Essentially, this is the same complaint as people talking about how we do not have enough STEM talent
From what I've seen, almost all the people who complain that we don't have enough STEM talents are also people who, themselves, are not in STEM fields. If they think it's so important, why didn't they go into it?
Basically, it's because the people complaining want a larger STEM workforce to make money from, but they don't work in it because they can't make nearly as much money in it as whatever they're doing. So they want other people to work their asses off for mediocre pay.
Yes, but that's only in OK. If you look at the statistics nationwide, not many people die of tornadoes. Because of this, we can't build tornado-resistant things, even in OK where tornadoes are concentrated, because we Americans aren't smart enough to realize that different localities have to do things differently.
Underground housing has many benefits besides protection from severe winds, chiefly protection against temperature changes. Underground houses don't ever get too hot or cold. Maybe the Shire gets excessively hot in the summer and the Hobbits, not having invented air conditioning, prefer to stay cool. Of course, underground housing like that does require extra labor to build; maybe the Hobbits used some slave labor force to build them.
I will accept nothing less than that or an underground facility or both.
Forget domes, what's so hard about building underground? If you're going to design a building for 310mph winds, wouldn't it be easier to just build the thing underground? We have underground parking garages in many places, so cost shouldn't be that large an issue if we can afford to do it just for parking, which isn't exactly a high-value real estate item. Tornadoes don't bother with underground structures at all.
Except that I've never had a job like that. In the "real world", projects are divided up so that each individual engineer gets a different portion of the task, and works on it himself. If one engineer doesn't contribute, it's entirely on him, and he gets a bad performance review, not the others. And management is constantly communicating with all the engineers to make sure the project is on-track; they don't just wait until the end to find out someone isn't doing anything or they're totally off-track with their progress. So no, this group project practice is nothing like real jobs at all.
Simplest, many places, one could pour a reinforced slab
You can't use slabs in most places in the US because of frost heave: you have to dig your foundation below the frost line, which usually requires around 4 feet of depth. That's why houses in the northern states usually have basements: if you're already digging 4 feet for a foundation, it's not that much extra cost to dig 8 feet and make a usable space (if for nothing else than a furnace, laundry room, and storage) out of it. You can do slabs in southern states that never get much below freezing, but that's it.
I like the idea of being able to get a range of standard designs, customize a bit, order up the parts, and having a house-assembly party; to be able to bring together your personal choices of blend of techs suited for locale and budget and crank out a house is to me a big step onward from the simple pre-fab kits one could get from Sears catalog almost a century ago.
Wood is getting expensive these days, and the quality of wood these days is crap; steel has become very cost-competitive with wood, and is a far better structural material. There's more and more companies popping up doing residential steel framing, and I think there's a lot of potential there. The steel I-beams can be prefabricated in a factory and assembled on site like an IKEA piece, with all the holes pre-drilled and everything bolting together in one day. It would be (or probably, is, as these companies are already advertising this as their current practice) just like the pre-fab Sears kits from the early 1900s.
This should be a good lesson about how group projects usually work in college; it's how all the ones I had worked out. One person does all the work, while the other person(s) claim credit and gets an equal grade even though they didn't do anything, or their contribution was very minor.
IMO, they shouldn't have group projects in college classes at all, because they always wind up like this.
They might use a cheap clam shell moulding, but quarter round or shoe moulding is used to cover the gap between trim and flooring.
Yeah, that's what I meant.
Point is, in regular tract/subdivision houses (not fancy custom stuff), I never see anything hard-to-get like what the OP described; it's just cheap standard crap from home depot. The basic trim molding choices haven't changed in ages.
They probably thought that in some of those other areas too. Earthquakes happen everywhere, though most are very low-magnitude, but even these weaken structures over time. Not building to handle even small tremors is just idiotic.
BTW, our crappy wood houses handle most earthquakes just fine. If we built houses out of bricks like you, they'd constantly be falling down around here. So for you to criticize us for using wood is inane and stupid.
Why on earth would anyone build a house from "proper fired clay bricks"? Have you not seen pictures of the destruction in Mexico and Turkey when earthquakes hit that kind of construction? Masonry is a terrible structural material.
If you really wanted to build things to last, you'd use steel framing, like this home builder does.
