Wow, that sounds like a total PITA. I had one briefly, for a few days, which I found outside (probably someone's escaped pet). It was really nice, and we kept it in a bathroom, where it made a bed in the trash can. We gave it to a ferret rescue person as soon as we could. Being locked in the bathroom (to keep it away from our cats), we never saw those other issues, but I just couldn't get over the smell.
Top-of-the-line hardware, Aeron chairs, a big fancy office with insanely high rent in some prime location, ridiculously-high salaries (esp. for the executives), all-expenses-paid trips to "important" conferences, I could go on and on.
When you're playing with someone else's money instead of your own, there's no reason to be frugal. Might as well have a field day with it.
2) While in stock form on most/all distros, KDE is set up with the same destructive window closing button issue as Windows and Mac, it's easy to reconfigure it to change the locations of all the window buttons. You can add some extra space between the close button and the minimize/restore buttons, or you can even move the close button to the other side of the window if you want. It's completely configurable. They probably keep it just like Windows/Mac to avoid confusing people.
6) The start menu (actually "K menu") in KDE is organized very well. When it opens, the first tab is "Favorites", and shows your most-used applications, plus a box where you can type in the name of an application to search for. Or you can switch to the "Applications" tab to get to a menu of all your installed applications. In there, all the applications are grouped according to their function: Development, Games, Graphics, Internet, Multimedia, Office, Settings, etc. This is completely unlike Windows where all the applications are a big mess, only grouped by the application's maker with no indication as to what it actually is or does. Then, inside one of these groups, each application has its own icon, plus is usually listed by its description, along with its name, such as "Image Editor", and then in smaller gray text, "GIMP Image Editor"; or "Media Player" and "Kaffeine" in smaller gray text; or "Spreadsheet" with "LibreOffice Calc" in smaller gray text. (note: some of this is probably distro-specific. I'm using Mint KDE for reference.) A new user doesn't have to know the name(s) of the spreadsheet programs on a Linux/KDE computer like this, he or she just needs to open up the K-menu, go to Applications, click on "Office", and then look for the programs that say "Spreadsheet", and LibreOffice Calc will be there (along with any others; that's all I have on mine at the moment). OR, they can click on the K-menu, and type "spreadsheet" into the search box, and all the spreadsheet programs will be listed there for selection. OR, for a shortcut, they can type Alt-F2 which brings up a litle search box at the top of the screen, type "spreadsheet" into that, and all the spreadsheet programs will be listed there. In my case, since I have only one (Calc), when I type Enter it automatically launches Calc. Windows doesn't do any of this stuff.
That's because in Latin it means "new" and Portuguese, like Spanish, is a Romance language, descended from Latin.
I think it's also important to note that Portuguese is much closer to Latin than Spanish is, so it's not surprising that "nova" (new) is common to both Latin and Portuguese and not Spanish. I wouldn't be surprised if "nova" is also used in Galician.
I had 2 work-issued E6400s which were nothing but headaches. Whenever the laptop would get even slightly above normal operating temperatures, it would under-clock itself to 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8 of the clock speed. At 1/8 the clock-speed, the entire system was completely unresponsive. I can't tell you how many times I put the laptop in the refrigerator to get it back to a temperature which it would be responsive.
I haven't had this problem with my two E6400s, however I have read about this problem. I believe it was fixed by a BIOS update a long time ago. If you were using brand-new units at the time, you probably got bit by this bug. If you buy a used off-lease machine (which is now 4-5 years old), you're not going to have this problem.
Why is anyone taking the parent post seriously? He spends half his post complaining about these silly subjective things and offers nothing substantiate about the devices.
What's wrong with subjective values? If something is butt-ugly, I'm not going to buy it, whether it's a car, a laptop, or whatever. And I did offer something non-subjective: the screens on the new models suck, which you yourself admitted to. The older screens were better: they were higher resolution with a better aspect ratio. Plus, the two units I have have zero problems with randomly locking up; to me, that's a show-stopper issue. Why would you continue using a laptop that locks up once a day? That's like going back to Windows 95. So instead of paying $100-200 for an older used unit that looks better, has a much better screen, and doesn't have any lock-up problems, you've paid a boatload of money (I'm guessing at least $1000) for a brand-new unit that looks like shit, has a crappy screen, and locks up as much as Win95. Good job!
