually manufacture their own hardware when they started signing up manufacturers, but I don't have a source available).
I'm certainly not saying that Nokia shouldn't consider diversifying, but I think quitting is a horrible idea. The problem with taking on another OS like android however is that it may harm their relationship with MS, which would definitely sink them at this point. The Lumia 900 is a really great phone and I see quite a few of them every day when I'm out and about, so I know they are selling well which may be the ticket that Nokia needs to keep going. Dropping MS so soon after a serious flagship release would be suicide and basically cripple the potential for their 900 and 710 devices to really take off. I know the AT&T store near my house can't keep the 900 in stock which kills the other WP7 devices that I've heard of lately.
Marketing has been the real difference (I think) when comparing Nokia and the other WP7 manufacturers. Before the 900 and 710 I hadn't heard any WP7 ads on the radio, never noticed any real push from sales staff, no premium display location in AT&T stores (they were usually in the back corner near the cases), and definitely no TV spots that made any sense (the initial TV ads were confusingly crappy). Nokia seems to have their head in the game for this push, and I think they can probably pull through just fine as they are if they keep up the pace in their marketing campaign.
People said the same thing about the XBOX because of their massive initial losses, and swore MS would fail and they should 'just give up'. Now the XBox360 is one of the top entertainment mediums for not just games but also other forms like music and movies. People complain and cry 'just give up' because windows phone 7 (which has barely been on the maret for what, not even two years now?) isn't the top pick for phones. That quitting attitude is why critics are just that, critics, and they don't own or run major global corps.
WP7 might fail and it might not, but to assume that MS and Nokia should just give up because they can't take over a market in one year is, well, pathetic.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that you'd rip up hundreds of miles of road between two North American cities to fit complex electrical systems under them so a few dozen trucks an hour could drive along there using electricity rather than diesel is simply laughable.
More like a hundred or more every hour during the day, and a few dozen an hour late at night. The number of trucks traveling over the highway system in Oklahoma is staggering, and having electrical systems under the highways would be well worth the money. As for ripping up the highway, they do that anyway on a regular basis to ensure maintenance and safety. If half the vehicles on the highway converted to electric it would be worth the money in the end.
I worked for Dell tech support in Oklahoma City Oklahoma about 8 years ago. They have since expanded from one facility to three facilities in the area in addition to all the other US phone support campuses throughout the USA. They also provide support centers in South America and various parts of Europe and Asia to better serve their customers.
Where I work we've transitioned network staff to programming in their 40s and cobol programmers to C# in their 50s, and not once have we had any of them fail. Age related issues can hinder learning, but that doesn't mean everyone who is over 35 is doomed to fail in IT. The capability to learn new languages and programming techniques is different from person to person, and age by itself is not going to stop anyone.
Yes.
Pick a side, any side! Logic is no object here!
Your first statement immediately made all other statements pointless. You immediately showed that you are unable to have an intelligent conversation and thus your view following the slurs are meaningless.
I remember reading somewhere that the purpose for the Surface was originally to force developers to stop dumping out crap devices. Sort of a "Hey, we're going to release a nice piece of hardware with our next OS, and if you can't drop something better than a netbook to compete with it then I guess we don't need you." MS depends on their hardware providers to step up and compete with the iPad and iPhone, and up until the Surface none of them tried to do that effectively (not that they had a great OS for it with win7, but it was fairly good for touch). Now we see a ton of hybrids, slates, and touchbooks that all run Win8 with pretty nice features.
I don't believe they are selling poorly. They've sold around 1 million units, and they've only been out for around 1 month. It sounds great to say "less than 1 million units in a quarter!" but the truth is they haven't even been out for a quarter, not even half a quarter. But lucky for slashdot plenty of people are around to make accusations based on incomplete information and an extreme bias against a company that actually produces something (unlike most of the posters).
Keeping hatred under control, perhaps. But even then you don't see anyone else patching pirated copies of their software 'for the good of everyone', even if it is for damage control.
