Agreed. When I first got my Galaxy, battery life was dismal. Reminded me of the 1st generation iPhone battery life. With JuiceDefender, my battery life is closer (but still not quite as good as) the iPhone. In general I think Android (OS, framework, and apps) aren't as energy-efficient as iOS is.
Exactly. Since this is Canada we're talking about here, we can talk about privatization (Canada has privatized things the US likely would never do, ironically). The same "who pays for it" thing happens when publicly-owned monopolies are privatized. Sure taxes can be reduced, but now we're paying for the service *and* profit. So in the end things end up costing a lot more all around.
And finally, this principle is why corporate income taxes make very little sense. Corporations who sell consumer goods, for example, never pay income taxes (or most taxes); they simply pass them on.
Actually Python has found quite a niche in web-based applications. There are a fair number of large Django-based sites out there. Also RedHat writes most of their system utilities, including their installer, Anaconda, in Python. Of course since Guido works for them, this is understandable. But RH was using Python in RH system utilities back in the Python 1.5 days. Virt-manager is written in Python with C-based modules to interface with libvirt. Anaconda itself uses c-based modules for hardware interfacing. In short, Python is definitely more than just for rapid prototyping.
Python is an incredible glue language. It also helps that extending python in C is very easy, and even embedding Python in your C app is easy (the same API is used for both use cases).
I think these days if I needed to rework some python modules for speed I'd try to write them in Cython, which is a python subset that compiles to straight C.
What editors and proofreaders? Even mainstream books from major publishing houses seem to be devoid of basic editing. Spelling errors, grammatical problems, missing words, the wrong word, all can be found with surprising regularity. So I don't think self publishing, especially for good authors is going to be a huge problem. And with self e publishing the author can release updates and edits. Though I'm unlikely to re-read most pulp fiction books when a revision comes out.
Western Digital is pretty clear about things. They don't intentionally design their desktop disks to fail in a RAID. Other brands may work better for you for a variety of reasons. But you seem to be mistaken about what's happening with the TLER setting. In fact the desktop drives have no TLER in their firmware at all. Thus when they get bad sectors and have to reallocate, they end up bogging down and the array will kick them out. The enterprise drives do have TLER, which changes the way the error recovery works so that they don't time out. Why you have problems only with western digital, I don't know, because I don't know of any desktop class drive that implements TLER.
In any case, if you really are trying to have enterprise-class storage, there are reasons to go with enterprise disks (we prefer seagate). They spin faster (desktop drives are slower now than in years past even), don't power down, and have TLER. Sorry but WD is not doing anything intentionally to force you to the right product. They warn about the problems you state you had, and then when you had them, you blamed WD.
Please give more information. Items 1 and 3 are somewhat self-explanatory (even if I've never experienced the same problems), but as someone who regularly uses LO for things more than a notepad (including styles and headings and such) I don't understand your explanation of the headings problem. Please provide more information. Are you talking about outline numbering (#.#.#.#.# blah)? Or does this really come down to a MS Office compatibility thing? I'm certain LO supports the kind of headings you talk about. Maybe it doesn't translate them as well as it should from MS Office.
PDF export has worked for everything I've thrown at it so far. Fonts, everything looked right (not sure if the fonts get embedded though) for normally used fonts.
As for LO being a mess, well use what works for you. For me LO works very well, and I've done some fairly fancy templating with it. Though sometimes it's so much like MS Office that I swear I'm going to break down and learn LaTeX for doing anything other than a letter.
I don't think you could argue Marx's system was a complete disaster; no one has ever really tried it. Marx postulated about what he felt would inevitably happen, and described the system he felt would ultimately replace capitalism. Of course he was wrong about a fair number of things. I don't think he came up with his own system to replace it. Or if he did it has never been tried or implemented. The communists took Marx's ideas as a starting point, but the complete disasters are of their own making, not Marx's. That is not to say that Marxism (if you really could formalize such a thing) would not also be a disaster.Time to reread his books I think, just to reacquaint myself with what he really said and proposed.
How your comment got rated insightful, I do not know. Your own anecdotal experiences prove nothing statistically, though like other highly emotional things, there is little I can say that will dissuade you that your own experiences say anything about the reliability of a make, or even model of car.