Yes, they do. Which is why I'd like it to be done by an... independent movie company? Indie? Whatever.
Indie studios don't have much budget; that's why they always do character dramas set in current times, since it doesn't cost squat to film one of those as long as the actors are cheap. Indies can't afford a big-budget sci-fi production, and if it's not big-budget, a sci-fi movie usually looks ridiculously bad.
Why not? I mean, look at the bad press Enders Game is getting, because the author is allegedly anti-gay. You'd think a story by an author who wasn't anti-anything* would do well. *well, sexually speaking.
Sorry, no. Movies have to follow conventional morality, or else people will get pissed off. Currently, the conventional morality allows for homosexuality to a limited extent; however, there's still a lot of anti-gay sentiment among the population, so anything mainstream that tries not to offend anyone will mostly sidestep the issue, or at best show gays as an odd curiosity rather than focusing greatly on gay characters. Of course, there's a lot of anti-anti-gay sentiment too, which is why Ender's Game is getting bad press because of the political activists who are trying to push equality for homosexuals (which IMO is fine, but the conservatives certainly won't see it that way).
Open relationships and polyamory are outside of conventional morality at this time; people who do such things are seen as "perverts". Just look at shows depicting younger people in relationships; there's a ton of drama over who's "with" whom, what everyone's relationship status is, etc. These days, it seems that as soon as a young person starts dating someone else for more than 3 dates, they're considered "hitched" and it's somehow "wrong" if they date more than one person at a time. There are more and more people exploring open relationships (particularly in Portland and Seattle) these days, but they're still a very very small minority. A movie showing main characters engaged in such relationships would not go over well in mainstream America.
However you will probably see the golden age of movies are from the period you are 8-18.
This is a pile of crap. Go watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, or any of Kubrick's other works, or some Hitchcock films. Those are all masterpieces, yet they were mostly made before I was born. Or, Ridley Scott's "Alien", made when I was only 3 or 4. I can easily pick out far more excellent movies outside my 8-18 age range than within it. In fact, most of the movies within that time, which I watched when new, I remember being crap. I don't have any nostalgia for the movies during those years.
Yes, but I thought MST3K got almost all their raw material from crappy, old low-budget movies. Back in the old days, there were a bunch of studios making ultra-low-budget crap movies because it wasn't that expensive to show movies in theaters. These days, we still have this. Asylum is a big example of this, and there's a bunch of others; we don't see these movies in theaters because they're all "straight to video". If MST3K wanted to continue and use new movies, that's what they'd have to look at if they wanted to be consistent with the old movies.
The big difference today is that the ultra-big-budget movies are just as bad, plot-wise and acting-wise, as those crappy old shoestring-budget movies.
No way, those stories would all make terrible Hollywood movies. As you admit yourself, when they try to make a movie version of books like that, they royally fuck them up.
You really think Hollywood would give fair treatment to, for instance, the open relationships and line marriages in Heinlein's books? Not a chance.
You've got to be kidding. Yes, by many/most accounts, STII was the best of the series, but STIV was a big favorite of many peoples's as well, and STVI was also very good and well-regarded. In fact, STVI was by the same director as STII, and it even had the same title: "The Undiscovered Country". STII was renamed "The Wrath of Khan" later by the studio before its release, against the wishes of its director.
STV was drek, but it was the only one that was that bad. STIII really wasn't that bad, though not up to the par the even-numbered movies set, and ST:TMP was horrifically boring at times, but was still mildly interesting, though easily the second-worst of the 6.