So you had multiple copies flagged as unlicensed or as invalidly licensed, and they gave multiple warnings that the issue existed so you could fix the problem but your employees failed to notify you, and somehow that is MS being a dick? After that they help you fix the problem by giving you new CD keys and appologizing to you, and they still aren't nice to pirates? That makes no sense at all. Also, considering you started by saying it was half a dozen machines and followed it up by saying "most of our computers" I'll bet you're a small business which means they didn't exactly apologize because they had to, they did it because it was the right thing to do.
It seems to me that they were pretty damn fair the whole time.
Microsoft provides free updates to their OS even if you're using a copy they know is pirated. I'd say that has a bit of good will to it, especially since most people just get a "you may be a victim of piracy" warning and a black desktop background. When it comes to being polite to people who pirate or infringe on your work, MS isn't exactly slashing throats.
He isn't saying at once, he's saying on multiple consoles in the same house at different times. For example, you're watching a movie in the living room so your child/sibling/mate takes the game into their room to play it. This is a common and legitimate use of the game, but would require a household to buy multiple 'licenses' to be able to use the same disc just on different consoles.
The UK is a horrible example to use as a measurement of how long it takes for an area to change from 2Mbps to 100Mbps. The parts of the UK that have shifted are relatively dense and have a high HPM (homes per mile) to warrant the massive spending required to get equipment capable of supporting this kind of change. The physical topology of the UK when compared to other areas is miniscule (USA? India? China? Australia?) and relatively trivial. On the other hand, in the USA there are not only higher upgrade costs, but incentives to NOT upgrade (i.e. local monopolies for every city) since there is little or no competition for internet. Sure, AT&T 'competes' with cable and satellite, but you don't see cable companies overbuilding eachother (and you won't thanks to franchise contracts and gentlemen's agreements) to get your money. No, your options are normally between one of two evils and the pricing is usually about the same (especially since many small-medium size MSOs actually lease their connections from AT&T to save money).
Bandwidth won't be shooting up over night, or even in the next decade for most people. The price will double long before the bandwidth does.
Really, because the people I see clustering together based on race (by choice) weren't even alive 40 years ago, and the city I live in isn't segregated that way.
The tone you're setting is wrong, because it implies that all white people are racist and somehow dedicate every waking moment to ruining and isolating non-white people. In reality most of the wide array of cultures and ethnic groups in America tend to bulk together out of comfort and stability by choice, not because they are rounded up and placed in isolation camps. People want to spend time typically with other people that are like them which includes taste in art, skill set, and (tada) ethnic origin. You see this all over the world and it establishes unique and interesting subcultures.
On the note of racism though which is always applied to white people oddly, I'd like to point out that non-whites are equally racist and (unlike white people) are often more willing to admit it because there is no focus on shaming them for it. One example is the shooting in Florida where the man is half hispanic and half white. The man claims himself to be hispanic as his primary race, but the minute people started saying he was racist they started calling him white or "half white". They completely stripped him of his willfully claimed ethnicity, mostly because saying a white man hates black people will sell better than a hispanic hates black people.
You can't control if peanuts are or are not in a school at this level of allergy. I eat peanuts every morning at breakfast. If I had a child go to school with peanut residue on his hands and face (even a small amount) then the ban becomes effectively useless. In cases like these (and we're talking what, 1 in 100,000 schools at a generous estimate?) the kid shouldn't be in a public school. I'll put it this way: 150 people (adult and child alike) die in America annually from food related allergies, meaning you're more likely to die from a bee sting or a lightning strike. To put it in further perspective, 2,000 children drown every year: but we still have public pools.
I guess the kid can't go to a gas station, grocery store, or any other store for that matter as well since most places these days have bagged peanuts in the checkout isle. In which case, the kid probably shouldn't be in a public school and instead be homeschooled since they have an allergy that will mean they die just about everywhere they go. Since, as you said, they don't have to be removed from the bag for the peanut to kill the person.
The CDC uses a flawed method of measuring "obese" honestly.
Body mass index (BMI) was calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared, rounded to one decimal place. Obesity in adults was defined as BMI greater than or equal to 30.