Speaking as someone who drives GM vehicles every day and has no more or no fewer problems than the average for any other brand, I say that neither your experience or mine, taken individually, is statistically significant. Are there still individual lemons out there? Sure. But not across an entire make or model, which is the article's point. People who say, "toyota is better than GM," or even "GM is better than Toyota," are simply making emotional assertions. I have maintained for some time that the big auto names are all very good makes. I happen to buy GM (Chevrolet, etc) because I like their style and feature sets (engines, etc).
Many point to Consumer Reports, but their reliability numbers mostly come from surveying their readers, so the numbers are very skewed in a sort of echo-chamber effect. The most their numbers can say is that the majority of the readers who respond happen to own toyotas or hondas, like them, and rate them highly. (Of course Toyotas and Hondas _are_ good reliable cars.) But their numbers really don't indicate whether they really are significantly better than other makes.
I live in a rural part of Alberta and I've been told the phone company really wants to get us all on VoIP over the existing WiMax network that runs here. That way they don't have to run wire out to new farm homes. In fact there are several miles of phone wire laying in the ditches around here that the company refuses to bury. I think they hope that if it gets cut by mowers and farm machines enough times that we'll beg for VoIP over wireless. The wireless WiMax system is pretty reliable, but not totally. It goes down in storms, for example. So if we were ever forced to this system, I think I'll be extremely grateful to have my HAM license and HAM station here for emergencies.
Sounds like rural Kentuckians really need to line up and get licenses and at least basic VHF radios. They're going to need them.
Sorry but a lot of these comments are way off base. Neither first-sale nor licensing really applies here in the same sense as you are used to in debating DRM. Monsanto seed is sold to farmers under strict agreement with the farmer. If I hold back some of my canola and replant it when I've promised Monsanto in a written contract (signed and dated) that I wouldn't, then I'm definitely liable. So-called bin-run seeding is expressly forbidden in the contracts. For this reason, even though roundup-ready soybeans are going to be off patent this year, farmers really won't be able to start growing and multiplying seed outside of a Monsanto contract for another year or so, once the existing contracts run out. Without a patent for something fancy, it's pretty hard to convince farmers to pay a premium and sign a contract for seed, which is why as patents expire, these contracts end up disappearing too. But to get around this income problem, seed companies are getting into hybrid seed production (as opposed to open pollination) which means that traits disappear from the crop after a couple of generations, so buying new seed is ensured. And to be fair the market is driving this because the hybrid traits are traits that farmers and food processors want. Healthy oil content, disease resistance, shorter crops (not as tall), etc.
Anyway, the famous case a few years ago over roundup ready canola was essentially a contract dispute (besides the patent issue). The farmer kept back some of the crop and replanted it the next year, but claimed it was just natural genetic drift, etc. However he violated his contract with Monsanto and the courts sided with Monsanto.
In the industrial world, water use by agriculture is already quite efficient and becoming more so all the time. Even with technologies like drip irrigation, there is still plant respiration which pours water into the air. A lush, green crop can expire an amazing amount of water into the air as a result of normal plant processes. I once heard the figures and they were staggering, but I cannot find them right now for standard crops. Anyway, this isn't necessarily a bad thing (it is normal for plants to do this), but it does mean that this water cannot be recycled easily. Also it does change the local climate.
You mention drip irrigation. I want to address that as I have experience in this area. Drip irrigation is not widely used for large scale agriculture mainly because it is too expensive and does not scale very well. And it's hard to clean up. If you've ever seen Israeli fields where they use it, you'll see chopped up bits of black hose everywhere. It's really sad actually. The things that make it expensive include the need for fairly fine filtration systems, lots of transmission pipes, elbows, and such, and emitters have to be checked regularly and replaced when they are plugged. Israelis typically use it on small plots, and it does work pretty well there. But a kibbutznick has a full time job just keeping it going.
Conventionally, we have room for improvement. Flood irrigation is very inefficient, as are any sprinkler systems that are high pressure (over 40 psi) and that don't drop the water down low to the ground. And even with current, low-pressure systems, there are things we can do yet. Dropping the water right near the soil is very close to the same efficiency as drip irrigation, but a lot cheaper. Unfortunately this also makes it harder to plant and cultivate the crop as you have to make the rolls follow the pivot track around so that the drops won't tear up the crops. Currently most pivot systems today (if they are anywhere close to modern standards) drop the water right inside an average crop's canopy. Even still on a windy day, evaporation losses between the sprinklers and the crop are a big efficiency loss.