There's probably another factor: the younger generation these days is flat broke. They're all living with their parents or cooped up with a bunch of roommates because they're all unemployed or underemployed. 20-somethings with little money aren't going to spend $15/ticket (plus overpriced concessions) on a movie; if they have a little money for entertainment, they're going to spend it on something that gives you a lot more bang-for-the-buck, like video games or Netflix. I pay $9/month for my Netflix subscription IIRC, and I can watch on-demand movies to my heart's content (except on some Friday and Saturday nights when apparently everyone else is trying to do the same thing and the video keeps pausing).
Would be nice if our culture just became weary of entertainment cartel offerings, and people could once again take up more productive pastimes:
Well it seems like something like that is already happening. Did you not read TFS? It says that Hollywood's latest movies are all flops. Sounds like people are weary of Hollywood's offerings. Either that, or people are too fucking broke to go watch movies for $10-15 per ticket, with 20-25% of the workforce unemployed and the rest probably worried to death about what their future is going to look like. Or maybe a combination of the two.
All the "makerspaces" I'm seeing pop up these days seem to indicate that people are also taking up more productive pasttimes, and there's no shortage of outings and such on Meetup these days.
Would it be possible for alternative Android rom makers like CyanogenMod to replace or augment Google's cloud-printing service with printing directly to your IPP-capable printer or CUPS print server when connected to your home network?
It seems like it should be possible for someone to make a custom rom set that eliminates a lot of the Google spyware stuff and makes Android closer to just plain Linux-on-your-phone, while still being compatible with all the Android apps.
I used to have ThinkPads, given to me by my employers. Now, for my personal use as I no longer have a work-issued laptop, I've ended up getting a Dell Latitude E6400 on Ebay, and I really like it. The keyboard is quite good for a notebook, and just as good as the T-series Thinkpad I used to have. The design is much more attractive, and it even uses real metal for much of the exterior, rather than plastic.
Unfortunately, your last line is correct: the successor to this, the E6410, was just as good (really only a slight update to use the Core i5/i7 CPUs instead of the Core2Duos), but after that they went to the E6420 and E6430, and they're shit. The E6420 changed to a crappy rounded shape, is much uglier, and there's a horrific looking orange trim ring around the keyboard for some insane reason. It looks ridiculous. The E6430 changed the butt-ugly orange ring to gray, but otherwise is pretty much identical, and still butt-ugly. Worse, these switched to the shitty wide-aspect-ratio screens, so you lose vertical pixels with these new "improved" models, as compared to the old ones (no, you don't get more horizontal pixels either); the whole change was really a cost-cutting move along with a move to "update" the aesthetics to make them ugly like everything else in the consumer space has become these days.
So if you want my recommendation, get a E6400 or E6410 (or their 15-inch brothers the E6500/E6510) on Ebay off-lease. They're dirt cheap, and there's tons of cheap parts available from vendors on there. Just be sure to get the higher-res screens, and unless the screen res isn't important to you, don't get anything from the official Dell refurbished seller on there ("delldirect" or something like that), because they never list the screen res. Avoid the newest models, though this seems to go for everything these days.
Yes, basically. However, it still doesn't fit the description of a country that only minds its own business. A "myopic" country that stays internally focused and doesn't look outward, such as Japan back in the 1700-1800s, doesn't worry about pirate attacks on the opposite side of the world (the Mediterranean was well outside the US's "neighborhood" back in the early 1800s). Such a country doesn't care as long as the pirates don't affect anything going on on the mainland, and it certainly doesn't worry about the trouble its citizens get into when they go far away abroad. The Barbary Wars had only one purpose: to improve the US's ability to trade with foreign countries.
I'm not saying the Barbary Wars were a bad idea: trade was important to the US's economy at the time (and always has been), and the piracy attacks and demands for "tribute" were a big impediment to that. They also caused a lot of other problems; the stupid European countries used the pirates against each other, paying off the pirates to attack their foes. The pirates also kidnapped a lot of southern European citizens from port towns and held them as slaves. It was rather shameful how the European rulers preferred to let the problem fester so they could fight proxy wars with each other than to nip it in the bud.