Huh? Why would you need to make a custom door just because of a quarter-inch difference. I've replaced a bunch of doors on a couple of rental houses, and having to trim the doors to fit was normal: even the super-cheap hollow interior doors have a certain amount of wood at the edges which can be cut away to make them narrower. I think I had to trim a full inch off one door (top to bottom) once. A quarter-inch is nothing.
Of course, if you're talking about a steel entry door, those have to be made to the right size, but you can always buy solid-wood entry doors and just cut them to fit. However, for steel entry doors like that, you don't normally replace the door, you replace the door and frame together; the two are made for each other.
As for trim, most houses these days use quarter-round at the most, because it's cheap. If you have something fancier on there, you probably have a higher-end house. But even then you can usually find something at home depot that's pretty close, unless you had some totally custom house made. Tract house builders don't get specially-made trim; they buy cheap off-the-shelf stuff from the local hardware store.
The mobile device usability issue I can see you not wanting to argue about, as it's a common disagreement these days between the mobile-device-proponents and those who don't believe they can be used for real work, but my later paragraphs completely disagree with your fundamental assertion earlier, that "the situation has evolved". It hasn't. Well it has, but it isn't better (which your statement implied): it's still the same shit, it just looks a little different. I'm still paying a "proprietary vendor" tax on any device I buy (either an OS I don't want/use, or a bogus patent fee), and worse, on many devices, I can't even change the OS if I want to. In some ways, things are even worse than before.
Sure, they're doing more web-browsing, Youtube-watching, and some emailing on their portable devices, rather than confining those tasks to PCs (laptops and desktops). But for doing anything that needs a real keyboard and a real monitor and real processing power, they're still buying PCs, though these days it seems to be mainly laptops, though businesses are still using desktops a lot.
Anyway, the bug was badly worded anyway; it focuses on Microsoft alone, when it should have been complaining that PCs are dependent on non-Free software, mainly for their OSes. Let's say that history went differently, and instead of mobile devices becoming popular, people stuck with laptops and desktops, except that MS collapsed and Apple took over, so that 95% of the market used Mac OSX. That situation isn't any better than 95% of the market going to MS Windows, it's pretty much the same thing. So what do we have here in our current universe? Sure, lots of mobile devices, but they're all running non-Free software which can't be changed: 1) Windows, 2) Mac OSX, 3) iOS, 4) Android. With 1 and 2 (confined to PCs), I can change the OS, but I'm still paying the MS Tax or Apple Tax for an OS I don't use. With 3 and 4, I'm stuck with the software that's on the mobile device, and can't be changed. iOS isn't Free in any way, but Android masquerades as Free software, but it isn't because it's customized by various entities, and then locked to the device so you're not allowed to change it (in the US at any rate). That's no better than if the thing ran Windows Phone. I do prefer Android to iOS (and WP of course) for various reasons, such as the fact that I can use a USB cable to connect my phone to my PC and then download photos from a bash shell, or upload Ogg Vorbis songs which play fine in the Android music player; I don't have to use some shitty proprietary Windows/Mac-only software to transfer data to and from my phone like I do with iOS devices. But it's definitely not at all like a PC running Linux, where I'm free to modify or replace the software as I see fit. Nothing except an hour or two of time keeps me from upgrading the Linux OS on my PC to a newer version of my choosing (and I have many distros to choose from). But even though I'd like to upgrade my phone to Jellybean, I can't do that, because T-mobile and HTC haven't allowed me to do so, and I'm confined to doing only what they allow me to do.
Finally, the big problem in 2004 was that you could only buy a PC running Windows, and even though you could certainly wipe out Windows and install some version of Linux, you were still paying the "Microsoft Tax" for an OS you didn't want or use. That isn't any different now: if you buy an Android device, you're paying a Microsoft Tax, in the form of a rather significant ($15?) fee the device mfgr pays to Microsoft for their patent fees, for bogus patents MS has asserted over Android.
In short, the situation isn't any better than it was in 2004. The bug should be re-opened, and modified so it isn't so MS-specific.
I disagree. He has more devices, so he can do more things (watch Apple TV instead of cable or OTA TV, for instance), but all the devices running Free software are doing different tasks than the tasks he uses the laptops (Win7 and Mac, both proprietary) for. In 2004, he likely had one or two laptops (WinXP and maybe Mac), now he has two laptops, again both with proprietary OSes. Nothing's changed, except he has some extra toys/gadgets running Linux.