One thing about agriculture in North America that really bothers me is that certain water-thirsty crops like potatoes are only grown to serve the fast food industry. It's an industrial machine of planting one variety year after year, soaking it in herbicides and fungicides to hold the diseases at bay. And typically potatoes require 16 or more inches of irrigated rain per growing season compared to 8 to 12 inches of water for high-yield wheat.
All this reminds me of something that I saw a few years ago. There was a dispute over water between Utah and Nevada, and was a typical city vs agriculture conflict. The news interviewed a woman from Reno who was very scornful of the Utah farmers' concerns. She said, "I can't understand why they need the water anyway. Why can't farmers buy food in grocery stores like everyone else?" Boggled the mind.
I have a 24" screen. Why would I ever maximize a window other than, say a game or Google Earth? I have a "windowing" system for a reason. Fixed-width layouts on the web are common as well and on a large, high res screen you're going to have either a very large window with a lot of blank space, or a window with very zoomed-in text. Maybe they are catering to the ADHT-type people, but I run a Window Manager for a reason. I can kind of see where they are going (and apps aren't forced to be maximized), but I have some serious doubts.
What-if scenarios such as this one are pointless. What if the American revolution hadn't happened? What if the Romans had had an industrial evolution? What if Hitler had won the war? What if 911 never happened? What if a hacker had a girlfriend?
All of these questions are only useful in an entertainment sort out way (that's the only polite way I could phrase this). They aren't really answerable in any way that is useful in analyzing things as they currently are and where they appear to be going. Sometimes fun to think about of course.
Well, except for massively failing economies, and incredible consumer and government debt levels. Just like here in the US, things are crumbling beneath their feet. Just give it a few years and they'll come down to our level! Crappy healthcare, mediocre food, horrible government, bandwidth-capped internet.
Kind of funny that you mention outdated, non-stealthy, gas-guzzling Rafales as that's exactly what the Tu-95s are as well (as are B-52s). They certainly aren't particularly fuel efficient by any stretch of the imagination. And they are super crazy loud. But just as in cars, buying a new car solely because it has increased fuel efficiency isn't an economically sound choice. In short Russia flies them for the same reasons your country flies "outdated, non-stealthy, gas-guzzling" Rafales. They have them now, they know how to fly them, and it's cheaper to keep flying them then to develop a new bomber.
I really enjoyed Ben Rich's book on Skunk Works. One thing that stood out to me is that the real reason we're still flying the U-2 is that Dick Chaney killed the SR-71 program, which was kind of an evolution of the U-2 program. Chaney argued that spy satellites replaced the need for airplanes to do surveillance. Turns out the reason he said that was because he was associated with companies that were into spy satellites and he didn't want the SR-71 to compete for that market. Such a shame that politics played such a large role in the neutering of America's capabilities. Most sad of all was that McNamara ordered the destruction of all plans and tooling for the SR-71. Even if the SR-71 was too expensive to fly, that's still a real crime that much of what was learned in that program has been lost.
The U-2 is probably much much cheaper to operate than the SR-71, so it's possible the SR-71 would have died anyway. But certainly politics played a huge role in its demise.
Sadly, in the current political climate it's doubtful Skunk Works would ever produce anything like the U-2, the SR-71, and the stealth fighter. Maybe it's a blessing though. The government seems hell bent on spying on even American citizens. I dunno.
Does this oil of which you speak come from the seed? After my neighbor grew hemp one year for seed, as a farmer I'm just not interested. The risks are way too high. He typically had 3 to 4 fires per day on his combine trying to harvest the stuff. Worse than flax by an order of magnitude. Farmers who do flax know what I'm talking about. With combines running about $300k a pop, the price of hemp seed would have to be sky high (no pun intended) to make it worth my while.
What you really mean to say is that you find cmd.exe to be useless. Fair enough; I agree that cmd is weak. However cmd.exe is not the only windows command-line shell available. I personally run bash as my command-line shell on Windows. And when it comes to managing MS server objects, Power Shell is often used. The tone of your post indicates to me that you have never every used Power Shell, so you really have no grounds to intelligently comment on the state of the Windows "command line." As I haven't used Power Shell either, I cannot comment on whether or not it is useless, though I've heard from people who have that it is anything but useless.