However, calling pre-Pearl Harbor America "myopic to the extreme" makes it sound like Edo-era Japan or China at some points in its history, countries that had no trade or diplomatic dealings with other nations whatsoever, and that's not at all the way the US was, ever.
Won't work. You can't prevent people from making screenshots. Yes, that's more work, but it only takes one person to subscribe and go to the trouble of taking screenshots of every page and compiling a PDF from them, and then uploading it on BitTorrent.
Not only that, who the fuck wants to read PDFs online using some shitty in-browser viewer? Not me; I'd never subscribe to something that made me jump through hoops like that. If I can't download the PDFs and be able to read them offline (like when I'm on a plane), then I don't want it.
Yes, but it is an example of foreign military intervention. I don't disagree with it; it had to be done to secure shipping, but it's not an example of a nation that stays within its own borders exclusively and is totally myopic.
Sorry, but the Terry Gilliam films are much better than the reality here. In Brazil, the cops busted into people's places, but I don't remember them actually shooting people, just scaring them, and then wrapping up the suspect and hauling them off while making their spouse sign a bunch of forms. Here in the US, the cops bust into people's places and start shooting immediately. Also, the same stuff happens in Canada.
Sorry, no. America was imperialistic long before the Pearl Harbor attack. Go read about the invasion of the Phillipines, the Spanish-American war, and the Banana Wars. Don't forget the Barbary Wars. America has been big into foreign intervention since the early 1800s.
This 11% drop is big, but if you look at their stock price for the entire year, it's still significantly higher than it was in January, and if you look back to early 2009, it's MUCH higher than it was then. It seems to me that maybe MS stock was simply overvalued and this was a correction.
Unfortunately, this is certainly not spelling doom for MS (though I wish it were), as their Windows/Office cash cows are still there and pumping money into the business, along with other business products like Outlook/Exchange and Sharepoint.
Desktop Linux could be a success, if someone did it right. With Windows 8 pissing off people so much (I'm hearing lots of stories of angry people getting Macs after they see Windows 8 at Best Buy), the time is really ripe for desktop Linux to take off. Of course, desktops (/laptop) aren't really a growing market any more, but that's OK, they're a stable market and most people want to have at least one such machine, even if they end up hanging onto it for a long time unlike the 90s.
Anyway, the problems with desktop Linux as I see it are fragmentation and the crappy new UIs. If KDE were the primary DE out there, switching from Windows to Linux would be almost a no-brainer, since the interface is fairly similar to the XP/Vista/7-style UI that most people are very comfortable with, plus distros could easily customize it (with just some pre-selections, no coding) to be almost a copy of Win7's UI. However, most of the Linux distros have instead jumped on the Gnome3 bandwagon, or made their own abomination in Unity, so that's what people see when they check out Linux. If someone is running screaming from MS because of Metro, Gnome3's UI isn't going to woo them either, nor will Unity.
It's really a shame, because Linux doesn't have any NSA spyware baked-in like Windows and Mac, and is very easy to install and set up on most computers these days (put an Ubuntu or Mint DVD in any computer and it generally installs with no problem); even the video driver stuff is mostly sorted out now by the distros. But because the main distros had to go with crappy new UIs lately instead of sticking with Gnome2 or KDE, it's being pissed away. My prediction is that Apple is going to take over a giant chunk of the desktop market in the next 5 years, and computers are going to go back to being very expensive like they were in the 80s.
No, they're much, much larger. Look up at a 747 flying overhead (assuming you're not near an airport and in the flight path): it's tiny, to you. Now fly one of those 4-rotor "quadrocopter" R/C toys at 20 feet over your head. It's not that small, and would be pretty easy to hit with a shotgun, certainly much easier than a clay pigeon. Clay pigeons travel faster than R/C vehicles.