If you live in an Islamic country in the middle east, it's "cool" to be a Muslim. Anyone who isn't is not "cool", they're considered a freak.
If you live in someplace like Nebraska, USA, it's "cool" to be a fundamentalist Christian, since almost everyone else there is too. Anyone who isn't some kind of Christian is not considered "cool", they're a freak.
Maybe in your little social circle, religious followers are considered morons, but in many parts of the world, this is obviously not the case, as seen by the high numbers of adherents.
No, it hasn't. People still use PCs for PC tasks (i.e., "real work"). Yes, less people are buying PCs for home use these days, because they apparently don't do any real work at home, and just surf the web and watch videos and stuff like that, and apparently are perfectly happy trying to type poorly-written messages on touchscreen keyboards from the comfort of their couches. But for everyone else (including ALL business/corporate users; no one works on big spreadsheets or Powerpoint presentations on a tablet), they're still using PCs, and the situation in the PC market has not changed one iota from 2004.
Considering this, I think it is safe to say that more of these devices are sold without Windows (and actually, with a Linux variant).
Doesn't matter, you're still paying a Microsoft tax for your Android device. MS makes more money (last I heard) in patent fees per Android device than they do for a Windows Phone device.
I am willing to grant that on our current time, we can categorize as "personal computing device" all the smart-phones and tablets in the market.
I'm willing to grant that too. However, this doesn't make them PCs, or replacements for PCs. No matter what anyone says, I do not agree that tablets or phones can be used for productivity work; they're content-consumption devices only. They're computing devices, but they're really a whole new market that exists in addition to the regular PC (laptop and desktop) market. Blu-ray players are also "personal computing devices", they're even internet-connected and lots of people use them for watching Netflix, and I suspect many of these run Linux too, but no one seems to be counting those, or routers (many of which again run Linux internally), or various other devices that may run Free software, but which serve purposes other than the purposes we use our regular PCs for.
If we all go out and buy a bunch of Linux-running gadgets (router, Blu-ray/Netflix player, internet-connected refrigerator, robotic lawn mower, etc.), does that suddenly mean we don't need Free software on the computer we use for typing documents, browsing the internet (and typing messages on it), paying our bills and managing our finances, and all the other things we still rely on regular PCs for, and that we should just go back to Windows for that? I don't think so.
It depends, I would think. On a refurb, if the original system came with a Windows license, there's no reason (I would think) that the refurb system wouldn't include the same license. Some refurbishers put updated copies of Windows on the system, so there'd be an extra cost there, but if it's a system that came with Vista for instance, you'll just have a Vista license you don't want. Of course, being a refurb system, the cost is much lower than a regular system, so it's not like you're paying full price for that Vista license anyway; it probbaly doesn't account for much of the cost at all (since no one wants Vista anyway, even Windows users).
You can also buy used systems (namely laptops) on Ebay that really don't come with anything, where you're really just bidding for the bare hardware. Technically it might have a Windows license of some sort (with a sticker on the back proving it), but the system doesn't come with recovery discs, and may not even have a hard drive (they probably took it out and crushed it to protect secret corporate data). These systems are pennies on the dollar, so it's probably safe to say the "Windows tax" on them is insignificant. I'm typing this on such a laptop right now. You can get some nice business-class laptops (Thinkpads and Latitudes) on Ebay really cheap that are only a few years old and in near-new condition for $100-300.
No, we don't. Business-wise, Mexicans are a complete PITA to deal with. I've dealt with people from Europe, China, Canada, and Mexico (and of course the US), and the Mexicans are completely goofy. Everything with them is a giant hassle; a simple transaction that should take 4-5 emails ends up taking 100 emails back and forth. I even had some Mexicans (at a fairly large manufacturing company, not individuals) buy from me by Paypal, then within minutes file a non-receipt dispute. WTF? At this point I don't really want any more business from Mexico.
It's probably because there's a lawyer handling the closing of the deal. The lawyer has certain legal obligations and can be sued if they don't handle the closing correctly. The two parties meet at the lawyer's office, the seller hands over the keys and deed to the house, the buyer hands over the cashier's check, and that's that. The lawyer later gives the seller their portion of the proceeds, the real estate agent their portion, pays the applicable government taxes, etc.