Google's pulled a lot of dumb moves recently. It used to be that if you disabled instant search you could get your search bar back at the bottom of the search results page. Now it's just gone permanently. You have no choice but to scroll back to the top of the page to change your query. Google says this is by design; they want you to use instant search, so you can just hit backspace and edit your search query string from anywhere on the page. But half the time I can't remember exactly what I typed, so I still have to scroll back up. And even then that's only if I can stand instant search. Bing, on the other hand, presents the traditional results page thank goodness.
Things like this combined with Google's increasing inability to return relevant results (their results are poisoned by link aggregators and years-old irrelevant results), is likely driving more than a few people away.
No the promise of the Pixel Qi was a triple-resolution black and white display in passive mode. A casual google search reveals that indeed it is black and white in outdoor mode. From what I've read the Pixel Qi isn't that great in sunlight or with blacklight, at least folks that were reviewing the Notion Ink.
I hoped that Pixel Qi could have made a screen that was readable like eInk for ebook readers, but worked well enough in active mode in color with a backlight. I haven't seen a screen in person, but the reviews I've read over the last couple of years said that the Pixel Qi screen is kind of the worst of both worlds, not the best. Not great color or definition in active mode, and not that great in passive, reflective B&W mode either. That was disappointing to me to hear.
Has anyone seen a recent Pixel Qi screen on a device? How well does it work? Is power usage good?
No it's absolutely not absurd do run such comparisons in general. If I was in the market for a new vehicle and found a used gas guzzler for $10k (which I did a few years ago) or a brand new jetta (just cause I wanted a cool car) for $45k (which indeed was the price just 3 or 4 years ago in Canada), then fuel economy just doesn't factor into the decision. A used, cheap, car would have been even more economical obviously.
In any event, there's a tremendous amount of pressure in society to eliminate the wasteful gas guzzlers and economics is often touted. The OP even mentioned it. He said fuel economy should always be considered. He's only right if the upfront cost is the same. And I'm simply saying the cost of a vehicle per mile has more do do with the cost of the car itself than the fuel economy. It almost never pays to buy new for this reason.
In a few years a used Prius should be a super good, cheap buy according to my numbers. I always figure let someone else depreciate the cars for me.
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Agreed. When I first got my Galaxy, battery life was dismal. Reminded me of the 1st generation iPhone battery life. With JuiceDefender, my battery life is closer (but still not quite as good as) the iPhone. In general I think Android (OS, framework, and apps) aren't as energy-efficient as iOS is.
Exactly. Since this is Canada we're talking about here, we can talk about privatization (Canada has privatized things the US likely would never do, ironically). The same "who pays for it" thing happens when publicly-owned monopolies are privatized. Sure taxes can be reduced, but now we're paying for the service *and* profit. So in the end things end up costing a lot more all around.
And finally, this principle is why corporate income taxes make very little sense. Corporations who sell consumer goods, for example, never pay income taxes (or most taxes); they simply pass them on.
Actually Python has found quite a niche in web-based applications. There are a fair number of large Django-based sites out there. Also RedHat writes most of their system utilities, including their installer, Anaconda, in Python. Of course since Guido works for them, this is understandable. But RH was using Python in RH system utilities back in the Python 1.5 days. Virt-manager is written in Python with C-based modules to interface with libvirt. Anaconda itself uses c-based modules for hardware interfacing. In short, Python is definitely more than just for rapid prototyping.
Python is an incredible glue language. It also helps that extending python in C is very easy, and even embedding Python in your C app is easy (the same API is used for both use cases).
I think these days if I needed to rework some python modules for speed I'd try to write them in Cython, which is a python subset that compiles to straight C.
What editors and proofreaders? Even mainstream books from major publishing houses seem to be devoid of basic editing. Spelling errors, grammatical problems, missing words, the wrong word, all can be found with surprising regularity. So I don't think self publishing, especially for good authors is going to be a huge problem. And with self e publishing the author can release updates and edits. Though I'm unlikely to re-read most pulp fiction books when a revision comes out.
Western Digital is pretty clear about things. They don't intentionally design their desktop disks to fail in a RAID. Other brands may work better for you for a variety of reasons. But you seem to be mistaken about what's happening with the TLER setting. In fact the desktop drives have no TLER in their firmware at all. Thus when they get bad sectors and have to reallocate, they end up bogging down and the array will kick them out. The enterprise drives do have TLER, which changes the way the error recovery works so that they don't time out. Why you have problems only with western digital, I don't know, because I don't know of any desktop class drive that implements TLER.