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Wow, that sounds like a total PITA. I had one briefly, for a few days, which I found outside (probably someone's escaped pet). It was really nice, and we kept it in a bathroom, where it made a bed in the trash can. We gave it to a ferret rescue person as soon as we could. Being locked in the bathroom (to keep it away from our cats), we never saw those other issues, but I just couldn't get over the smell.
Ferrets are really cute and friendly animals. However they smell absolutely horrible, which makes them difficult to live with as pets.
Top-of-the-line hardware, Aeron chairs, a big fancy office with insanely high rent in some prime location, ridiculously-high salaries (esp. for the executives), all-expenses-paid trips to "important" conferences, I could go on and on.
When you're playing with someone else's money instead of your own, there's no reason to be frugal. Might as well have a field day with it.
KDE is the answer to both of your questions.
2) While in stock form on most/all distros, KDE is set up with the same destructive window closing button issue as Windows and Mac, it's easy to reconfigure it to change the locations of all the window buttons. You can add some extra space between the close button and the minimize/restore buttons, or you can even move the close button to the other side of the window if you want. It's completely configurable. They probably keep it just like Windows/Mac to avoid confusing people.
6) The start menu (actually "K menu") in KDE is organized very well. When it opens, the first tab is "Favorites", and shows your most-used applications, plus a box where you can type in the name of an application to search for. Or you can switch to the "Applications" tab to get to a menu of all your installed applications. In there, all the applications are grouped according to their function: Development, Games, Graphics, Internet, Multimedia, Office, Settings, etc. This is completely unlike Windows where all the applications are a big mess, only grouped by the application's maker with no indication as to what it actually is or does. Then, inside one of these groups, each application has its own icon, plus is usually listed by its description, along with its name, such as "Image Editor", and then in smaller gray text, "GIMP Image Editor"; or "Media Player" and "Kaffeine" in smaller gray text; or "Spreadsheet" with "LibreOffice Calc" in smaller gray text. (note: some of this is probably distro-specific. I'm using Mint KDE for reference.) A new user doesn't have to know the name(s) of the spreadsheet programs on a Linux/KDE computer like this, he or she just needs to open up the K-menu, go to Applications, click on "Office", and then look for the programs that say "Spreadsheet", and LibreOffice Calc will be there (along with any others; that's all I have on mine at the moment). OR, they can click on the K-menu, and type "spreadsheet" into the search box, and all the spreadsheet programs will be listed there for selection. OR, for a shortcut, they can type Alt-F2 which brings up a litle search box at the top of the screen, type "spreadsheet" into that, and all the spreadsheet programs will be listed there. In my case, since I have only one (Calc), when I type Enter it automatically launches Calc. Windows doesn't do any of this stuff.
That's because in Latin it means "new" and Portuguese, like Spanish, is a Romance language, descended from Latin.
I think it's also important to note that Portuguese is much closer to Latin than Spanish is, so it's not surprising that "nova" (new) is common to both Latin and Portuguese and not Spanish. I wouldn't be surprised if "nova" is also used in Galician.
I had 2 work-issued E6400s which were nothing but headaches. Whenever the laptop would get even slightly above normal operating temperatures, it would under-clock itself to 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8 of the clock speed. At 1/8 the clock-speed, the entire system was completely unresponsive. I can't tell you how many times I put the laptop in the refrigerator to get it back to a temperature which it would be responsive.
I haven't had this problem with my two E6400s, however I have read about this problem. I believe it was fixed by a BIOS update a long time ago. If you were using brand-new units at the time, you probably got bit by this bug. If you buy a used off-lease machine (which is now 4-5 years old), you're not going to have this problem.
Why is anyone taking the parent post seriously? He spends half his post complaining about these silly subjective things and offers nothing substantiate about the devices.
What's wrong with subjective values? If something is butt-ugly, I'm not going to buy it, whether it's a car, a laptop, or whatever. And I did offer something non-subjective: the screens on the new models suck, which you yourself admitted to. The older screens were better: they were higher resolution with a better aspect ratio. Plus, the two units I have have zero problems with randomly locking up; to me, that's a show-stopper issue. Why would you continue using a laptop that locks up once a day? That's like going back to Windows 95. So instead of paying $100-200 for an older used unit that looks better, has a much better screen, and doesn't have any lock-up problems, you've paid a boatload of money (I'm guessing at least $1000) for a brand-new unit that looks like shit, has a crappy screen, and locks up as much as Win95. Good job!