For the atmosphere to be heated up by the kinetic energy in an asteroid (or a bunch of fragments of one), it'd have to be a really enormous asteroid. We've had lots of asteroid impacts in our prehistory and they didn't turn the biosphere into an oven.
I'm no astrophysicist, but it seems to me that if you break the asteroid apart, and all the fragments still fall into Earth's atmosphere, a smaller mass of debris will strike the surface because more of it will vaporize in the atmosphere, due to greater surface area (of many fragments versus one single asteroid). Now whether that's enough to make a worthwhile difference, I dunno.
Choices have cost: the Linux community's continued refusal to acknowledge this has left the Linux desktop in a continuous state of disrepair.
It's not "the Linux community's" fault: it's the fault of certain groups, namely the GNOME developers and Canonical. If it weren't for those two groups, we'd still have only two main desktop environments (KDE and Gnome), plus a few very minor players (XFCE, LXDE, etc.). Instead, both Canonical and Gnome decided to try to "innovate" by making crappy new touch-like DEs that so many people hated, it ended up causing a mass defection to XFCE (turning it from a bit player into a much larger player) and spawning not one, but two forks of Gnome (MATE and CInnamon).
If "the community" operated like a democracy, then this never would have happened, because there would have been no popular support for Unity or Gnome3. However, Linux is developer-driven, so whatever the developers want, they get. What's disappointing is that the distros do little to no quality control it seems; remember with KDE4.0 how the distros just went ahead and dumped the 3.5 series and made 4.0 the only one available, even though 4.0 wasn't nearly ready for primetime use? Then with Gnome, they did the same thing, adopting Gnome3 just because the Gnome devs told them it was ready and Gnome2 was "obsolete". Linux Mint seems to be the only distro that actually listens to its users, rather than trying to force things on its users, which is why it's providing both MATE and Cinnamon (and KDE), because that's apparently what users want.
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Essentially, this is the same complaint as people talking about how we do not have enough STEM talent
From what I've seen, almost all the people who complain that we don't have enough STEM talents are also people who, themselves, are not in STEM fields. If they think it's so important, why didn't they go into it?
Basically, it's because the people complaining want a larger STEM workforce to make money from, but they don't work in it because they can't make nearly as much money in it as whatever they're doing. So they want other people to work their asses off for mediocre pay.
Yes, but that's only in OK. If you look at the statistics nationwide, not many people die of tornadoes. Because of this, we can't build tornado-resistant things, even in OK where tornadoes are concentrated, because we Americans aren't smart enough to realize that different localities have to do things differently.
Underground housing has many benefits besides protection from severe winds, chiefly protection against temperature changes. Underground houses don't ever get too hot or cold. Maybe the Shire gets excessively hot in the summer and the Hobbits, not having invented air conditioning, prefer to stay cool. Of course, underground housing like that does require extra labor to build; maybe the Hobbits used some slave labor force to build them.
I will accept nothing less than that or an underground facility or both.
Forget domes, what's so hard about building underground? If you're going to design a building for 310mph winds, wouldn't it be easier to just build the thing underground? We have underground parking garages in many places, so cost shouldn't be that large an issue if we can afford to do it just for parking, which isn't exactly a high-value real estate item. Tornadoes don't bother with underground structures at all.
Except that I've never had a job like that. In the "real world", projects are divided up so that each individual engineer gets a different portion of the task, and works on it himself. If one engineer doesn't contribute, it's entirely on him, and he gets a bad performance review, not the others. And management is constantly communicating with all the engineers to make sure the project is on-track; they don't just wait until the end to find out someone isn't doing anything or they're totally off-track with their progress. So no, this group project practice is nothing like real jobs at all.
Simplest, many places, one could pour a reinforced slab
You can't use slabs in most places in the US because of frost heave: you have to dig your foundation below the frost line, which usually requires around 4 feet of depth. That's why houses in the northern states usually have basements: if you're already digging 4 feet for a foundation, it's not that much extra cost to dig 8 feet and make a usable space (if for nothing else than a furnace, laundry room, and storage) out of it. You can do slabs in southern states that never get much below freezing, but that's it.