In any case, if you really are trying to have enterprise-class storage, there are reasons to go with enterprise disks (we prefer seagate). They spin faster (desktop drives are slower now than in years past even), don't power down, and have TLER. Sorry but WD is not doing anything intentionally to force you to the right product. They warn about the problems you state you had, and then when you had them, you blamed WD.
Anyway for those interested, see http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1397/~/difference-between-desktop-edition-and-raid-(enterprise)-edition-drives about this issue.
Please give more information. Items 1 and 3 are somewhat self-explanatory (even if I've never experienced the same problems), but as someone who regularly uses LO for things more than a notepad (including styles and headings and such) I don't understand your explanation of the headings problem. Please provide more information. Are you talking about outline numbering (#.#.#.#.# blah)? Or does this really come down to a MS Office compatibility thing? I'm certain LO supports the kind of headings you talk about. Maybe it doesn't translate them as well as it should from MS Office.
PDF export has worked for everything I've thrown at it so far. Fonts, everything looked right (not sure if the fonts get embedded though) for normally used fonts.
As for LO being a mess, well use what works for you. For me LO works very well, and I've done some fairly fancy templating with it. Though sometimes it's so much like MS Office that I swear I'm going to break down and learn LaTeX for doing anything other than a letter.
I don't think you could argue Marx's system was a complete disaster; no one has ever really tried it. Marx postulated about what he felt would inevitably happen, and described the system he felt would ultimately replace capitalism. Of course he was wrong about a fair number of things. I don't think he came up with his own system to replace it. Or if he did it has never been tried or implemented. The communists took Marx's ideas as a starting point, but the complete disasters are of their own making, not
Marx's. That is not to say that Marxism (if you really could formalize such a thing) would not also be a disaster.Time to reread his books I think, just to reacquaint myself with what he really said and proposed.
How your comment got rated insightful, I do not know. Your own anecdotal experiences prove nothing statistically, though like other highly emotional things, there is little I can say that will dissuade you that your own experiences say anything about the reliability of a make, or even model of car.
Speaking as someone who drives GM vehicles every day and has no more or no fewer problems than the average for any other brand, I say that neither your experience or mine, taken individually, is statistically significant. Are there still individual lemons out there? Sure. But not across an entire make or model, which is the article's point. People who say, "toyota is better than GM," or even "GM is better than Toyota," are simply making emotional assertions. I have maintained for some time that the big auto names are all very good makes. I happen to buy GM (Chevrolet, etc) because I like their style and feature sets (engines, etc).
Many point to Consumer Reports, but their reliability numbers mostly come from surveying their readers, so the numbers are very skewed in a sort of echo-chamber effect. The most their numbers can say is that the majority of the readers who respond happen to own toyotas or hondas, like them, and rate them highly. (Of course Toyotas and Hondas _are_ good reliable cars.) But their numbers really don't indicate whether they really are significantly better than other makes.
I live in a rural part of Alberta and I've been told the phone company really wants to get us all on VoIP over the existing WiMax network that runs here. That way they don't have to run wire out to new farm homes. In fact there are several miles of phone wire laying in the ditches around here that the company refuses to bury. I think they hope that if it gets cut by mowers and farm machines enough times that we'll beg for VoIP over wireless. The wireless WiMax system is pretty reliable, but not totally. It goes down in storms, for example. So if we were ever forced to this system, I think I'll be extremely grateful to have my HAM license and HAM station here for emergencies.
Sounds like rural Kentuckians really need to line up and get licenses and at least basic VHF radios. They're going to need them.
Sorry but a lot of these comments are way off base. Neither first-sale nor licensing really applies here in the same sense as you are used to in debating DRM. Monsanto seed is sold to farmers under strict agreement with the farmer. If I hold back some of my canola and replant it when I've promised Monsanto in a written contract (signed and dated) that I wouldn't, then I'm definitely liable. So-called bin-run seeding is expressly forbidden in the contracts. For this reason, even though roundup-ready soybeans are going to be off patent this year, farmers really won't be able to start growing and multiplying seed outside of a Monsanto contract for another year or so, once the existing contracts run out. Without a patent for something fancy, it's pretty hard to convince farmers to pay a premium and sign a contract for seed, which is why as patents expire, these contracts end up disappearing too. But to get around this income problem, seed companies are getting into hybrid seed production (as opposed to open pollination) which means that traits disappear from the crop after a couple of generations, so buying new seed is ensured. And to be fair the market is driving this because the hybrid traits are traits that farmers and food processors want. Healthy oil content, disease resistance, shorter crops (not as tall), etc.