Yes, they do. Which is why I'd like it to be done by an... independent movie company? Indie? Whatever.
Indie studios don't have much budget; that's why they always do character dramas set in current times, since it doesn't cost squat to film one of those as long as the actors are cheap. Indies can't afford a big-budget sci-fi production, and if it's not big-budget, a sci-fi movie usually looks ridiculously bad.
Why not? I mean, look at the bad press Enders Game is getting, because the author is allegedly anti-gay. You'd think a story by an author who wasn't anti-anything* would do well. *well, sexually speaking.
Sorry, no. Movies have to follow conventional morality, or else people will get pissed off. Currently, the conventional morality allows for homosexuality to a limited extent; however, there's still a lot of anti-gay sentiment among the population, so anything mainstream that tries not to offend anyone will mostly sidestep the issue, or at best show gays as an odd curiosity rather than focusing greatly on gay characters. Of course, there's a lot of anti-anti-gay sentiment too, which is why Ender's Game is getting bad press because of the political activists who are trying to push equality for homosexuals (which IMO is fine, but the conservatives certainly won't see it that way).
Open relationships and polyamory are outside of conventional morality at this time; people who do such things are seen as "perverts". Just look at shows depicting younger people in relationships; there's a ton of drama over who's "with" whom, what everyone's relationship status is, etc. These days, it seems that as soon as a young person starts dating someone else for more than 3 dates, they're considered "hitched" and it's somehow "wrong" if they date more than one person at a time. There are more and more people exploring open relationships (particularly in Portland and Seattle) these days, but they're still a very very small minority. A movie showing main characters engaged in such relationships would not go over well in mainstream America.
However you will probably see the golden age of movies are from the period you are 8-18.
This is a pile of crap. Go watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, or any of Kubrick's other works, or some Hitchcock films. Those are all masterpieces, yet they were mostly made before I was born. Or, Ridley Scott's "Alien", made when I was only 3 or 4. I can easily pick out far more excellent movies outside my 8-18 age range than within it. In fact, most of the movies within that time, which I watched when new, I remember being crap. I don't have any nostalgia for the movies during those years.
Yes, but I thought MST3K got almost all their raw material from crappy, old low-budget movies. Back in the old days, there were a bunch of studios making ultra-low-budget crap movies because it wasn't that expensive to show movies in theaters. These days, we still have this. Asylum is a big example of this, and there's a bunch of others; we don't see these movies in theaters because they're all "straight to video". If MST3K wanted to continue and use new movies, that's what they'd have to look at if they wanted to be consistent with the old movies.
The big difference today is that the ultra-big-budget movies are just as bad, plot-wise and acting-wise, as those crappy old shoestring-budget movies.
No way, those stories would all make terrible Hollywood movies. As you admit yourself, when they try to make a movie version of books like that, they royally fuck them up.
You really think Hollywood would give fair treatment to, for instance, the open relationships and line marriages in Heinlein's books? Not a chance.
You've got to be kidding. Yes, by many/most accounts, STII was the best of the series, but STIV was a big favorite of many peoples's as well, and STVI was also very good and well-regarded. In fact, STVI was by the same director as STII, and it even had the same title: "The Undiscovered Country". STII was renamed "The Wrath of Khan" later by the studio before its release, against the wishes of its director.
STV was drek, but it was the only one that was that bad. STIII really wasn't that bad, though not up to the par the even-numbered movies set, and ST:TMP was horrifically boring at times, but was still mildly interesting, though easily the second-worst of the 6.