I like the idea of being able to get a range of standard designs, customize a bit, order up the parts, and having a house-assembly party; to be able to bring together your personal choices of blend of techs suited for locale and budget and crank out a house is to me a big step onward from the simple pre-fab kits one could get from Sears catalog almost a century ago.
Wood is getting expensive these days, and the quality of wood these days is crap; steel has become very cost-competitive with wood, and is a far better structural material. There's more and more companies popping up doing residential steel framing, and I think there's a lot of potential there. The steel I-beams can be prefabricated in a factory and assembled on site like an IKEA piece, with all the holes pre-drilled and everything bolting together in one day. It would be (or probably, is, as these companies are already advertising this as their current practice) just like the pre-fab Sears kits from the early 1900s.
This should be a good lesson about how group projects usually work in college; it's how all the ones I had worked out. One person does all the work, while the other person(s) claim credit and gets an equal grade even though they didn't do anything, or their contribution was very minor.
IMO, they shouldn't have group projects in college classes at all, because they always wind up like this.
They might use a cheap clam shell moulding, but quarter round or shoe moulding is used to cover the gap between trim and flooring.
Yeah, that's what I meant.
Point is, in regular tract/subdivision houses (not fancy custom stuff), I never see anything hard-to-get like what the OP described; it's just cheap standard crap from home depot. The basic trim molding choices haven't changed in ages.
They probably thought that in some of those other areas too. Earthquakes happen everywhere, though most are very low-magnitude, but even these weaken structures over time. Not building to handle even small tremors is just idiotic.
BTW, our crappy wood houses handle most earthquakes just fine. If we built houses out of bricks like you, they'd constantly be falling down around here. So for you to criticize us for using wood is inane and stupid.
Why on earth would anyone build a house from "proper fired clay bricks"? Have you not seen pictures of the destruction in Mexico and Turkey when earthquakes hit that kind of construction? Masonry is a terrible structural material.
If you really wanted to build things to last, you'd use steel framing, like this home builder does.
Huh? Why would you need to make a custom door just because of a quarter-inch difference. I've replaced a bunch of doors on a couple of rental houses, and having to trim the doors to fit was normal: even the super-cheap hollow interior doors have a certain amount of wood at the edges which can be cut away to make them narrower. I think I had to trim a full inch off one door (top to bottom) once. A quarter-inch is nothing.
Of course, if you're talking about a steel entry door, those have to be made to the right size, but you can always buy solid-wood entry doors and just cut them to fit. However, for steel entry doors like that, you don't normally replace the door, you replace the door and frame together; the two are made for each other.
As for trim, most houses these days use quarter-round at the most, because it's cheap. If you have something fancier on there, you probably have a higher-end house. But even then you can usually find something at home depot that's pretty close, unless you had some totally custom house made. Tract house builders don't get specially-made trim; they buy cheap off-the-shelf stuff from the local hardware store.
The mobile device usability issue I can see you not wanting to argue about, as it's a common disagreement these days between the mobile-device-proponents and those who don't believe they can be used for real work, but my later paragraphs completely disagree with your fundamental assertion earlier, that "the situation has evolved". It hasn't. Well it has, but it isn't better (which your statement implied): it's still the same shit, it just looks a little different. I'm still paying a "proprietary vendor" tax on any device I buy (either an OS I don't want/use, or a bogus patent fee), and worse, on many devices, I can't even change the OS if I want to. In some ways, things are even worse than before.
Sure, they're doing more web-browsing, Youtube-watching, and some emailing on their portable devices, rather than confining those tasks to PCs (laptops and desktops). But for doing anything that needs a real keyboard and a real monitor and real processing power, they're still buying PCs, though these days it seems to be mainly laptops, though businesses are still using desktops a lot.