This method of calculating BMI puts many people into the obese category that aren't actually at an unhealthy weight. Not only are normal people you see regularly at a 30BMI based on this type of scale, but this includes all people who do any form of highly competitive sport, body building, or other activity that would increase muscle mass or require you to store extra weight (including long distance swimmers). Based on BMI height/weight measurements, just about every single navy seal is fat.
I'd be fine with that actually, since I don't agree with mandatory health care. Affordable yes, but that is a hard thing to define and not something that can be guaranteed since the current system has a profit motive which also goes against the idea of affordable (since everyone MUST have it, why make it affordable?)
Actually when you go to rob someone taking a gun (since they can't legally own one) is the best move to both passify the home owner and / or murder them if needed. In these instances there won't be anyone to see you do it. The only person who did see you is now dead on the floor (or people if you murder a whole family). Criminals don't think "what is the minimal amount of defense I can take into this robbery", no they think "What can I do to make sure I get away without being caught". A gun pretty much ensures that when you tell the home owner to bury his face in the pillow while you tie him up, he does it.
This is why Americans don't want to give up weapons. We know the "kind criminal" is a myth, and we don't intend to be a victim while we hope that someone shows up to save us.
No actually, it doesn't make anything your business other than the fact that you're being over charged for insurance based on a faulty and quite honestly questionable business practice. If they needed to raise the cost of insurance, it wouldn't be such a profitable industry. Instead it is extremely profitable because people like yourself get confused and blame other customers.
The weight of the people around you is :: drum roll :: none of your business! Yes, if someone works to earn a paycheck, they get to spend it in any way that they want. If a 450lb man wants to buy a 600oz mega-ultra-gulp I guess he's going to die of diabetes, but the transaction is between him and the seller. Similarly if you don't want to be around fat people then don't be around fat people. Leave, walk somewhere else. It isn't like 8 of 10 people standing on the sidewalk are giant tubs of lard. You notice fat people because they aren't the norm and are not nearly as common as people think. If they were, you wouldn't call them "fat", you'd call them "normal".
If you don't like what people spend money on then change careers and become a financial advisor so that the people who care to listen can receive your sage-like advice. Otherwise you need to realize that how people spend their money is between them and the people they spend it with. If you don't like it, well tough shit. Life is hard, get a helmet.
Just get a coffee machine with multiple startup times.
Microsoft won't purchase the Lumia line because it would immediately create a conflicting interest to their main product (the OS) being used on other devices. I know that if I made smart phones I wouldn't want to use someone else's OS when they are already competing with me in the market (also I think MS agreed to not actually manufacture their own hardware when they started signing up manufacturers, but I don't have a source available).
I'm certainly not saying that Nokia shouldn't consider diversifying, but I think quitting is a horrible idea. The problem with taking on another OS like android however is that it may harm their relationship with MS, which would definitely sink them at this point. The Lumia 900 is a really great phone and I see quite a few of them every day when I'm out and about, so I know they are selling well which may be the ticket that Nokia needs to keep going. Dropping MS so soon after a serious flagship release would be suicide and basically cripple the potential for their 900 and 710 devices to really take off. I know the AT&T store near my house can't keep the 900 in stock which kills the other WP7 devices that I've heard of lately.
Marketing has been the real difference (I think) when comparing Nokia and the other WP7 manufacturers. Before the 900 and 710 I hadn't heard any WP7 ads on the radio, never noticed any real push from sales staff, no premium display location in AT&T stores (they were usually in the back corner near the cases), and definitely no TV spots that made any sense (the initial TV ads were confusingly crappy). Nokia seems to have their head in the game for this push, and I think they can probably pull through just fine as they are if they keep up the pace in their marketing campaign.
People said the same thing about the XBOX because of their massive initial losses, and swore MS would fail and they should 'just give up'. Now the XBox360 is one of the top entertainment mediums for not just games but also other forms like music and movies. People complain and cry 'just give up' because windows phone 7 (which has barely been on the maret for what, not even two years now?) isn't the top pick for phones. That quitting attitude is why critics are just that, critics, and they don't own or run major global corps.
WP7 might fail and it might not, but to assume that MS and Nokia should just give up because they can't take over a market in one year is, well, pathetic.