There's probably another factor: the younger generation these days is flat broke. They're all living with their parents or cooped up with a bunch of roommates because they're all unemployed or underemployed. 20-somethings with little money aren't going to spend $15/ticket (plus overpriced concessions) on a movie; if they have a little money for entertainment, they're going to spend it on something that gives you a lot more bang-for-the-buck, like video games or Netflix. I pay $9/month for my Netflix subscription IIRC, and I can watch on-demand movies to my heart's content (except on some Friday and Saturday nights when apparently everyone else is trying to do the same thing and the video keeps pausing).
Would be nice if our culture just became weary of entertainment cartel offerings, and people could once again take up more productive pastimes:
Well it seems like something like that is already happening. Did you not read TFS? It says that Hollywood's latest movies are all flops. Sounds like people are weary of Hollywood's offerings. Either that, or people are too fucking broke to go watch movies for $10-15 per ticket, with 20-25% of the workforce unemployed and the rest probably worried to death about what their future is going to look like. Or maybe a combination of the two.
All the "makerspaces" I'm seeing pop up these days seem to indicate that people are also taking up more productive pasttimes, and there's no shortage of outings and such on Meetup these days.
Would it be possible for alternative Android rom makers like CyanogenMod to replace or augment Google's cloud-printing service with printing directly to your IPP-capable printer or CUPS print server when connected to your home network?
It seems like it should be possible for someone to make a custom rom set that eliminates a lot of the Google spyware stuff and makes Android closer to just plain Linux-on-your-phone, while still being compatible with all the Android apps.
I used to have ThinkPads, given to me by my employers. Now, for my personal use as I no longer have a work-issued laptop, I've ended up getting a Dell Latitude E6400 on Ebay, and I really like it. The keyboard is quite good for a notebook, and just as good as the T-series Thinkpad I used to have. The design is much more attractive, and it even uses real metal for much of the exterior, rather than plastic.
Unfortunately, your last line is correct: the successor to this, the E6410, was just as good (really only a slight update to use the Core i5/i7 CPUs instead of the Core2Duos), but after that they went to the E6420 and E6430, and they're shit. The E6420 changed to a crappy rounded shape, is much uglier, and there's a horrific looking orange trim ring around the keyboard for some insane reason. It looks ridiculous. The E6430 changed the butt-ugly orange ring to gray, but otherwise is pretty much identical, and still butt-ugly. Worse, these switched to the shitty wide-aspect-ratio screens, so you lose vertical pixels with these new "improved" models, as compared to the old ones (no, you don't get more horizontal pixels either); the whole change was really a cost-cutting move along with a move to "update" the aesthetics to make them ugly like everything else in the consumer space has become these days.
So if you want my recommendation, get a E6400 or E6410 (or their 15-inch brothers the E6500/E6510) on Ebay off-lease. They're dirt cheap, and there's tons of cheap parts available from vendors on there. Just be sure to get the higher-res screens, and unless the screen res isn't important to you, don't get anything from the official Dell refurbished seller on there ("delldirect" or something like that), because they never list the screen res. Avoid the newest models, though this seems to go for everything these days.
Yes, basically. However, it still doesn't fit the description of a country that only minds its own business. A "myopic" country that stays internally focused and doesn't look outward, such as Japan back in the 1700-1800s, doesn't worry about pirate attacks on the opposite side of the world (the Mediterranean was well outside the US's "neighborhood" back in the early 1800s). Such a country doesn't care as long as the pirates don't affect anything going on on the mainland, and it certainly doesn't worry about the trouble its citizens get into when they go far away abroad. The Barbary Wars had only one purpose: to improve the US's ability to trade with foreign countries.
I'm not saying the Barbary Wars were a bad idea: trade was important to the US's economy at the time (and always has been), and the piracy attacks and demands for "tribute" were a big impediment to that. They also caused a lot of other problems; the stupid European countries used the pirates against each other, paying off the pirates to attack their foes. The pirates also kidnapped a lot of southern European citizens from port towns and held them as slaves. It was rather shameful how the European rulers preferred to let the problem fester so they could fight proxy wars with each other than to nip it in the bud.