Anyway, the bug was badly worded anyway; it focuses on Microsoft alone, when it should have been complaining that PCs are dependent on non-Free software, mainly for their OSes. Let's say that history went differently, and instead of mobile devices becoming popular, people stuck with laptops and desktops, except that MS collapsed and Apple took over, so that 95% of the market used Mac OSX. That situation isn't any better than 95% of the market going to MS Windows, it's pretty much the same thing. So what do we have here in our current universe? Sure, lots of mobile devices, but they're all running non-Free software which can't be changed: 1) Windows, 2) Mac OSX, 3) iOS, 4) Android. With 1 and 2 (confined to PCs), I can change the OS, but I'm still paying the MS Tax or Apple Tax for an OS I don't use. With 3 and 4, I'm stuck with the software that's on the mobile device, and can't be changed. iOS isn't Free in any way, but Android masquerades as Free software, but it isn't because it's customized by various entities, and then locked to the device so you're not allowed to change it (in the US at any rate). That's no better than if the thing ran Windows Phone. I do prefer Android to iOS (and WP of course) for various reasons, such as the fact that I can use a USB cable to connect my phone to my PC and then download photos from a bash shell, or upload Ogg Vorbis songs which play fine in the Android music player; I don't have to use some shitty proprietary Windows/Mac-only software to transfer data to and from my phone like I do with iOS devices. But it's definitely not at all like a PC running Linux, where I'm free to modify or replace the software as I see fit. Nothing except an hour or two of time keeps me from upgrading the Linux OS on my PC to a newer version of my choosing (and I have many distros to choose from). But even though I'd like to upgrade my phone to Jellybean, I can't do that, because T-mobile and HTC haven't allowed me to do so, and I'm confined to doing only what they allow me to do.
Finally, the big problem in 2004 was that you could only buy a PC running Windows, and even though you could certainly wipe out Windows and install some version of Linux, you were still paying the "Microsoft Tax" for an OS you didn't want or use. That isn't any different now: if you buy an Android device, you're paying a Microsoft Tax, in the form of a rather significant ($15?) fee the device mfgr pays to Microsoft for their patent fees, for bogus patents MS has asserted over Android.
In short, the situation isn't any better than it was in 2004. The bug should be re-opened, and modified so it isn't so MS-specific.
I disagree. He has more devices, so he can do more things (watch Apple TV instead of cable or OTA TV, for instance), but all the devices running Free software are doing different tasks than the tasks he uses the laptops (Win7 and Mac, both proprietary) for. In 2004, he likely had one or two laptops (WinXP and maybe Mac), now he has two laptops, again both with proprietary OSes. Nothing's changed, except he has some extra toys/gadgets running Linux.
Are you really this dumb?
If you live in an Islamic country in the middle east, it's "cool" to be a Muslim. Anyone who isn't is not "cool", they're considered a freak.
If you live in someplace like Nebraska, USA, it's "cool" to be a fundamentalist Christian, since almost everyone else there is too. Anyone who isn't some kind of Christian is not considered "cool", they're a freak.
Maybe in your little social circle, religious followers are considered morons, but in many parts of the world, this is obviously not the case, as seen by the high numbers of adherents.
No, it hasn't. People still use PCs for PC tasks (i.e., "real work"). Yes, less people are buying PCs for home use these days, because they apparently don't do any real work at home, and just surf the web and watch videos and stuff like that, and apparently are perfectly happy trying to type poorly-written messages on touchscreen keyboards from the comfort of their couches. But for everyone else (including ALL business/corporate users; no one works on big spreadsheets or Powerpoint presentations on a tablet), they're still using PCs, and the situation in the PC market has not changed one iota from 2004.
Considering this, I think it is safe to say that more of these devices are sold without Windows (and actually, with a Linux variant).
Doesn't matter, you're still paying a Microsoft tax for your Android device. MS makes more money (last I heard) in patent fees per Android device than they do for a Windows Phone device.
I am willing to grant that on our current time, we can categorize as "personal computing device" all the smart-phones and tablets in the market.
I'm willing to grant that too. However, this doesn't make them PCs, or replacements for PCs. No matter what anyone says, I do not agree that tablets or phones can be used for productivity work; they're content-consumption devices only. They're computing devices, but they're really a whole new market that exists in addition to the regular PC (laptop and desktop) market. Blu-ray players are also "personal computing devices", they're even internet-connected and lots of people use them for watching Netflix, and I suspect many of these run Linux too, but no one seems to be counting those, or routers (many of which again run Linux internally), or various other devices that may run Free software, but which serve purposes other than the purposes we use our regular PCs for.