Anyway, the famous case a few years ago over roundup ready canola was essentially a contract dispute (besides the patent issue). The farmer kept back some of the crop and replanted it the next year, but claimed it was just natural genetic drift, etc. However he violated his contract with Monsanto and the courts sided with Monsanto.
In the industrial world, water use by agriculture is already quite efficient and becoming more so all the time. Even with technologies like drip irrigation, there is still plant respiration which pours water into the air. A lush, green crop can expire an amazing amount of water into the air as a result of normal plant processes. I once heard the figures and they were staggering, but I cannot find them right now for standard crops. Anyway, this isn't necessarily a bad thing (it is normal for plants to do this), but it does mean that this water cannot be recycled easily. Also it does change the local climate.
You mention drip irrigation. I want to address that as I have experience in this area. Drip irrigation is not widely used for large scale agriculture mainly because it is too expensive and does not scale very well. And it's hard to clean up. If you've ever seen Israeli fields where they use it, you'll see chopped up bits of black hose everywhere. It's really sad actually. The things that make it expensive include the need for fairly fine filtration systems, lots of transmission pipes, elbows, and such, and emitters have to be checked regularly and replaced when they are plugged. Israelis typically use it on small plots, and it does work pretty well there. But a kibbutznick has a full time job just keeping it going.
Conventionally, we have room for improvement. Flood irrigation is very inefficient, as are any sprinkler systems that are high pressure (over 40 psi) and that don't drop the water down low to the ground. And even with current, low-pressure systems, there are things we can do yet. Dropping the water right near the soil is very close to the same efficiency as drip irrigation, but a lot cheaper. Unfortunately this also makes it harder to plant and cultivate the crop as you have to make the rolls follow the pivot track around so that the drops won't tear up the crops. Currently most pivot systems today (if they are anywhere close to modern standards) drop the water right inside an average crop's canopy. Even still on a windy day, evaporation losses between the sprinklers and the crop are a big efficiency loss.
One thing about agriculture in North America that really bothers me is that certain water-thirsty crops like potatoes are only grown to serve the fast food industry. It's an industrial machine of planting one variety year after year, soaking it in herbicides and fungicides to hold the diseases at bay. And typically potatoes require 16 or more inches of irrigated rain per growing season compared to 8 to 12 inches of water for high-yield wheat.
All this reminds me of something that I saw a few years ago. There was a dispute over water between Utah and Nevada, and was a typical city vs agriculture conflict. The news interviewed a woman from Reno who was very scornful of the Utah farmers' concerns. She said, "I can't understand why they need the water anyway. Why can't farmers buy food in grocery stores like everyone else?" Boggled the mind.
I have a 24" screen. Why would I ever maximize a window other than, say a game or Google Earth? I have a "windowing" system for a reason. Fixed-width layouts on the web are common as well and on a large, high res screen you're going to have either a very large window with a lot of blank space, or a window with very zoomed-in text. Maybe they are catering to the ADHT-type people, but I run a Window Manager for a reason. I can kind of see where they are going (and apps aren't forced to be maximized), but I have some serious doubts.
What-if scenarios such as this one are pointless. What if the American revolution hadn't happened? What if the Romans had had an industrial evolution? What if Hitler had won the war? What if 911 never happened? What if a hacker had a girlfriend?
All of these questions are only useful in an entertainment sort out way (that's the only polite way I could phrase this). They aren't really answerable in any way that is useful in analyzing things as they currently are and where they appear to be going. Sometimes fun to think about of course.
Well, except for massively failing economies, and incredible consumer and government debt levels. Just like here in the US, things are crumbling beneath their feet. Just give it a few years and they'll come down to our level! Crappy healthcare, mediocre food, horrible government, bandwidth-capped internet.
Kind of funny that you mention outdated, non-stealthy, gas-guzzling Rafales as that's exactly what the Tu-95s are as well (as are B-52s). They certainly aren't particularly fuel efficient by any stretch of the imagination. And they are super crazy loud. But just as in cars, buying a new car solely because it has increased fuel efficiency isn't an economically sound choice. In short Russia flies them for the same reasons your country flies "outdated, non-stealthy, gas-guzzling" Rafales. They have them now, they know how to fly them, and it's cheaper to keep flying them then to develop a new bomber.