However, calling pre-Pearl Harbor America "myopic to the extreme" makes it sound like Edo-era Japan or China at some points in its history, countries that had no trade or diplomatic dealings with other nations whatsoever, and that's not at all the way the US was, ever.
Won't work. You can't prevent people from making screenshots. Yes, that's more work, but it only takes one person to subscribe and go to the trouble of taking screenshots of every page and compiling a PDF from them, and then uploading it on BitTorrent.
Not only that, who the fuck wants to read PDFs online using some shitty in-browser viewer? Not me; I'd never subscribe to something that made me jump through hoops like that. If I can't download the PDFs and be able to read them offline (like when I'm on a plane), then I don't want it.
Yes, but it is an example of foreign military intervention. I don't disagree with it; it had to be done to secure shipping, but it's not an example of a nation that stays within its own borders exclusively and is totally myopic.
Sorry, but the instability thing is bogus. What distro are you using? Mint KDE has been working flawlessly for me for some time.
Sorry, but the Terry Gilliam films are much better than the reality here. In Brazil, the cops busted into people's places, but I don't remember them actually shooting people, just scaring them, and then wrapping up the suspect and hauling them off while making their spouse sign a bunch of forms. Here in the US, the cops bust into people's places and start shooting immediately. Also, the same stuff happens in Canada.
Sorry, no. America was imperialistic long before the Pearl Harbor attack. Go read about the invasion of the Phillipines, the Spanish-American war, and the Banana Wars. Don't forget the Barbary Wars. America has been big into foreign intervention since the early 1800s.
The excessive use of exclamation marks should have been a big tip-off that that post was not intended to be serious.
This 11% drop is big, but if you look at their stock price for the entire year, it's still significantly higher than it was in January, and if you look back to early 2009, it's MUCH higher than it was then. It seems to me that maybe MS stock was simply overvalued and this was a correction.
Unfortunately, this is certainly not spelling doom for MS (though I wish it were), as their Windows/Office cash cows are still there and pumping money into the business, along with other business products like Outlook/Exchange and Sharepoint.
Desktop Linux could be a success, if someone did it right. With Windows 8 pissing off people so much (I'm hearing lots of stories of angry people getting Macs after they see Windows 8 at Best Buy), the time is really ripe for desktop Linux to take off. Of course, desktops (/laptop) aren't really a growing market any more, but that's OK, they're a stable market and most people want to have at least one such machine, even if they end up hanging onto it for a long time unlike the 90s.
Anyway, the problems with desktop Linux as I see it are fragmentation and the crappy new UIs. If KDE were the primary DE out there, switching from Windows to Linux would be almost a no-brainer, since the interface is fairly similar to the XP/Vista/7-style UI that most people are very comfortable with, plus distros could easily customize it (with just some pre-selections, no coding) to be almost a copy of Win7's UI. However, most of the Linux distros have instead jumped on the Gnome3 bandwagon, or made their own abomination in Unity, so that's what people see when they check out Linux. If someone is running screaming from MS because of Metro, Gnome3's UI isn't going to woo them either, nor will Unity.
It's really a shame, because Linux doesn't have any NSA spyware baked-in like Windows and Mac, and is very easy to install and set up on most computers these days (put an Ubuntu or Mint DVD in any computer and it generally installs with no problem); even the video driver stuff is mostly sorted out now by the distros. But because the main distros had to go with crappy new UIs lately instead of sticking with Gnome2 or KDE, it's being pissed away. My prediction is that Apple is going to take over a giant chunk of the desktop market in the next 5 years, and computers are going to go back to being very expensive like they were in the 80s.
No, they're much, much larger. Look up at a 747 flying overhead (assuming you're not near an airport and in the flight path): it's tiny, to you. Now fly one of those 4-rotor "quadrocopter" R/C toys at 20 feet over your head. It's not that small, and would be pretty easy to hit with a shotgun, certainly much easier than a clay pigeon. Clay pigeons travel faster than R/C vehicles.