If we all go out and buy a bunch of Linux-running gadgets (router, Blu-ray/Netflix player, internet-connected refrigerator, robotic lawn mower, etc.), does that suddenly mean we don't need Free software on the computer we use for typing documents, browsing the internet (and typing messages on it), paying our bills and managing our finances, and all the other things we still rely on regular PCs for, and that we should just go back to Windows for that? I don't think so.
It depends, I would think. On a refurb, if the original system came with a Windows license, there's no reason (I would think) that the refurb system wouldn't include the same license. Some refurbishers put updated copies of Windows on the system, so there'd be an extra cost there, but if it's a system that came with Vista for instance, you'll just have a Vista license you don't want. Of course, being a refurb system, the cost is much lower than a regular system, so it's not like you're paying full price for that Vista license anyway; it probbaly doesn't account for much of the cost at all (since no one wants Vista anyway, even Windows users).
You can also buy used systems (namely laptops) on Ebay that really don't come with anything, where you're really just bidding for the bare hardware. Technically it might have a Windows license of some sort (with a sticker on the back proving it), but the system doesn't come with recovery discs, and may not even have a hard drive (they probably took it out and crushed it to protect secret corporate data). These systems are pennies on the dollar, so it's probably safe to say the "Windows tax" on them is insignificant. I'm typing this on such a laptop right now. You can get some nice business-class laptops (Thinkpads and Latitudes) on Ebay really cheap that are only a few years old and in near-new condition for $100-300.
We need to help the Mexicans out anyway
No, we don't. Business-wise, Mexicans are a complete PITA to deal with. I've dealt with people from Europe, China, Canada, and Mexico (and of course the US), and the Mexicans are completely goofy. Everything with them is a giant hassle; a simple transaction that should take 4-5 emails ends up taking 100 emails back and forth. I even had some Mexicans (at a fairly large manufacturing company, not individuals) buy from me by Paypal, then within minutes file a non-receipt dispute. WTF? At this point I don't really want any more business from Mexico.
It blocks the regular banner ads just fine. Nothing can block Slashvertisements however.
It's probably because there's a lawyer handling the closing of the deal. The lawyer has certain legal obligations and can be sued if they don't handle the closing correctly. The two parties meet at the lawyer's office, the seller hands over the keys and deed to the house, the buyer hands over the cashier's check, and that's that. The lawyer later gives the seller their portion of the proceeds, the real estate agent their portion, pays the applicable government taxes, etc.
Have you tried AdBLock Plus?
For the atmosphere to be heated up by the kinetic energy in an asteroid (or a bunch of fragments of one), it'd have to be a really enormous asteroid. We've had lots of asteroid impacts in our prehistory and they didn't turn the biosphere into an oven.
I'm no astrophysicist, but it seems to me that if you break the asteroid apart, and all the fragments still fall into Earth's atmosphere, a smaller mass of debris will strike the surface because more of it will vaporize in the atmosphere, due to greater surface area (of many fragments versus one single asteroid). Now whether that's enough to make a worthwhile difference, I dunno.
Choices have cost: the Linux community's continued refusal to acknowledge this has left the Linux desktop in a continuous state of disrepair.
It's not "the Linux community's" fault: it's the fault of certain groups, namely the GNOME developers and Canonical. If it weren't for those two groups, we'd still have only two main desktop environments (KDE and Gnome), plus a few very minor players (XFCE, LXDE, etc.). Instead, both Canonical and Gnome decided to try to "innovate" by making crappy new touch-like DEs that so many people hated, it ended up causing a mass defection to XFCE (turning it from a bit player into a much larger player) and spawning not one, but two forks of Gnome (MATE and CInnamon).
If "the community" operated like a democracy, then this never would have happened, because there would have been no popular support for Unity or Gnome3. However, Linux is developer-driven, so whatever the developers want, they get. What's disappointing is that the distros do little to no quality control it seems; remember with KDE4.0 how the distros just went ahead and dumped the 3.5 series and made 4.0 the only one available, even though 4.0 wasn't nearly ready for primetime use? Then with Gnome, they did the same thing, adopting Gnome3 just because the Gnome devs told them it was ready and Gnome2 was "obsolete". Linux Mint seems to be the only distro that actually listens to its users, rather than trying to force things on its users, which is why it's providing both MATE and Cinnamon (and KDE), because that's apparently what users want.