I really enjoyed Ben Rich's book on Skunk Works. One thing that stood out to me is that the real reason we're still flying the U-2 is that Dick Chaney killed the SR-71 program, which was kind of an evolution of the U-2 program. Chaney argued that spy satellites replaced the need for airplanes to do surveillance. Turns out the reason he said that was because he was associated with companies that were into spy satellites and he didn't want the SR-71 to compete for that market. Such a shame that politics played such a large role in the neutering of America's capabilities. Most sad of all was that McNamara ordered the destruction of all plans and tooling for the SR-71. Even if the SR-71 was too expensive to fly, that's still a real crime that much of what was learned in that program has been lost.
The U-2 is probably much much cheaper to operate than the SR-71, so it's possible the SR-71 would have died anyway. But certainly politics played a huge role in its demise.
Sadly, in the current political climate it's doubtful Skunk Works would ever produce anything like the U-2, the SR-71, and the stealth fighter. Maybe it's a blessing though. The government seems hell bent on spying on even American citizens. I dunno.
http://www.blackbirds.net/sr71/fallblackbird.html
https://www.google.com/search?q=Skunk+Works%3A+A+Personal+Memoir+of+My+Years+of+Lockheed
And at only 10-100 times the cost!
Yeah, like magnesium!
Does this oil of which you speak come from the seed? After my neighbor grew hemp one year for seed, as a farmer I'm just not interested. The risks are way too high. He typically had 3 to 4 fires per day on his combine trying to harvest the stuff. Worse than flax by an order of magnitude. Farmers who do flax know what I'm talking about. With combines running about $300k a pop, the price of hemp seed would have to be sky high (no pun intended) to make it worth my while.
What you really mean to say is that you find cmd.exe to be useless. Fair enough; I agree that cmd is weak. However cmd.exe is not the only windows command-line shell available. I personally run bash as my command-line shell on Windows. And when it comes to managing MS server objects, Power Shell is often used. The tone of your post indicates to me that you have never every used Power Shell, so you really have no grounds to intelligently comment on the state of the Windows "command line." As I haven't used Power Shell either, I cannot comment on whether or not it is useless, though I've heard from people who have that it is anything but useless.
No more than Linux without a GUI is DOSEMU.
Google's pulled a lot of dumb moves recently. It used to be that if you disabled instant search you could get your search bar back at the bottom of the search results page. Now it's just gone permanently. You have no choice but to scroll back to the top of the page to change your query. Google says this is by design; they want you to use instant search, so you can just hit backspace and edit your search query string from anywhere on the page. But half the time I can't remember exactly what I typed, so I still have to scroll back up. And even then that's only if I can stand instant search. Bing, on the other hand, presents the traditional results page thank goodness.
Things like this combined with Google's increasing inability to return relevant results (their results are poisoned by link aggregators and years-old irrelevant results), is likely driving more than a few people away.
No the promise of the Pixel Qi was a triple-resolution black and white display in passive mode. A casual google search reveals that indeed it is black and white in outdoor mode. From what I've read the Pixel Qi isn't that great in sunlight or with blacklight, at least folks that were reviewing the Notion Ink.
I hoped that Pixel Qi could have made a screen that was readable like eInk for ebook readers, but worked well enough in active mode in color with a backlight. I haven't seen a screen in person, but the reviews I've read over the last couple of years said that the Pixel Qi screen is kind of the worst of both worlds, not the best. Not great color or definition in active mode, and not that great in passive, reflective B&W mode either. That was disappointing to me to hear.
Has anyone seen a recent Pixel Qi screen on a device? How well does it work? Is power usage good?
No it's absolutely not absurd do run such comparisons in general. If I was in the market for a new vehicle and found a used gas guzzler for $10k (which I did a few years ago) or a brand new jetta (just cause I wanted a cool car) for $45k (which indeed was the price just 3 or 4 years ago in Canada), then fuel economy just doesn't factor into the decision. A used, cheap, car would have been even more economical obviously.
In any event, there's a tremendous amount of pressure in society to eliminate the wasteful gas guzzlers and economics is often touted. The OP even mentioned it. He said fuel economy should always be considered. He's only right if the upfront cost is the same. And I'm simply saying the cost of a vehicle per mile has more do do with the cost of the car itself than the fuel economy. It almost never pays to buy new for this reason.
In a few years a used Prius should be a super good, cheap buy according to my numbers. I always figure let someone else depreciate the cars for me.